One of the most fundamental aspects of Ecko is the concept of Stories and Editions. Here’s a brief explanation of the difference between the two and how they work together to make creating newsletters in Ecko fast and easy.
Stories
A Story is a single piece of content about a specific topic. Think of it a bit like an individual article in a newspaper. Stories can contain all sorts of content such as text, images, videos, diary dates, buttons, embedded PDFs…
Every Story is assigned to a Section and optionally, to a Group.
For readers, Sections provide labels to indicate the type of Story it is and for editors, they help you automatically sort Stories into a logical order within an Edition. Groups let you mark a Story as only being relevant to specific audiences, such as year groups or classes. Readers can filter Editions to hide Stories that relate to Groups that they aren’t interested in, for example the family of a child in Year 4 probably doesn’t need to know about Year 1’s upcoming school trip.
A Story isn’t tied to one specific Edition of your newsletter – a single Story may only appear in one Edition, but it might just as easily appear in several or even all of them.
Editions
An Edition is a collection of Stories placed in a certain order. An Edition is what you share with your readers – you don’t share individual Stories on their own. Every Edition you publish gets its own unique URL which you can share using whatever communication channels you normally use to send messages to families, whether that’s SMS, email, Arbor, Famly, or any other platform.
When you create a new Edition, Ecko will automatically populate it with the correct Stories, determined by the Inclusion rules you set. You can also manually add or remove any Story from any Edition.
Stories remain dynamic even after an Edition is published, so if you need to correct something or make a tweak to a Story you only need to update it once and every Edition that Story appears in will update to reflect your changes.