Introduction

The CUE Content Store is a platform for building large, sophisticated multi-platform publishing operations. It provides editorial staff with a streamlined production environment in which they can concentrate on the production, editing and publishing of content for one or publications. A publication is a collection of content that may be published to a variety of online and offline targets. Within the CUE Content Store, the content for a particular target web site/print publication is stored in a publication.

All publications have a similar overall structure, composed of:

content items: Stories (i.e rich text documents) of various kinds, images, videos, audio files and so on.
sections: Containers for content items. Sections are organized in a tree structure. All content items must belong to a section. A content item can belong to mutiple sections but must always have one and only one home section. This section structure typically maps on to the navigation/section structure of the target web site, but it does not have to.
section pages: A section can have one or more section pages, only one of which can be active at any given time. Section pages have an internal structure of containers called areas in which content items can be placed (or desked) by editorial staff in order to enable manual curation of a web site's front pages.
lists: A list is an ordered list of content items that can be created and edited in CUE. Lists belong to sections and can be desked on section pages in the same way as individual content items.
inboxes: An inbox is a list of content items that can be created and edited in CUE. Inboxes belong to sections and are mostly used as a workflow tool: they are a convenient way of organising content and passing it between users.
tags: Tags are specially defined names that can optionally be associated with content items in order to categorize them for search and retrieval purposes. A journalist might, for example tag a travel article about Thailand with the tags Travel and Thailand. Tags can optionally be organized in hierarchies, in order to be able to represent logical associations between the concepts they represent. Bangkok, for example, might belong to Thailand, which in turn might belong to Asia.

All CUE publications have this overall structure, which is reflected in the CUE editor. The details of a publication's structure, however, are customer-defined:

What types of content items are available, and the internal structure of those content types – what fields they can contain, the type and internal structure of the fields, constraints on what the fields may contain, and so on
What sections are available, and the section tree structure
The internal section page structure – what areas are available, how they are structured, and constraints determining what may be desked in each area
What lists and inboxes are available in each section of a publication
What tags are available, and how they are organized

A publication's section tree is directly editable in the CUE editor, and is therefore under editorial control. This is also the case for lists and inboxes. The tag structures available for use in publications are defined using the escenic-admin web application, and the tags in them can be edited in CUE. This manual is primarily concerned with the other two aspects of publication design: content type definition and section page definition. It will also cover the whole process of creating a publication from scratch.