Display Publications

This article spells out what's required to display a Publication on your site. For more details about the initial setup requirements for a Publication, see the Knowledge Base article Setting up a Publication: Issues, Volumes and Posts.

In the Setting up a Publication article, we established that Publications display groups of posts together as individual issues, released on a set schedule.

With Publications, you define your publication timeframes in advance, and Posts handles the work of assembling individual issues.

Before creating Publications content, it may be worth taking a moment to double-check the settings on your Volumes and Issues.

Ensure that your Volumes have correct start and end dates. Volumes typically cover a calendar or academic year and include at least one Issue.

Check that your Issue dates are set appropriately and do not overlap. The start date of each issue defines when that Issue's content will be visible in your Publication.

Note: It may be helpful to write down the start and end dates of your various issues, so that you can refer to them when you’re creating posts and set your post start dates accordingly.

Publications are organized around the Issue. The content associated with whichever Issue is current (based on the current date and the start dates of each Issue) is what appears on the Publication display when a user visits it. Users can then navigate from one Issue to another, changing the entire slate of content on that page each time they do so.

Creating content for a Publication is just a matter of creating new posts. But if a Publication is just composed of individual Posts, what groups those posts together and ties them to a given Publication or Issue?

Enter the "Issue" element.

Publications elements

When creating an area for your publication, you will use some combination of these elements:

• Issue element: defines the date range for the posts that will be displayed on the page; visitors will only ever see the posts whose start dates correspond to the currently displayed issue
• Issue Tools element: Issue-specific search tool
• Board element: displays details about a selected board
• Post element: displays posts from one or more boards; can be configured to only display posts that have a specific tag
• Post Tools element: allows users to filter the displayed posts based on their tags or categories; can also be used as a search tool

The "Issue" element powers the scheduled-release feature of Publications. It also enables users to browse issue by issue, changing the entire set of content shown at once.

You must include an Issue element when displaying your Publication. (The Issue Tools element is optional!)

As discussed in the Setting up a Publication article, each issue of your Publication is established in advance, and each issue has its own start date.

When you display a Publication, the Issue element keeps track of the various start dates for all of the Issues you've established. Upon reaching the start date of a new issue, the Issue element will find all of the posts in the Posts element with a later start date. Those are the posts that can be displayed in the Publication.

As for which of those eligible posts are actually displayed, that's up to the configuration of the individual Post and Board elements in the Publication. Generally speaking, Posts elements can be configured to display of the content from one or more boards, and/or all of the posts that have a specific tag (just like regular, non-Publication Post elements).

Therefore, you can use either a dedicated board or a dedicated tag to designate which of your posts will be included in your Publication.

See the Knowledge Base article Adding Posts to a Publication for more details about how to populate a specific issue of your publication with content.