Books: Making one of your very own
Hey, there. So, you're all geared up about making some content for the website, right? Well hang on there! There's a few things you should know before you find yourself doing things you don't want to do and just getting frustrated.
What's a book?
A book is, basically, a collection of pages. Think of it as a book in real life! You want your book to have a cover, a title, and then a bunch of pages. You can use them to display information you want the public to know about... Well, basically anything. Events, groups, plots, even blogs and journals can be contained in books.
Okay... So how do I make one?
Easy! Click the "Create content" link on your left sidebar. You may want to open a new tab or window so you can keep this help page up.
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Ah, there we are. Now you see a list of all the things you can create. For now we'll stick with Book pages. Click on that link.
You should now see a couple text boxes, some buttons that look like you might find them in Microsoft Word, and a few links and buttons besides that. This is what we will be using to create all of our pages for our book.
The "cover"
Now, the first page we create will be the "Cover" of your book. This is where you can summarize what's in your book. You can give the reader as much information as you want here before they actually get into the book itself. Eventually there will be a list of all of your pages, but we'll get to that later. Make sure you type the title of your book in the Title field!
Now you'll see two links below the Body field. Click the one that says "Book outline." Some new options will show up. Click on the drop-down menu titled "Book:" in bold. There should be an option entitled "." Select that one, and don't worry about the weight for now. When you're sure you're done with everything, click "Preview" to see if you like it, then "Save" it if you're satisfied.
Page 1
You're looking at your newly created cover page now, so let's get on with making page one of your book!
Since the pages you'll make for the book belong to the book itself, we call the pages "child pages." The cover is the "parent page" of all of the pages in it. So click "Add child page," and you'll find a screen that looks familiar. This page basically looks identical to the one you used to create the cover. Give your page a title, give it a body with whatever you want to put on page one, and click on "Book outline."
This time you'll see an extra field: "Parent page." It defaults to the page you clicked "Add child page" on, so it should be alright. Leave that be, and click Preview, then Save if you like it. You'll be taken to the page you just created.
Notice the two horizontal bars underneath the content of your page? There's a back arrow with the title of your cover page next to it on the left, and the word "up" somewhere in the middle there. In general, the link on the left will take you to the previous page, or if it's the first child page it will take you to that page's parent. The "up" link will take you from that page directly to its parent.
Making more pages
If you want to add more pages to your book, you can do that by going back to your cover page and adding another child. Just follow the same thing you did to make the first one, and you'll be fine! As you add pages in this way, you'll notice that if you go back to your cover page, there will be links to ALL of these pages... But not necessarily in the order you created them!
Page order and weighting
There's a way to help this! If you've been paying attention to the "Book outline" submenu, you will have seen a "Weight" option. What the weight is used for is to make sure child pages appear in the order you want them to. Initially, all pages you create are weighted 0. Pages with the same weight are then ordered alphabetically.
More possibilities with adding pages
Your cover page doesn't have to be the parent of every page in your book. Pages can have child pages as well! All you have to do is click "Add child page" on the page you want to add a child page too. You can do this to create subsections, perhaps "chapters," in your book.
Start playing Pomp and Circumstance...
Cause you've just graduated! Now you can go off and make your own content for all of the MUCK community to see!
