Chebucto Suite Newsletter Installer
Introduction
The Chebucto Suite Newsletter Installer helps to maintain
and manage the assembly of Chebucto Connections, Chebucto Community Network's
on-line newsletter. Chebucto Suite Newsletter Installer takes text files with
minimal HTML markup, and adds standard headers and footers, creates links to
other articles, and updates links when new editions of the newsletter are
published. It also includes a facility for creating mockups of the newsletter to
ensure the edition is properly formatted before publication.
These instuctions assume that you have three bookmarks in your mook mark
list, pointing to the Newsletter Mockup, Remove Mockup
and Newsletter Publish scripts. If you do not have these links,
ask your technical support team to add them or let you know their
location so you can enter them yourself.
Using the Installer
Installing a newsletter requires the following
steps: Preparation
-
Markup the edited text in HTML, keeping in mind the following:
- The installer script creates the header and footer, including all
<HTML> <HEAD>and <TITLE> elements.
- The title is also automatically linked to the Table of Contents. The title
should appear as a Level 2 Heading (<h2>) on a line by itself at the
beginning of the document. Titles should be descriptive; the name of the section
(Tips for Power Users, Hot Links, etc.,) are added by the installer.
- In general, the only HTML coding necessary is paragraph markers, links to
reference graphics (other than the header and footer graphics, which are linked
automatically), and for any hyperlinks to documents other than the newsletter
table of contents, other pages and previous issues.
- Name the files so that the installer script can identify them. The current filenames and their description can
be found here.
- Create a directory in your file area to hold the newsletter articles.
- Upload the articles, and transfer them into the appropriate directory. Only
this current month's articles should be in the directory.
- It's always a good idea to look at each article to check it with the Lynx
browser and to make sure the basic formatting is correct. Ensure that the title
of the article is the only text on the first line of the file.
Mockup
- Next, create a mockup of the newsletter to test
it. Activate the Create Mockup link. You will be promted for a directory
name; type in the name of the directory, eg, newsletter_oct. If you have placed
the newsletter directory within another directory, give the path to that
directory, eg, issues/newsletter_oct.
- The installer script will then
process the files. Once it has finished, activate the Mockup Home Page
link. This will take you to the home page of the test version of the newsletter.
This is not normally accessable to anyone but you, the editor, so don't worry
about the mistakes.
- If there are problems, remove the newsletter mockup
by activating the Remove Mockup link, edit the article files, and run the
mockup again.
Publish
Once you are happy with the results, it's
time for the real thing. Activate the Publish Newsletter link, and the
new newsletter will be processed and linked to the Chebucto Community Net Home
Page. When you install the next month's files, the old edition will be
archived and linked as a back issue.