We recently transformed our website candobetter.net from Drupal version 7.5 (I think) to Backdrop. On our transformed site, the size of the introduction|summary|teaser, ususally on the main page, through which site visitors could find that page, has been greatly reduced. I have not been able to find, in any of:

https://candobetter.net/admin/structure/types/manage/blog7/configure,

https://candobetter.net/admin/structure/types/manage/blog7/fields or

https://candobetter.net/admin/structure/types/manage/blog7/display

..., how to increase the given default size of the teaser.

As a consequence, the teaser for the recently published article,  Australia: Demand your Parliament finally allow debate on Julian Assange , is a great deal smaller than what I wanted.

If you look further down the main page you can see that most of our previously published  articles had much larger teasers than this.

Could someone please tell me how I can fix this, or else show me where I can find the documentation that will describe how to do this?

Thank you for your attention.

(Apologies for the confusing title: "How to enlarge the site of the teaser/introduction". This has been corrected - cacofonix 23:06 +11 Sat 27 Nov 2021)

Comments

I can say some general things about teasers that MIGHT help you solve your problem. 

  1. I can see that the top article on your site has a short paragraph followed by a long paragraph. It MIGHT be that the teaser is only breaking at the end of a paragraph or sentence and thus that one teaser looks very short, because the following paragraph is too long to be included.
     
  2. In theory, you can change the default length of teasers by going to the content type > manage displays > teaser. However, there might be limitations on how detailed you can get with the length of your teaser. But at least, you should be able to make them longer. 

       
       

  3. Also, if you are including the image inside the body field. That might be effecting how much text is displaying in unexpected ways. You might add or make better use of an image field that displays at the top of your teaser to have more control. 
     
  4. Your front page list of articles is mostly likely being generated by a "view." Using views, it is possible to gain greater control over how much of your article displays on the front page, but it MIGHT require some advanced knowledge or understanding of views to accomplish this. In summary - rather than displaying a teaser, you can change the view to show "fields" and then display the Title and Body field. You can then "rewrite" the body field in such a manner that gives you quite a few other options for how much is displayed. 

    The following screenshot is from the body field after changing the view from "Show: Content | Teaser" to "Show:Fields | Settings"

    If these instructions are not enough, let me know and I can provide more details. This is getting into "advanced" use of the views module, in my opinion.

    This video might help: https://youtu.be/dryQK3Pv7Q0

  5. For at least the next month (Dec 2021), Backdrop volunteers are holding weekly office hours in Zoom where we can help you with problems like this one. Feel free to drop in: https://backdropcms.org/news/events

The administrative menu structure is different on our installation of Backdrop. It seems to me that I should have found 'teaser' within structure > content types, but it's not there.

Within "content types", I find blog entry, book page, forum topic, page, poll, story, but no teaser.

I am also unable to find:

Home > Admin > Structure > Content types > Post > Manage displays

... although I could find

Home > Admin > Structure > Content types > Blog entry > Manage displays

Home > Admin > Structure > Content types > Book page > Manage displays

Home > Admin > Structure > Content types > Forum topic > Manage displays

Home > Admin > Structure > Content types > Poll > Manage displays

Home > Admin > Structure > Content types > Story > Manage displays

This may be something I will have to take up with the site administrators before I able to procede further.

 

@cacofonix - A couple of notes. 

1) Your user interface might look different from mine if you are not logged in as a full admin. Since you mention having other site administrators, it is possible that your account does not have access to all the settings. 

2) You should be able to find a "Manage Display" option for every content type, but part of what makes Backdrop powerful is the ability to create custom content types for every website, which means that most websites have different options regarding which types of content are available. 

The "post" content type comes by default. But, if you have an older Drupal site that has been upgraded to Backdrop, it's probable that you are using a different type of content for your articles. Either "blog entry" or "story". 

If you edit any of your articles, you can see at the top of the page what content type was used. Look at one of your articles and see what is used in the position where the word "Post" is on mine.

3) I did a little digging and it turns out that Backdrop DOES break your text at the end of a paragraph. This means that if your teaser has one short paragraph and another long one, the teaser might be much shorter than expected - in some cases, it might not display any text. 

This is something that has been discussed and I would like to see fixed. 
https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/599. 

It may turn out that you will need to use "views" if you need more control OR wait until we fix this problem in Backdrop (potentially in January, but we can't promise that). 

One other option that is not ideal, is that you might consider breaking your article into shorter paragraphs (at least until we get this fixed). 

Thank you all.

There is a lot posted above and it all looks very helpful.  Right now I have another higher priority to attend to, but will get back, digest those posts more fully. I expect that should help me to fix my problems.

Probably; though whether it is worth doing for CKeditor 4 is another matter. Perhaps have a look and see what is on the horizon for CKeditor 5

I don't know if there is any code still in Backdrop that processes a pagebreak because I guess that would also be needed to make use of such an insertion