January 24, 2008.
Recently I have been talking a lot about LifeFlow and its functionality, and how it can provide good stuff for making your site flexible and convenience for your visitors (customizable skins, threaded comments, etc), but I haven't written a clear article describing how an author using LifeFlow sits down and transforms their vision into a published blog entry available for the world to see.
As such, this article should address all standard usage cases in simple how-to segments. Please let me know if anything is missing! It begins with an overview of my simple publishing flow, and then it continues with a list of Frequently Asked Questions.
Using LifeFlow is pretty simple, at least for me. There is a custom editting app that is slowly moving towards usability, but for the time being here is my system:
Create an entry, but don't save.
Click on the Resources tab.
Click on the Plus Sign (+) near the top of the existing resources.
Select the file you want to display using the filechoose, and give it a description (the first field), and an id (the second field) that you will use to refer to it.
Lets say that you gave it the id "my_pic" (without the quotes).
Click save on the little popup you used to create the resource.
Somewhere in your body text include something to the effect of ![this is my picture][file my_pic]
.
Save your entry.
Create an entry, but don't save.
Click on the Resources tab.
Click on the Plus Sign (+) near the top of the existing resources.
Select the file you want to display using the filechoose, and give it a description (the first field), and an id (the second field) that you will use to refer to it.
Lets say that you gave it the id "my_file" (without the quotes).
Click save on the little popup you used to create the resource.
Somewhere in your body text include something to the effect of [this is my file][file my_file]
.
Save your entry.
If you don't want an Entry to be published, then set its date to the future. You can use this mechanism to time publication as well. If you want to be certain that something remains as a draft for a long time, then set its publishing date a few millenia from now.
Click on the flows you want to add the Entry to, and they'll move from the left box to the right box. An Entry can be in any number (0+) of Flows.
Click on the tags you want to add the Entry to, and they'll move from the left to the right box. An Entry can have any number (0+) of Tags. Please note that the list of tags is ordered first by upper and lower case, and second by alphabetically (its a bit weird, I agree).
This will be at http://www.yourwebsite.com/admin/↩