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The classic Esri Story Maps templates are scheduled to be retired in early 2026. For more information and resources about the retirement, see the Classic Esri Story Maps Roadmap for Retirement. If you are looking to preserve one or more of your most popular Shortlist stories, you can use the simple process outlined below to migrate a Shortlist layer to a hosted feature layer that can be immediately used in ArcGIS StoryMaps. Note: After the classic templates are retired, you will be unable to view existing classic stories using their arcgis.com URLs. However, your classic story content items, such as the web maps that contain the data for classic Shortlist stories, will remain. This means you can migrate your classic stories to ArcGIS StoryMaps even after the retirement date has passed.   Convert the Shortlist layer into a feature layer The first part of this process involves finding the Shortlist layer and converting it to a hosted feature layer. Here’s are the steps to follow to do this: Go to your ArcGIS Content page. Find a web map that contains a Shortlist layer and open its item page. The web map typically has the same name as the Shortlist web mapping application item. On the web map's item page, click Open in Classic Map Viewer Find the Shortlist layer in the layer list and click ... then Save layer. Go back to your ArcGIS Content page and open the item page for the new feature layer you created in the previous step. On the feature layer item page, click Publish.   This workflow currently requires the classic map viewer, which is also scheduled to be retired in early 2026. The new map viewer will be updated with this capability in an upcoming release. When that occurs, we will look to update this blog.   Create the map tour Once you’ve created the feature layer, you can create a map tour in a new story or any existing story. Go to ArcGIS StoryMaps and create a new story (or edit an existing story where you want to add the new categorized tour). Click the green (+) button, select Map Tour, then Start with a feature layer, and then the hosted feature service layer you created in the previous steps. Finally, configure the map tour as needed. You can change the tour to use the Categorized layout, if needed, and select fields to display the information fields you want in the tour and categorize the places. See the resource links below for more info about the available options and tips.   More resources Here are some more resources for learning more about map tours. Use — or create — a feature service to build a map tour in ArcGIS StoryMaps Create a data-driven map tour Using ArcGIS Arcade to your story's advantage Format place descriptions for data driven map tours using HTML   Looking to migrate other types of classic stories? Try the Classic Story Conversion Helper - Esri Community ... View more

In a previous post, we shared how to use Arcade to combine information from several feature layer fields into a new field that can be used for a map tour description. The process in that blog works well when your tour requires a short description, but you can take this to the next level and use HTML formatting if your tour places need longer descriptions with multiple paragraphs, lists, and links.  It’s easy to create a nicely formatted description field for your data driven map tour using some basic HTML. There are several ways you can do this. If you are starting with data in a spreadsheet or CSV, you can do the calculations in your favorite spreadsheet app such as Excel or Google Sheets. If you already have a feature layer, you can use the field calculator on the Data tab of the feature layer’s item page.   Anatomy of a description field  The goal is to produce a single field that includes all the text needed for your description and any required formatting using HTML markup. The HTML will be parsed when your tour is shown, so your readers won’t see the HTML tags, they will see the result of the formatting applied by the markup.  Here’s a simple example. If you create a description that looks like this:  <p>This is the first paragraph.</p><p><a href="https://example.com">This is a link</a></p>   It will look like this in the map tour:  This is the first paragraph.  This is a link  Here's a screenshot of a more robust concatenated description in a map tour. You can view this feature layer and inspect the "Full description" field to see the field information needed for this description: Great Places Shortlist layer - Data.   Calculating the description  First, add a new column for your calculated description and give it a name.  Next, construct the formula you need to calculate the values for your new field. You’ll simply string together information from existing fields along with HTML tags. To calculate values for your description field you can use Arcade functions such as CONCATENATE or the & operator in your favorite spreadsheet tool.  To structure your description, you can include HTML tags for paragraphs (p), lists (ol, ul, and li), and line breaks (br). For formatting, you can include bold (b or strong), italic (i or em), superscript (sup), subscript (sub), and links (a).  Link tags support the href and target attributes. You may also need to include spaces or other punctuation, depending on how your existing information is stored or formatted. In a spreadsheet, be sure to use double quotes around any text or HTML markup you add since you’ll want that text to be added as-is to the calculated field. In Arcade, you use single quotes for this. If you are using links and need to include double quotes in your calculated formula, make sure you use extra double quotes as escape characters. Examples Below are a few examples of the syntax you’ll need to use.  In a spreadsheet, combine info from column A and column B (in row 2) as separate paragraphs:  ="<p>"&A2&"</p><p>"&B2"&"</p>" In a spreadsheet, combine info from column A and column B as a single paragraph (with a period and space between them) and column C as a second paragraph:  ="<p>"&A2&". "&B2&"</p><p>"&C2&"</p>"   In a spreadsheet, start with info from column A and add a link using a URL in column B (which opens in a new tab) and has "More info" as the link text. ="<p>"&A2&"<p><a href="""&B2&""" target=""_blank"">More info</a></p>"   Using the field calculator with Arcade, include info in fields named Paragraph1 and Paragraph2 as the first two paragraphs, and include a third paragraph that contains a hyperlink using the text “Website Link” and the URL stored in a field named “URL”.  Concatenate(['<p>', $feature.Paragraph1, '</p><p>', $feature.Paragraph2, '</p><p><a href=“’, $feature.URL, ‘ >Website Link</a></p>’])   Resources  If you need a primer on basic HTML, here are some good resources.  https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_paragraphs.asp  https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_lists.asp https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp  https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_formatting.asp  More info on map tours.  Use — or create — a feature service to build a map tour in ArcGIS StoryMaps Create a data-driven map tour Using ArcGIS Arcade to your story's advantage      ... View more