ZineMachine Control Panel

About the ZineMachine

The ZineMachine 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:

Examples of Zines include:

ZineMachine allows you to associate articles to each other in various ways. ZineMachine uses this internally to do article threading in forums, and to have commentary spinning off of regular articles. But you can manipulate this feature to have any type of associations you like, such as blogs inside books, and news inside forums, and so on.

Types of Articles

Regular Articles are the primary content of your Zines. They have a number of attributes used for formatting and indexing, including:

*required

** set automatically

Many of these are optional. The body contains the main text of the article. The body can be formatted as HTML (full markup), plain text (no markup, but ZineMachine will attempt to insert paragraph breaks), or mixed (ZineMachine will try to insert paragraph breaks, but you can add links or other special tags manually).

Comments are a special type of article that is typically posted by users of the website. They use an abbreviated set of article attributes:

Comments are the main content of forums (see below), but any Zine can be configured to allow comments on its articles.

Types of Zines

Zines are containers for articles. For example:

Book
a collection of regular articles
Forum
a collection of comments
Blog
an online journal
PhotoBlog
an online journal of photographs
Wiki
a user-maintained knowledgebase

The choice of Zine determines the rules for indexing and formatting its articles, and whether to allow posting of comments. Many of these defaults can be overridden.

Technical Note: Zines are treated internally as another form of article. Thus, they can also have titles, subtitles, summaries, bodies, pictures, and footnotes.

Managing Articles

Zine management is all about creating (and sometimes removing) articles.

To start, you should have one or more appropriate Zines to add articles to. You can create some using the buttons along the right edge of the Zine Control Panel.

Once you have some Zines, you should open up the Zine you want to work with by clicking on its name (or the view link) from the Home view. This displays the Zine with its approximate formatting, and includes a number of control button links:

Creates a new article under this Zine.

Edits the given article.

Configure the given zine/article, if the default settings are not satisfactory.

Copy the given zine/article, with optional modificiations.

Delete the given zine/article, along with all of its sub-articles and comments.

Configuring Articles

ZineMachine provides default indexing and formatting rules that will be useful in most cases. To change the rules for a particular Zine, click on the config icon, and alter one or more of the following settings:

Index display limit
The number of articles that will shown at once in an index. The default is 10 for regular articles, 25 for comments. Older articles can be accessed through a "more" link.

Index age limit
Articles older than the age limit will be demoted in appearance in indexes. For instance, in threaded forums, new articles will be shown in full, while old articles will be summarized with links to view them if the reader is interested.

Index type
Determines the logic of how articles are ordered. Threaded means the articles are displayed in a tree-like format with related articles adjacent to each other. Thread list means the starting articles of each thread are shown in order. Date means the articles are simply listed in order of their posting dates. Sorted means they are listed according to their sort key order. Wiki indexes are lists of all articles that are linked from this article. Paged indexes simply provide a link to the next article in the sequence.

Index format
Determines how each article will be formatted in its index. Brief gives a title/author/date summary. Teaser includes summary or sample text from the body. Full shows the whole article. Table shows the title/author/date in a tabular form (sorted indexes only). Photoindex includes a photo thumbnail along with a brief summary of the article. Gallery shows only the photo thumbnails, with no text.

Status
Zine normally displays only "active" articles to the public, but you can set other status flags here to help control how articles are handled.

Using CSS for formatting

ZineMachine outputs the following HTML tags and CSS classes, which you can define in your site stylesheets to customize the formatting of Zines and articles:

div.Zine
encloses each Zine and each article.
td.ZineThumb, img.ZineThumb
encloses thumbnail images in photoblog galleries.
table.ZineIndex
encloses tabular article indexes.
div.ZineTeaserHeader
encloses article title in "teaser" summaries.
div.ZineTeaser
encloses article snippet in "teaser" summaries.
table.ZineSummary
encloses article summaries/abstracts.
div.ZineHeader
encloses comment headers.
table.ZineIndex
encloses tabular article indexes.
table.ZineTools
encloses the icons for managing articles and comments.
span.caption
encloses picture captions.
span.quote
encloses quoted messages in comments.
h1,h3
encloses article titles and subtitles.
address
encloses article footnotes.

Ownership

Every Zine and article can have an owner. By default this is the logged-in user who created the article. Owners have special priveleges to configure/edit their zines and articles, so you can assign different Zines on your site to different owners to spread the administration duties around. Zines and articles without owners can only be configured/edited by the top-level administrator through the control panel interface.

In addition, Zines can belong to particular websites. These zines will only be served to those sites. Zines that do not belong to any site are considered public zines, and will be made available to every site on the system.

Permissions

Zine creation is restricted to the system administrator. Article creation is restricted to the administrator or the Zine owner.

Comment creation can be restricted to members only, or open to the public. Anonymous public comments can optionally be allowed, otherwise the poster has to enter a name (although this name can be anything).

Wikis

Wikis are special Zines that allow for shared editing duties, and easy cross-linking between articles. To use this feature, every wiki article needs a name which is used to link to it. When composing a wiki article, and you want to link a word to a matching article, simply enclose it in square brackets, like [this]. ZineMachine will automaticlly hyperlink that word to the article of the same name.

Some articles need to be referenced using a variety of names. In this case, simply separate all the names with a vertical bar "|", for example: dog|puppy|schnauzer.

If no wiki article is specified, ZineMachine will look for one named "_START" and display it, if found. Wiki indexes include links to all of the articles referenced in the chosen article, plus a search box to enter arbitrary names to search for.

System Configuration

Overall configuration settings are specified in the ZineMachine configuration file in conf/Zine.conf. Contact your system administrator to edit the settings in this file. The editable values are:


# default formatting rules
# allowed values are shown at left

[ZINE].[ARTICLE].indexlimit = ...
[ZINE].[ARTICLE].indexage = ...
[ZINE].[ARTICLE].indextype = ...
[ZINE].[ARTICLE].indexformat = ...

# default comment policy
# values are "allowed" or "forbidden"

[ZINE].comment_policy.member = ...
[ZINE].comment_policy.public = ...

# send emails to authors when someone 
# comments on their articles

notify = 1  

# label the Zine tool icons

icon_labels = 1

# maximum image width to wrap text 
# around

img_max_wrap_size = 400

# gallery width (in images)

gallery_width = 4

[ZINE] in the above is one of the zine types (see at left) such as "blog" or "forum". [ARTICLE] is one of the article types, ie. "article" or "comment". The configuration parameters apply only to those types of articles under that type of zine. Thus, to used threaded forum comments, but a sequential list of comments on blog articles, use:

forum.comment.indextype=threaded
blog.comment.indextype=date