When you press the Create Issue(s) button in the Control Panel, you come to a page that looks remarkably similar to the Control Panel. But upon closer inspection, you’ll see that it lists Issues instead of Articles. It will list every Issue that you entered in the Issue field of the Add Article form. The way this page works is to do it in steps 1, 2 and 3.

1. Create All Pages

This creates the webpages from the articles that you entered into the database using the Add Articles form. If, for example, you had 6 articles in an issue you called ‘vol1’ then this would create 6 webpages. Each page would be called "vol1_pagename.htm" where pagename is the name of the page you entered in the Page Name field of the Add Article form. (Aha! See how that works?)

The only result you see is a page listing the articles that we created. And then you go back to the Issue Creation screen to do number 2.

2. Create Starting Page

This creates the opening (or "starting page") of your newsletter. When you click here, you see a screen that will assist you in creating the starting page. Your newsletter start page will consist of three sections:

#1) An Introductory Message (usually consisting of some personal chatting with the subscriber. Or any kind of opening information you may wish to share....)

#2) A list of the abstracts of the articles, along with the title of the article, linked to the article.

#3) An Ending Message

The starting page of each issue of the newsletter is what people will see, at first. It is a list of the summary paragraphs for each article with a link to the article. If you are sending an HTML newsletter (one with pictures and formatted text) then this is the page you will be making an email out of, to send along.

Try it and see what happens. Just like in step 1, the only result you see is a page creation verification message. And then you go back to the Issue Creation screen to do step number 3.

3. View Complete Issue

You’ve just created your issue in steps 1 and 2. Now you get to view your creation. Click on View Complete Issue and you get a choice of how you want to look at your newly created issue. You can view it as an HTML newsletter, by clicking on the words Click here to view issue as HTML. This will "spawn" a new browser page showing you the completed starting page. If you’re sending an HTML email to your subscriber list, you would do a right-click and select View Source when this page comes up. Then copy-paste that text file into the email message you are sending.

Another way to view your issue is as a text listing of the abstracts. Just click on View Abstracts as Text, and see what you get. It’s your starting page in plain text format. Some folks prefer to send a newsletter as text instead of HTML. And this will take care of those folks.

And then again, some folks like the entire issue in full text. That is the function of the View In Full Text button. Try it. All the articles appear on the page separated by their titles. This is for folks who like to send everything, all at once, in an email newsletter.

One last note here: When you’re back at the Create Issue(s) page, you also see a button called Create Back Issue page. This can be used to create a webpage which simply lists all your issues on a page, so that visitors have a chance to see all your issues. Note that when you click on Create Back Issue Page, you see a list of all the issues for which you have already created a starting page. You can then choose which issues to appear on your Back Issues page.

Where do you publish a link to your Back Issues? That would be in the header HTML (or footer HTML) that was entered in the Configuration section.