Publishing Rules
You can manage your Publishing Rules from Article Manager's Admin > Publishing section.
Everything created by the program is generated through different Publishing Rules, such as your article pages, the main and category index pages, and the different files used as includes (like the navigation, search box, and headlines).
Publishing Rules provide you with an amazing level of control over the generated content. You can even use Publishing Rules to generate extra sets of content for different formats, like RSS feeds or handheld devices.
Each Publishing rule tells the program:
- what type of content to generate (such as lists of articles or individual article pages)
- which Template to use to format the content
- the file names to use for generated files, and where to publish them
- what placeholders to used in your links and Server Side Includes
Types of Publishing Rules
| publishing rule | description |
| a list of articles (articleList) |
Generates various headlines files and index pages, such as your site and category home pages. |
| a page for each article (articlePages) |
Used for complete article pages and printer friendly pages. |
| a category menu (categoryMenus) |
A list of your categories, mainly for navigation. |
| a page with global placeholders (singlePage) |
Generally used for creating small files for includes, like the site header and the search engine box used on all pages. |
Linking to a Publishing Rule (or including with SSI)
Publishing Rules link to each other through their templates. For example, if you have a Publishing Rule that generates a list of Articles (i.e. an Index page), its template will need have links to your Articles Pages, and also a category menu embedded using a Server Side Include (SSI).
The three "published" placeholders below are used for different ways of referencing a rule in your template. Replace placeholderSetName with the "Placeholder Set Name" value from the Publishing Rule - that value determines the specific placeholders you use to connect to the publish rule.
- $published.placeholderSetName.url$
- Used primarily for links, this will generate the full URL of the page published.
Example: <a href="$published.articlePage.url$">$article.title$</a> - $published.placeholderSetName.webpath$
- Used for most Server Side Includes, the webpath is the published page's URL without the domain name (the path from the webroot to the generated page).
Example: <--#include virtual="$published.categoryMenu.webpath$" --> - $published.placeholderSetName.filepath$
- Used in scripting (such as PHP includes), this publishes the server filepath to the generated page. Most sites will not make use of this placeholder.
Example: <?php include('$published.categoryMenu.webpath$'); ?>