Skip to main content

Behind the Screens, Pt. 1--Creating a Site With the New Tizra Publisher Control Panel

Now that it's public, we're excited to show the new Tizra Publisher web control panel in a bit more detail. To provide a real-world example, we'll show it in use building the eat.shop guides site for Cabazon Books, which went live a few weeks ago. While in practice the process is quick—with initial online selling capability available in a matter of minutes—there's a lot to the software, so we'll break it up over a few posts.

1. Upload a Document When you open your Tizra Publisher account, you're presented with the control panel homepage in your web browser. The cog dropdown provides quick access to key tasks from anywhere in the system. Start by using it to upload a PDF. In this case, it's the full 132 illustrated spreads for eat.shop nyc.




Note how the progress bar informs you as the system imports the file, extracts metadata, breaks the PDF into individual pages, and indexes it for full-text searchability. Apart from the upload, which of course is bandwidth dependent, it only takes a few seconds, but it's nice to know what's going on (beats the "click and pray" approach typical in web content management).

2. Verify metadata To minimize hand entry, metadata such as title, author and table of contents headings are extracted from documents that contain it. Any missing data can be entered through the control panel.



The second screen is a powerful outline editor used to manage table of contents entries extracted from the PDF bookmarks. The entries can be reordered indented, grouped, hidden from end users (but still saved for internal reference), and deleted.

3. Set sales terms Simply enter a price and promotional blurb, or if you want, test more sophisticated options like subscriptions based on variable duration or dates, pay-per-view, concurrencies (the number of users who can view your content at once) or multipacks (any X books from a given collection).

4. Stage and Publish Once the metadata's been reviewed, you can save it to the staging area, where the book can be checked in the context of the full web site exactly as it will appear to your users before being made public. Then click publish and your content is live!

5. Look what you've got! The book is online and part of the your own, customizable publishing web site, with a full complement of browse and search features, plus editable information pages that can be used to say more about the company and its products. Users can find their way to your content via Google and other search engines, see sales offers, buy content and use it over the web, including on handhelds like the iPhone.



Next up: Customizing design to match the eat.shop branding. Then, creating new products by breaking books down into subsections and gathering them up into collections.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What Einstein Taught Us About Searching Inside Publications

When the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein went live on Tizra a few years ago, it was a huge step forward. Suddenly, anyone anywhere could search and access the output of one of the 20th Century’s great minds…from love letters to breakthrough articles that changed how we think about the nature of time and space. But the project also showed the limits of traditional tools for searching within large, complex publications. These limits sparked a collaboration with Princeton University Press and Einstein Papers Project editors, which this year resulted in a dynamic new search interface, which we’ll be demonstrating in a  Webcast Friday, December 15 at 1pm ET . The interface not only makes it easier for Einstein researchers to home in on relevant content on both mobile devices and desktops, it points the way toward faster, better searching within a wide range of publication types, from reference books to periodicals, technical documentation and standards to textbooks. Click To Re

Behind the Screens, Pt. 2--Customizing Site Design in Tizra Publisher

If you’ve seen some of the sites created with Tizra Publisher, you know how different they can look. But how does this happen? In this second in our series on the Tizra Publisher web based control panel ( first post here ), we’ll show how easy it is to completely re-skin and restructure an Tizra Publisher site in a matter of hours. First, a little slideshow of some recent results: As in the first post, we’ll use the eat.shop guides from Cabazon Books as our example. Founded by a graphic designer, Cabazon has a strong visual identity and has done a great job reinforcing it across its print and online properties. Step 1: Pick a design While Tizra Publisher does provide pre-made templates for publishers to customize, Cabazon already had a site design they were happy with, and wanted to carry it over to the new online books site they were building on Tizra Publisher. Screens from the preexisting design they wanted to match: Cabazon’s original eat.shop homepage. Origin

2018 Tizra User Summit: What We Learned by Meeting Our Customers Where We Are

They say you should "meet your customers where they are." Well, for Tizra 's 4th annual user conference we decided to take a chance and do the opposite. Instead of going to Chicago or DC, where Tizra customers are concentrated, we bet on hosting in our home town of Providence, RI. It's not that we don't love Chicago and DC, but we really felt we could do something special with the home field advantage. As it turns out, we were right. The Tizra user community is a silo-busting mix of creatives, technologists, content strategists and executives, who share the goal of building, engaging and generating value from audiences with digital content. For this crowd, we didn't want a sterile conference facility. We felt that by giving them a place they could really connect with, we'd help them connect with each other. Providence, with its vibrant tech and design scene, walkable downtown, and non-traditional venues, provided just the funky catalyst we were loo