This articles explains how you publish articles to the site and what all those different options above and under your article do.
The only people who can publish blogs or articles to the site are people who I’ve given writer accounts to. A normal registered account enables you to post comments and see some additional site information (ie the number of reads for each article) but not to blog/post articles. If your interested in getting a writer account contact me with the URL’s of 3 articles you’ve written.
For writers here is a very quick guide to publication, note people with just blogging accounts won’t see the story option
1. Click on ‘Create Content’ in the right hand column, this will give you 3 choices
a. Blog entry – this intended for chatty minor stuff rather than articles. Material posted here will not appear on the front page and will not appear in most article views. It will appear in the left hand ‘Recent blog posts’ column.
b. Forum topic – this appears only in the forum and so not at all on the front page. It’s intended to ask technical questions about the site etc.
c. Story – this is for your articles, it may appear on the front page and will appear in your article index and all relevant views of the entire archive. Stuff published here should have been published somewhere else or written for publication elsewhere either in written form or for an online article site like Anarkismo or Indymedia. Don’t republish blog stuff here unless you think its of article quality.
Experienced users of Drupal will be aware that there are number of other articles types possible, I’ve deactivated those for bloggers and writers as they are just confusing unless you know what your doing. If you think the book format would be useful to you PM me and I’ll give you the right, we use it for the Anarchist FAQ on the site at the moment.
Once you click on one of these buttons what you see next will vary a little according to which one it was. In particular ‘story’ gives a lot of classifications that are not available for the other types so casual blog posts for instance don’t appear in the list of articles on imperialism or from the USA. Here is what the sections refer to
a. Title
This obviously is the title your story will appear under in all archive views. Importantly it is also used to generate the URL that points to your story. So the title should contains words that are descriptive of the content. If you prefer to use artistic flouishes in titles I’d suggest you don’t put them here but put a second title at the top of the story itself, that is at the top of the ‘Body’ box. Be aware that a lot of people are subscribed to the sites RSS feed so this means what they will see on their RSS reader of an article will be the title and summary and they will decide to click on it on that basis alone so the title and summary shoudl give them a good idea of what the content is. Also don’t reuse titles as the URL generator will write over the old article URL with the new one.
b. Classifications
Next are the classification fields. These will allow you and other users to rapidly find all articles you have written on a particular topic. Most are self explanatory. Note that those who do not start off with a shallow ‘please choose’ box allow you to put your article in more than one classification in the box that follows. To select more than one category hold down the [cmd] key as you click on each (this is for a mac, with windoze it will be one of the keys to the left of the space bar).
Writer – you obviously choose your own name here. At the time of writing this was the only way I could make the articles searchable by author as well as by the other classifications, hopefully in the future this step can be dropped.
Region – choose the region your article is about, not the region you are writing from (unless the two are the same)
Contains multimedia – choose these if the article includes links to PDF or video or if the images are significant rather than just illustrative.
Article Index – It is possible to put anything in this box but don’t! Instead only put relevant terms as listed at http://anarchism.pageabode.com/using-tags If a term is not listed there then add a comment asking it to be listed. This is important because although this ‘free tagging’ is important in creating interesting subject index’s it will only be useful if all writers use the same tag to describe relevant articles. From time to time I’mmbe browsing articles and adding new tag terms that seem to be useful, this will be notified on that thread
c. Body – This is the text of your article. There is a WISYG editor called FCK that controls this field which is a complex way of saying that selecting some text and then clicking on the button on top of the field will allow you to add formatting (Bold etc) to the text.
Just over the right corner of the Body: box you’ll see a button that says ‘Split summary at cursor’. This is very useful and allows you to determine two things.
1 – where the summary that appears on the front page and in the archive will end
2 – whether the summary will appear in the article view itself. Once you have ‘split summary’ a check box titled ‘show summary in full view’ will appear. If unchecked the summary will not appear so if you want to have an additional artistic title uncheck this and put that title at the top of the second box.
d. Input format
This is used to choose between possible ways of adding code to the article. Normally full HTML is the way to go. The HTML no linebreak exists for articles you are copying from the source code of other websites which might otherwise have lots of end of line characters inserted.
e. Images Picker – this is used to add images to an article. It’s a little complex as you need to upload the image and then click on ‘Switch to plain text editor‘ before clicking on where you want the image to go and then clicking ‘insert image’. Play around with it and you’ll work it out. You can upload up to mb of images which is loads providing you make them smallish and compress them. Your also able to browse images you have already uploaded allowing you to resue images
f. File attachments
At the moment don’t attach PDF, sound or video as all these will take up a lot of your storage space.
g. URL path setting
Don’t touch this when first publishing an article but if you subsequently edit the title you should uncheck the automatic alias box before saving. The function of this part is to generate the URL that will link to the article. If you think you understand what it is doing feel free to edit the bit of the URL that comes AFTER your name, leave your name there though as that will prevent you overwriting other peoples URL’s.
h. Save and Preview are obvious, the first puts the article on the site, the second first shows you a preview of how it will look so you can spot errors. Obviously you should preview first and then save Adding old articles If you are adding a lot of old articles tell me when you have done so and I can set it so that they are not on the front page but still appear in all the archive views. This will prevent them driving your or other peoples current writing off the front page.