Magazines: start here
A magazine publishes less often than a newsroom but with more care per piece: long reads, photo stories, themed issues, and pages that are designed rather than listed. Its site is also a brand: readers notice when a feature page looks like every other page. What a magazine needs is an editorial process with clear stages, pages its editors can lay out themselves, and a calendar that keeps the issues coming.
This page is for the editor, the art director and the person who owns the site for the publisher.
What Exponential gives a magazine
| Need | What carries it | Where it is explained |
|---|---|---|
| Long articles with several parts | Content classes with the fields you need; the demonstration installation has Article, Article (main-page) and Article (sub-page) | Designing your content model |
| Designed feature and issue pages | Exponential Layouts: layouts, zones and blocks your editors arrange | The Layouts editor, Landing pages with Layouts |
| Photo stories | Galleries and automatic image conversion and scaling | Media and uploads, Images and image variations |
| Clear editorial stages | Drafts, approval workflows and version control | Approvals and review |
| Issues that appear on a set date | Scheduled publication | Scheduled publishing |
| Readers who come back | Newsletters (the CJW Newsletter extension) and feeds | Newsletters |
| Related stories | Relations between content items | Relations and reuse |
The feature list is in the repository's README.md ("Main Exponential features", "Exponential Layouts"). The class
names above are the ones on a demonstration installation; your site may use others.
Organizing an issue
Most magazines find a simple structure works best:
- One folder or category per issue or theme, so the issue has its own address and its own page.
- A landing page for the issue, laid out with Layouts, that presents its pieces in the order the editors want.
- Each piece as its own item, related to the issue page and to earlier pieces on the same subject.
- A publication date for the issue, with the pieces scheduled to appear together.
Your builder or partner decides how this maps onto classes and the content tree when the site is built (Structuring the content tree). If the structure does not fit the way you work any more, that is a change request for your partner (Change requests), not something to work around in every issue.
Roles in a magazine
- Writers create drafts and submit them.
- Editors edit, approve and publish, and decide the order of an issue.
- The art director or layout editor arranges the landing pages with Layouts and checks the images.
- The site owner keeps the calendar, the accounts and the contact with the host or partner.
See Roles for your team for how roles and permissions are set up.
Tip
Layout editors change what readers see first. Give the right to publish layouts to the people who own the look of the magazine, and let others prepare drafts of a layout for them to check.
Rhythm
- Per issue: the issue plan in the content calendar, the landing page draft, the approval of every piece, a final look in preview, the scheduled date.
- Every week: the weekly owner routine.
- Every quarter: a content audit of older issues: are the links still good, are the images still allowed to be shown?
Your next step
Follow the magazine reading path. If the magazine also sells subscriptions or single issues, add the online store reading path or the membership reading path.
Related pages
- Magazine reading path
- Newsrooms: start here
- Blogs: start here
- Landing pages with Layouts (builders)
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
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