Introduction
The Zine Module is an application for creating and
managing (e-)Zines. A Zine is simply a collection of articles,
and an article is a piece of text with a certain set of attributes,
including at the very least, an author and a title. For example:
- a magazine article
- a book chapter
- a comment or letter from a reader
- and so on...
There are four fundamental classes of article:
- zine - an article collection that follows a consistent set
of indexing rules
- article - a normal article, which is associated with a zine
- comment - a note or comment added by a reader, and is
associated with an article (or sometimes directly with a zine, such as a
forum)
- attachment - a photo, figure or other attachment that is
associated with a zine, article, or comment.
In a very general sense, all of these are treated as "articles"
at a low level.
Visual Tutorial
Info
Types of Zines
Before you can create articles, you must have some zines to place them in. The zine type determines the basic rules of zine behaviour, such as how indexes are displayed, whether you can add comments, and
so on.
- e-Zine
This is a generic e-zine. It accepts articles from a variety of
authors, and displays them most recent first. Older articles are
expired into the archives.
- Book
Books are assumed to collect a series of articles from a single
author. They are presented in a specific order (eg. as a series of
chapters), and do not expire.
- Blog
Blogs accept articles from a single author, much like a
magazine column. They are presented most recent first, and eventually expire into the archives. They usually accept comments from readers.
- PhotoBlog
PhotoBlogs are similar to regular blogs, but they highlight the
picture, rather than the text of the article.
- Forum
Forums dispense with regular articles, and cut straight to comments
from site readers.
- PhotoForum
PhotoForums are like PhotoBlogs, except that any site reader may post
a photo, and receive comments.
- Wiki
Wikis are cross-linked collections of articles, which any site reader
may add to.
Managing Zines
Managing your zines typically consists of adding articles, deleting
or disabling comments, and occasionally adding or reconfiguring your
zines. There are two ways to access your zines as an
administrator:
- Go to the Zine icon in the ExSite web top. This gives you access
to all administration and configuration functions.
- View a dynamic web page that is displaying the zine you want to
work on. (If the page is normally published statically, you should
preview the page in your favourite CMS plug-in.) This lets you add
new articles, if the policy allows posts from somewhere other than
the administrator control panel.
Administration functions are described below. Two icons are shown,
a simple GIF and a full-colour PNG. Which one you see will depend on
system configuration:
Add a new article.
Edit an existing article. This includes
changing the article status so that it is not displayed (eg. moderation).
Reconfigure an article. This includes changing
some of the special configuration rules noted above.
Delete an article.
Note that you will have these options for every zine, article, and
comment in the system. To add a new article to a zine, be sure to
click the 
icon under the zine; if you click the
icon under an existing article, you will be creating a new article
nested underneath the existing article (ie. a subindex).
You may also see the the public/user-level functions, namely:
Add a comment.
Reply to another comment.
Enter or exit the archives.
Get an RSS feed of this zine.
Users who have recently added a comment may also have the option to
edit their comments. The option to edit comments only exists for a
few minutes before the comment is frozen; this is so that comments do
not get out of sync with their replies.
Editing Articles
When creating, editing, and configuring articles, you will be able to enter data
for many of the following fields. (Which fields you see will depend
on the zine or article type.)
| Author | The author of an article, if different from the
owner. |
|---|
| Name | A simple browser-friendly version of the article
title, used in URLs. This field will be set automatically if it is left
blank, but you can set it manually if you want more control. |
|---|
| Title | The full, human-friendly title of the zine or
article. For comments, this is the subject line. |
|---|
| Subtitle | Optional subtitle, for articles that require
more complicated title structures. |
|---|
| Summary | An optional outline or abstract for the article.
A summary will be automatically generated if you do not provide one.
(The automatic summary consists of the first 50 words or so of the article.)
|
|---|
| Article | The full body of the article or comment.
For normal articles and zines, it will default to a rich-text HTML
editor, but can be switched to a plain-text input box.
For comments, it will default to a plain text input box.
|
|---|
| Content-type | Sets whether to treat the article
contents as HTML (no further markup required) or text (will require
some extra markup for display in browsers). |
|---|
| Footnotes | Optional; displayed at the bottom of the
article. Can be used for footnotes, attributions, copyright notices, etc.
|
|---|
| Sortkey | For sorted indexes, the articles will
be sorted based on this sortkey. |
|---|
| Picture | An optional image can be uploaded, and will be
displayed at the top of the article (float right, if there appears to
be room). This is also the primary content of photoblogs and
photoforums. |
|---|
| Thumbnail | Thumbnailed version of the picture, above.
The thumbnail is usually generated automatically. |
|---|
| Caption | A caption for the picture. |
|---|
| Site | For zines, this sets which site owns (and
therefore may display) the zine. If no site is set, it may be
displayed by all sites. |
|---|
| Owner | This sets which user owns the zine and may
access the administration functions. If not set, the site
adminsitrator is the owner. |
|---|
Note that you will see many of these fields for the zine itself, as well
as for the articles that go into the zine. In the case of the zine
itself, the values will be used to format a "preamble" for the zine
index. For example, you could have an e-zine with the following
values:
| Title | News |
|---|
| Name | News |
|---|
| Footnotes | All news stories are © 2007 by Acme Corp. |
|---|
This information would be placed at the head of all indexes into
this zine, as if it was an article without any body text. For example:
News
All news stories are © 2007 by Acme Corp.
News Article #1
This is the article summary. This is the article summary.
This is the article summary.
News Article #2
This is the article summary. This is the article summary.
This is the article summary.
|
