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:
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.
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.
Zines are containers for articles. For example:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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 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.
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