"First Baby Steps" Tutorial about Xaraya

SpiritTech <greg-7AJS2N3YFopQWC9lL0RKGQC/[email protected]> Fri, 24 Oct 2003 02:05:23 +1000
Newsgroups gmane.comp.cms.xaraya.documentation
Organization Xaraya News Server
Message-ID <[email protected]>
After recently coming over to the Xaraya camp (with which to build my 
FIRST website) I have had to struggle with having no idea how to do 
things. The Xaraya documentation is written by experts who don't realise 
how little a beginner knows. As a result I have had a hard time learning 
how to do even the most basic of things. Having spent a lot of time just 
  working out how to display articles I have decided to contribute by 
writing a tutorial which absolute beginners can follow. It may save many 
of them several hours of frustration.

Here it is for your critique and correction. Its only half finished, but 
I'll do the rest tomorrow after doing a fresh Xaraya install so that I 
can refer to the default category names correctly :-)

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First Baby Steps Tutorial to using Xaraya.

The essential part of a CMS is to display articles. The articles could 
be any kind, they might be news, reviews, recipes or whatever. It 
doesn't matter what KIND of article they are (referred to as 
"Publication Types" in Xaraya). This is a fairly simple thing to do. 
Articles are displayed using the "Articles" module.
Lets for a moment pretent that you already have some articles on your 
site. To display them you would :

1. Click on the "Articles" link on the Modules list under Main Menu on 
the left hand side of the display. The page will reload and display 
"Front Page" and "Article Map" beneath "Articles"

2. Click on "Article Map"
    This will bring up the list of articles by Publication Type. News, 
Documents, Reviews, FAQs, Pictures and Web Links are the defaults which 
you have after first installing Xaraya. But you can (and probably will) 
change at least some of these to suit the needs of your site. Each of 
these Publication Types has a list beneath it. This list is the 
Catagories which currently exist on your site - again something which 
you will change.

3a. Click on any one of the catagories under a Publication Type will 
take you to a list of all the articles included in that category. 
Articles can be in multiple catagories at the same time - so the same 
thing can show up in several places.

That is how to get a listing of the articles by Publication Type. But 
there is another way, you can also list by Catagory.

3b. Down the bottom of the Article Map you have a link "Article Map by 
Catagory". Click on that and it will sort your articles by category 
instead. Each category list will show all articles included in it 
regardless of what Publication Type it is.

Now to put things into a bit better perspective, we will do a quick 
little tutorial to get to grips with how this works.

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This is where I'll add the extra. What do you think of it so far?

SpiritTech