Re: Beginners questions about Xaraya

In article <bmddtn$5g3$1-111RdWWlOxkOkXtL6OYfHgC/[email protected]>, SpiritTech <[email protected]> wrote:
>...
I'll continue where Jason left off :-)

>3 What is a Publication Type?
>
Publication types are specific "types" of articles, e.g. News Articles,
FAQs, Pictures, ... - see the Overview page of articles (Admin Menu
-> Articles).

>5 How are artilces sorted into sections/catagores/topics?
>
Articles can be placed in categories (one or more). What those
categories represent is your own business, but the default
installation of articles comes with a set of categories familiar
to PHP-Nuke / PostNuke / Envolution / ... users, where
news articles are categorised in two independent ways
(topics & categories), documents are categorised into sections
etc.

New sites will often use generic categories across all publication
types, instead of having separate hierarchies for each of them.
See the Overview page of articles (Admin Menu -> Articles).

>6 How, and by what, are articles displayed?
>
By the articles module, in cooperation with a bunch of hooked
utility modules (categories, hitcount, ratings, comments, ...).

>7 What do Catagories do? Are they the only way of sorting articles or 
>just an example?
>
How you organise your categories is your own business - the ones
provided at installation are just an example. You can browse through
articles by publication type, by category and/or by author, and sort
them by date, title, ...

>8 Do articles need to be sorted into a simple heirarchy or can they be 
>sorted into a multidimensional aray with each article fitting into 
>several independent heirarchies simultaneously or using catagory flags 
>instead of a heirarchy at all?
>
Each "base category" is organised as a hierarchy, but you can assign
several independent base categories (and their hierarchies) to each of
the publication types in articles.

For instance, a travel site might have one hierarchy with countries and
cities, and another hierarchy with particular interests (culture, sports,
restaurants, ...). An article about a restaurant in Brussels can e.g. be
placed in the category "Brussels" and in the category "Restaurants",
and people can then view all articles about Brussels, about restaurants,
or about restaurants in Brussels.

And if you work by publication type, you could let people browse only
through reviews (a particular pubtype) about restaurants in Brussels.

>9 Are there any other basics I need to know about?
>
You should know about themes as well :)

Themes are a collection of templates, images etc. that represent a
particular theme/layout/style/skin/... for your site. Typically, you
would have at least the page templates there, and possibly some
overrides for default module and block templates.

Special themes are the "print" theme, where the page template
does not include any blocks and so will only show the output
of the main module function, and the "rss" theme, that doesn't
generate XHTML at all but XML for syndication by other sites.

Mike.