Kookaburra Essay
Kookaburra Essay is both a design module, and a feature set, available in Backlight 5.3.0 and beyond.
Getting Started
Essays in Kookaburra do everything and more that could be done in Backlight 4 with Pangolin, so the Pangolin Essay video is actually a great place to start.
New Essay Features in Kookaburra
Kookaburra's essay features allow you to create narrative presentations by comingling photos and text. An essay is similar in concept to a blog post, only without being tied to chronological feed.
To utilize Kookaburra's essay features, look for this button, appearing on your Kookaburra pages when logged into Backlight's admin:
The Essay Anywhere Ethos
Kookaburra embraces an "essay anywhere" ethos.
In Pangolin, one could only use essay features on album-type pages assigned an essay template. By contrast, in Kookaburra, you may utilize the essay features on any page, in albums or in sets, anywhere on the page! Like a bird -- for example, the kookaburra -- the sky is the limit.
The Kookaburra Essay module
Because one can essay anywhere in Kookaburra, it is not strictly necessary to use the Kookaburra Essay. However, there are reasons you might like to do so.
#1. Images uploaded directly to an album using a Kookaburra Essay template will be baked into the page, saving an API request to load those images. This is a fairly negligible benefit, but a benefit nonetheless.
#2. Single-image HTML pages are generated as a part of an image's native album. Therefore, when images are uploaded to an album using Kookaburra Essay, those pages will be native to the essay, which may yield some SEO benefit for the essay. When sourcing images from another album, those pages will be accessible in their native location, outside the essay.
#3. Finally, images uploaded to an album using Kookaburra Essay will always appear first and by default in the essay presentation composer, so will be easier to access in your workflow.
If using Kookaburra Album, these same benefits apply, except #1.
While there are benefits to using Kookaburra Essay, these benefits are not so impactful that you should feel dissuaded from using the essay features on any other page! Do feel free to ... ESSAY ANYWHERE!!!