Creating Collections

Collections are a powerful tool for creating customized lists of content across your site. They are commonly used to do things like display a running list of your site's Events or News Items on a designated page, but are very flexible and can be used with a variety of different types of content. This article will help you understand how to create the most common kinds of Collections.

NOTE: Michigan Libraries has created a tutorial video for Collections:

Many Plinkit sites had pages like "Community Organizations" and "News" that were created as Collections (a kind of stored search that displays as list of results). These Collections were not migrated along with the rest of the site, and need to be recreated. Fortunately, the content that was in these Collections will still be there.

1. Navigate to the folder in which you would like the create your Collection. For instance, if you are adding a Collection that will display News Items, you'd probably want to do this in the Library News folder inside your News & Events folder.
2. Click on Add New... in the Edit menu above the central section of the page and choose Collection.
3. The Title can be something straightforward like "News" and the Summary is an optional detailed explanation of the purpose of the Collection that will appear in search results.
4. Under Search terms, click on the button that says Select criteria to open a list of possible choices. There are three sets of criteria: 

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  • Text - will search the text of the selected field in each content item to see if the selected phrase exists. An example of this would be a Collection that finds all content with titles that refer to "Holidays" or "closures".
  • Dates - you can filter your Collection by different dates, including the scheduled date of an event or the date on which the content item was created.
  • Metadata - metadata is information about a content item, like who created it, where it is on the site, and what type of content it is.
• In this instance, we are creating a Collection of News Items, so select Type. This will cause an additional blank to appear.
• You can add additional criteria if you'd like by following a similar process in the next blank. To delete a criterion, click the X to the left of the one you'd like to delete.
  • Limit controls how many search results the Collection will return. The default of 1,000 should be sufficient in most cases.
  • Item count controls how many items will show up when viewing the collection. If you want to see more items on the page, increase this counter. If you would like to see fewer, decrease it.
  • Table columns allows you to decide which information the Collection will show about each item. By default, it will show the item's Title, who created it, when it was last modified, and what type of item it is. This is indicated by the fields in the right-hand column. To add a field, select it from the left field and click the right arrow. To remove a field, select it in the right field and click the left arrow.
  • Text will be the explanatory text that appears at the top of the page that displays the Collection. This is a place to put any prefatory remarks about the purpose of the collection, or additional links, images, or information that may be of use when looking at the Collection.
    
  • Click Save to create and view your Collection.