Create & edit stories

This guide covers everything you need to know about creating and editing stories. Stories are published to your site/newsroom, and can be shared and reused in pitches and campaigns easily, as well as provide valuable organic SEO benefits online.

Check this quick overview of the editor or read on for a deeper dive:

Create a new story

To create a new story, go to the Stories page and click Create story. This opens the Story editor where you can build your story with rich multimedia embeds, formatting, and more.

The editor includes sections for header image, title, subtitle, and body content.

Story metadata and actions are quick actions are shown top right. Below this settings for language and translations, cover image and sharing options, categories and tags are available in the right sidebar.

Story editor top bar:

Story editor window:

Draft, Autosave & format issues

Autosaving

Your updates are automatically saved every few seconds. An auto-save label next to Preview above the story editor shows when the last save occurred. While autosave protects against data loss, regularly click Save draft or Save changes as you work.

Each time you save, we create a version history entry for a story, and you can view changes over time. Track changes and view previous versions through the story's version history.

Discarding autosaved changes: Click the "auto-saved" label to access the option to revert to the last saved state.

Handling conflicts

Stories cannot be edited simultaneously in multiple locations. If detected, you'll see a warning. Options include:

If a teammate is editing the story, save your work elsewhere and wait until they finish.

Format issues

When copying content from Word, Google Docs, or other sources, formatting problems may occur (odd line breaks, missing spaces). To avoid issues, clear formatting in the source document before pasting into Prezly.

Editing

The Story Editor provides comprehensive tools for formatting text, embedding multimedia, and organizing content.

Access editing options through the `[+]` button or keyboard shortcuts (type "/" on a new line followed by what you want to embed).

Header image

Add a header image by clicking "+ Add a header image" at the top of the editor or drag-dropping an image above the title placeholder. The header image appears just under the story title and subtitle when published.

You can change the header image position to appear above the title and subtitle in your site's styling settings.

Recommended image specifications

Story header image: At least 926 px wide; aspect ratio is preserved. Avoid overly tall images. Since the header may be used as your card and social sharing image by default, avoid graphics or text that could be cropped.

Images should be no more than 25MB in size and max 3000px in width or height.

Text formatting menu options

Highlight text to access the formatting menu with options including:

Text Styles dropdown:

Image & image galleries

Adding images

Click the [+] button and select Image, or drag-and-drop images directly into the editor. Images can be aligned left, center, or right.

Adding links to images: Click the image, paste the URL in the Link field, and choose whether to open in a new tab.

Most embeds have an contextual settings menu overlay if you click them. This is the options menu for images:

Image captions

Image captions can be formatted like regular text, and you can add things like bold, italic and links.

Image galleries

Three options for adding image galleries:

Gallery settings

Reorder images by dragging, add captions, crop images, adjust layout (width, size, spacing).

Recommended image sizes for sites/stories

Cover image (card):

Social sharing image

Images should be no more than 25MB in size and max 3000px in width or height.

Reusable content (snippets & templates)

Access saved snippets and templates through the [+] menu.

Templates let you create whole templates (including header images) for stories and press releases.

Snippets are for smaller content. Think boilerplate text or anything you want to make once and reuse. These both allow you to reuse common content blocks across multiple stories. Learn more about snippets and templates →

Multimedia & embeds

Click the [+] button or type "/" followed by the embed type (e.g., "/image") to add multimedia.

Supported multimedia

Service-specific embeds

Available under the Embed section:

File attachments

You can upload files to a story to be displayed as attachments for download. Supported formats: PDF, PPT, Keynote, Zip, Doc and more with a maximum of 720MB file size.

Tables

Copy and paste tables from spreadsheets or create them directly in Prezly using the [+] menu and selecting Table.

Buttons and calls-to-action

Add interactive call-to-action buttons to guide readers to specific links.

To add a button:

Dividers

Add visual separators between content sections using the Divider option in the [+] menu.

Web bookmarks

Web bookmarks improve the appearance of website links in stories. They are shown as cards and can be displayed in landscape or portrait mode. Add them via the [+] menu under Embed options.

Story bookmarks

Link to other published stories from your Prezly sites by adding story bookmarks through the [+] menu.

Site contact card

Embed contact cards for people or companies from your CRM into stories using the [+] menu. contacts are shown per site, and can be created in site settings.