FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Will Campsite reduce the efforts of HTML work required for my online publication?

A: Yes. Which is exactly why you would want an online publication to be automated. Once you have designed your publication you need to convert your HTML into Campsite templates and then one template will handle all articles and still allow you to be as flexible as you want when tweaking your layout depending on the sections the article is published in. Additionally, using Campsite will allow you to have consistent navigation for your archive and back issues, rather than having to make sure that you will not need to redo all the links manually once the new issue is out.

Q: I have worries that using new software for my online publication requires a lot of training for my staff.

A: It should not. And that’s how we designed the administration interface for Campsite. Your journalists and editors can use the rich text editor in Campsite the same way they might use Word or Star Office. It was modeled to mimic such an environment as closely as possible to make use of your staff’s experience in handling software and let them do what they do best: produce the content that makes your publication not waste energy on complicated software quirks. As for your web design and system administration, once you installed the Campsite server at your hosting provider you will only need to convert your HTML design to Campsite only once. And as with any other application you can make this as easy or complicated a task as you want. It’s up to you. Campsite is doing the repetitive tasks. Use your staff to be imaginative.

Q: We have just invested in new computers and licenses. What will I need to invest to use Campsite in my office?

A: There are no licensing costs involved. It does not matter if you have three, ten or 200 journalists feeding your content to your site. All they need is the browser of their workstation or laptop. Everything else is free. SO if your office is licensed and up and running. There are no additional costs involved. This makes it easier to work with free lancers who will just rely on their equipment and all you need to give them is a login to Campsite and they are ready to go.

Q: We are a small editorial office and want to be able to syndicate our content to different clients. How can i do that?

A: Campsite allows you to run various websites on one database. That way you can call content from anywhere in the database to any client website you are maintaining. You might even think of having one dedicated News publication where journalists feed all the news and you call the content from this publication on any client website you want.

Q: We are not sure yet if we would like to use a subscription policy for our content. How does that effect the use of Campsite?

A: No problem. Campsite allows you to specify for each article if you want this to be available for subscription only. So you can make that switch any time you want. In fact, the templates allow you to be even more flexible and make detailed decisions on what to display and what not for trial subscriptions, full subscriptions or ordinary readers. Such changes can be made any time.

Q: Can the Campsite be used for publishing in double-byte languages (i.e. Japanese, Chinese, Arabic?)

A: Yes. Campsite is a Unicode-based content management system, so publishing in any language included in the standard is not only possible but you can also localize Campsite into your language of choice.

Q: Campsite wants you to structure all the stories (articles) by issues, so that you have to assign an issue to a certain story. This seems a bit inflexible to me. What do you do if you have breaking news stories coming out in between publication dates?

A: Just add the story (article) to your most recent (i.e. current) published issue. You can also tell Campsite to forget about issues temporarily and list articles from a section, starting with the newest entry. In fact, if you’d like to be extremely flexible and never encounter a logical quandary as to which article into which issue if your business are breaking stories, you may want to consider putting everything into a single issue. Issues are there for the easy structuring of archives, so it’s your call.

Q: You can modify the templates, which is a good idea, but what happens to articles that have been published with that template previously? That is, you publish article with template, then later on change add fields to template1, will the story added previously still behave?

A: Templates are used to display the content of the Campsite database in the client browser. This just follows the fundamental idea of Content Management Systems to separate the content from the layout. If you change the layout of the template, this changes all the articles displayed using this template. However, within the Campsite templates you can specify what you want to do depending on the issue number. This makes it possible to pull up certain designs for certain articles and allows you to be as flexible as you want with your back archive.

Q: Also how do you control where a field in the template will appear on the site, what it will look like etc?

The templates are basically HTML pages with some Campsite specific coding. So the easiest thing to do would be: build your HTML layout then replace whatever part of the page with the appropriate Campsite command to adjust the content dynamically. The fields which can be called up are specified in the article-types you are using for the article.

Q: How do you set launch and expiry times for stories?

A: Use the "Scheduled Publishing" feature for the article. You can set when you want the article to be published, on which page you want it published, and when to unpublish the story, if you choose to do so.

Q: Is there any archive functionality?

Campsite automatically archives all content in the database. However, once you publish a new issue, you might want them to display the new content, which is why you release a new issue. In order to make the archive available, you need to generate templates which will display a list of the old issues and navigate through your archive from there. Having said this, you can design the appearance of the archive whatever way you want, even display all articles of all section from all issues on one page; it’s entirely up to you and not limited by Campsite. Another access to the archive is through its search engine.

Q: How do you handle the positioning and location of images?

The article editor allows you to easily place images in the article, not unlike standard text editors commonly used by journalists. So this can be done by the journalists as easily as placing images in Word or similar applications. Additionally on the template level you have the chance to call certain images from the article and display them in the HTML. This is an interesting feature if you would for example have the same image in various sizes (for the section page versus the home page). If you number them consistently while uploading, the templates will do the rest.

Q: Can you make a story appear in more than one location in the site?

Campsite allows you to specify the environment of all features on all sites. Generally you would want to display feature articles in the feature section. So that would be the default section after clicking on it in the navigation. However, using the local command you can change the parameters and set the section to let’s say sports and list your sports headlines anywhere you want. Using "endlocal" you are back to your default setting.