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Overview of the Max News System What does it mean when we say "Newsletter Generation System?" The idea is to create a web-based newsletter (or collection of articles) without having to know anything about editing a web-page or how to publish a website. Here’s how we do it, instead: You write your articles in any word-processor or text editing program. Then you go to the beginning page of the Max News system (after it’s installed on your website) and enter your article(s) into a webpage form. The usual process will be copy-pasting the article from your word-processing program into the form. This is not different than filling out any other form you’ve ever done. You also fill in the title of the article, and the author of the article. When you press the Submit (or Add Article) button after having copy-pasted your article and entered the title and author, the article gets added to a database. Upon returning to the beginning page of the Max News system, you’ll see your article in a list of all the articles you have in the database. At first, you’ll have only the one article, but as you add more articles, the list will grow. And for each article, you’ll be able to review the contents, make changes/deletions, etc. Then, when you're ready, you'll do the Create Issue process to put everything together into an issue. That’s the basic overview of how the system works. Now let’s look at a few questions we need to answer... For example, suppose you’ve entered 3 or 4 articles and you want those articles to be included in one issue of your newsletter? And later, you add more articles, but you want those articles to be in a different issue? How do you do that? Actually, it’s pretty simple. When entering an article, you’ll also see a field on the Add Article form called Issue. In that field, you enter a name that identifies the issue. For example, you could enter ‘vol1’ or ‘vol2.’ Or perhaps you’d like to use ‘issue1’ or ‘issue2.’ It doesn’t matter what you call it. It just means that each article with that same identifier will be included in the issue with that name. Similarly, there’s another field on the Add Article form called Page Name. That is simply a name you assign to the article, to identify the article. For example, if you had an article called "Finding the Joy In Your World," you might want to use a Page Name of ‘joy’ or perhaps ‘findingjoy.’ Lastly, there’s one more field on the Add Articles form called Summary (also called "Abstract.") This is meant to be a summary description of the article. It is suggested that this be written in such a way as to encourage the reader to want to read the article. The "abstracts" are used when we create a "starting page" for each issue. The starting page is how we tie all the articles together in an issue. It is a list of the abstract paragraphs with a web link to each article itself. So it can be considered the main page of your issue of the newsletter. Note: This documentation is meant to be read while you have the Max News program operating in another window, so you can follow along. On every page of the system, you’ll find little graphic symbols next to the elements of the page. These symbols have a question mark and say HELP. By clicking on these HELP buttons, you see a little pop-up screen which gives you some information about what needs to be done, at that point. Next, we’ll look at the details of how to install the system. If you have had someone else install the system, and configure it for you, and all you want to do is start adding articles and creating an issue, then you can skip right to Starting the Max News System. |
