Publishing Module

Although the Administrators may have setup a lot of Categories, only those that have been associated with an article that a particular user can access will be shown. Articles that are Pending or that are Neighborhood Only and the Neighborhood the article belongs to is not the users will not be available. If no articles in a Category are avialable then it will not be displayed in the side panel. Articles can belong to more than one Category but must have at least one or it will not be available. If a Category contains only one Article, then the full text of the Article will be displayed instead of just the Introduction/Synopsis when clicked. Categories are sorted alphabetically within a Section, but the Sections can be in any order. Categories on created, renamed, deleted and assigned right on the Edit Articles page, but only Administrators can change the list of Categories.

Categories are grouped into Sections, which only Adminstrators can setup. A custom page may be associated with a Section, but if not, then a list of all the articles in all of the Categories in that Section will be displayed instead. Sections that do not have any Categories or who only have articles that cannot be seen by the particular user will not be displayed. If there is only one Category in a Section then that Category will not be displayed and the articles will be accessed by clicking the Section heading instead. Normally, when the full story of an article is displayed, it shows who wrote it and the date, but an Administrator may set an option such that all the articles in any Category in a particular Section are displayed as if they were inherently part of the web site. You can see the difference by first clicking Introduction then Sample Category in the menu. Notice how the Introduction does not look like it is an article. Another interesting thing about Sections is that it supports image rollovers instead of just text and you can have different rollover images depending on the selected stylesheet. The Urban Outfitters site was the basic inspiration for a lot of this stuff.

Included in the Publishing module is the ability to use Topics, which provide a way of relating articles across categories. The model for this was the Slashdot site where each article is tagged with an icon that represents a topic. For example, they use a picture of a reel of magnetic tape to signify Data Storage which they associate with any article concerning the storing of data, so that if you click the icon, all the articles from any section will be listed. In this application, the icons are uploaded on the Images page with the file name as the topic name (underscores are replaced with spaces) where they are tagged as candidates for Topics so they will be included in the dropdown list on the Edit Articles page.

News articles are typically short and concise, so usually the entire message or story will fit in the Introduction/Synopsis box, which can be seen in its entirety on this, the index page. For this reason, the tags that you can embed in the message is severely limited to only those that change the style of the text, like italics or bold or monospace. If you do use a tag that would change the spacing, like <BR> or <P>, it just gets displayed as is. But links do work...Apple Computer. If you need to have more control over how the text is formated, like lists and tables, or if you need more space, just attach a story. Now click the Go button on the left to see more information about the Publishing module.

Here is an example of a more comprehensive article with an attached story, like you would find at O'Reilly ONLamp or DevShed. In this case, the message that appears on the index page (what you are reading) would typically be a lead-in or synopsis of the full article and the user would then click the title or the trailing "continued..." to see the whole article, which may or may not be broken down into sub-sections.Continued...