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I suggest that a new posting format be made (this could be a Hack)
basically have the possibility to make the into text of a story disappear when you read the main story, that way the intro could be small and relevent and not necessarily the first part of the
actual story.
In this way small images and a good short quote could be displayed in the intro in topics and when you click "read More" the main story comes up and the intro disapears.

I have been struggling with the present format until I realised what it actually was I wanted !

Summaries in place of Introductions have been suggested before. They don't exist today because the submission form doesn't let the submitter enter the text separately, leaving it to the approver to move the text around. I believe the CVS has the submission form split into Intro and Body. Once that is finished it probably is no problem adding a flag to the stories table to determine whether the "intro" is an Introduction or a Summary/Teaser.

So the feature is pretty much with Us ?
Great

Not quite. But adding it will be easy. All the story code is now in an object in CVS and this modification is probably just a few hours of work. Someone still has to do it. If you can convince Mark to do it, it's probably even faster. The steps involved are:

1) Add a tinyint(1) field to $_TABLES['stories'] called skip_intro, default to 0
2) Add a checkbox to the story edit and submission templates to hold the skip_intro value.
3) Modify the story class
a) on save, save the skip_intro field
b) on render, skip the intro if skip_intro == 1

That's modifying like 6-8 files so it's not a quick change but it is pretty straightforward.

Great,
I think the change is both logical and necessary to allow an intro to be more compact and logical, sometimes you only want two lines of text an a small picture as a taster and these lines may not best be served by the actual first two lines infact hardly ever.