General Concepts

Overview

The following image shows the relationships, in Magazine, between articles, categories, sections, issues and publications.  It demonstrates the various combinations by which Magazine can be configured to achieve vastly different Web sites.

The following image shows the relationships between authors and categories in Magazine.

Concepts

Articles

Articles need little special definition. They are the base unit of the content used by Magazine. Articles have a very rich set of attributes and metadata that you can define.

Articles can be placed in multiple categories if required.

Articles integrate with JXtended Comments (if installed). Each article can be setup to accept comments, ratings or display social bookmark links.

Sub-articles

Any articles can be parented to any other article in the same issue, and if you are not using issues, any other article in the publication.
Sub-articles are use to produce side-bar effects on your site.

Authors

Magazine allows you to define additional metadata. You can optionally relate a Magazine author a Joomla! user and also a Joomla! contact.  We define enough information within an author so that you do not need to add them as a Joomla! user if that suits the way you set up your site. For example, you may only have a couple of people with login access to your site but the rest of your contributors could supply aritcles via email.

Authors can be placed in their own categories, and also can be related to articles categories. This dual relationship can be used in creative ways on your site such as allowing you to exact certain columns related specifically to the author.

Categories

Categories are defined universally across all publications. In this way your can use sections to define grouping within a publication, and you can you categories to group articles across you whole site.

For example, you may have a publication for Travel, and another for Gardening. A category of New Zealand could be used to relate articles about destinations in New Zealand from the travel publication, and also various plants native to New Zealand in the gardening publication.

It’s possible to use Magazine as a simple catalog or directory using a combination of custom fields and an orderly category hierarchy. In this instance you can use categories to define a tree of Countries, States and Cities. In this case you might define two publications, one called Directory and another called News Letter. The Directory publication could use only categories in which to group detailed articles about each country, state or city. Your Newsletter publication could group articles within issues that are released on a regular basis and categories can be used to relate topical information within the newsletter to articles in your directory.

Authors also have their own set of categories. This can be used in many ways but is typically used to group regular editorial staff to distinguish them from authors that may do one-offs or contribute irregularly. For example you may set up specific categories for your Editors, Science Writers, Politcial Editors and so on.

Combined with mapping support, categories can also be used to show maps of category or article locations.

Issues

Issues are a way of grouping articles generally on a periodical or relational basis. Issues support a rich set of nomenclature, that is, the way you classify each issue such as number, volume and either single month or dual-month notation.

The use of issues is option and can also be used in a number of creative ways. For example a blog-style site may use issues to group collected article entries in a monthly or weekly format. A prose site may use issues to group articles into chapters. Combined with layout overlays, you can rename whole various fields are presented on your site to suit the result you wish to receive.

A publication that resembles a user manual may use issues to represent the manual for a particular version, or for different products.

Publications

In Magazine, the publication is the top-most container for articles. Your site may need only one publication, or it may require many depending on your needs.

For each publication you can define a unique set of Sections, and a unique set of Custom Fields for all the articles within that publication. For performance reasons, you can only manage issues and articles in one publication at a time. For this reason, you must put a publication in "edit" mode to be able to manage its issues and articles.

If your site is a traditional magazine, then your publication will probably be the name of your magazine. Magazine can support more than one publication and this may relate to the fact that you carry multiple magazines, or it reflects your need to collect articles in "super-sets", or it reflects your need to define different custom fields for various sets of articles.

Sections

Sections are like categories but are defined uniquely for each publication. They can be used in various ways depending on how the content of your site needs to be arranged. For a traditional magazine they might relate to the various regular sections such as Features or Reviews. For a lifestyle site they may relate to your major topical areas such as Health, Travel, Gardening and so on.

When displayed in the table-of-contents of an issue, Magazine is smart enough to only display those sections that are used within that issue. While sections can be defined in a tree structure, Magazine will only consider them as a flat list in terms of display.

Common Elements

All publications, issues, articles, sections and categories have several common features:

Alias

The alias is used to produce human readable URL’s when SEF is enabled in Joomla!

Sub-title

A subtitle is a very common requirement of most publishing systems.

Media

Magazine supplies a number of “named” media types that can be used in front-end layouts. It currently support the names thumb, small, media, large and full-size. In addition there is the ability to define a folder for a gallery of images that can be integrated with Slimbox supplied with Magazine. Finally there is a textarea to define custom object types such as for audio or media. The gallery folder could also be used to support an audio or video playlist that integrates with, for example, a flash player or similar.

Mapping

Google Map support is provided natively for each major entity. You define the Lat (Y direction) and Long (X direction), starting zoom levels (how much of the map you see initially) as well as a selection of the optional controls that can be used with Google Maps.
In order to use the mapping features you must apply for a map key from Google.