So Hot Ink is getting people talking, and more importantly, asking questions – the most basic being, what exactly do you get when you sign up?
At its core, we hope Hot Ink can serve 5 functions: Article Support, Media Support, Organization and Navigation, API/Extendability, and finally Security. As the project progresses we’ll have more in-depth posts about all aspects of these functions, but for now, here’s a brief rundown.
Article Support
This is what you think of when someone mentions a content management system – the basic page where you enter your written content. This has been one of our biggest concerns: making sure the uploading process is easy and intuitive, and ultimately well designed. It will be fully sortable/searchable by authors and tags, and content can be organized by any section or category criteria you can dream of.
Media Support
Putting up a website isn’t just a matter of a pile of text and an image anymore. There’s images, sound files, sound slides, video, and PDF documents that can enhance your articles and Hot Ink will let you easily attach them all while adding metadata – making them as searchable as the text itself.
Organization and Navigation
There will be three ways to sort, search and track your site’s content: as mentioned above, they are by author, category, and tags.
API/Extendability
API - you’re going to hear that a lot on this blog. It stands for application programming interface – which is they way different pieces of software speak to each other. It means that motivated developers can extend Hot Ink easily, adding their own custom pieces to site. Most users will never use the API directly, but it’s the magic behind key features like the CUP newswire and web-publisher.
Of course, the data you upload into the Hot Ink software is yours to use in whatever way you can imagine, and we try to make that as easy as possible.
Security
There’s nothing scarier than unsecured data. There’s different definitions to security as well. As Chris has pointed out in another blog post, it can mean the security you have when you’re content is archived properly, which is a facet of Hot Ink. Another aspect is who has the metaphorical keys to your website and content: who’s changing what? Who has access?
Our approach is a staggered one: you can give access to Hot Ink anyone at your publication, but as an administrator, you can control what they can and cannot do on the site with an authorization (roles and permissions) system. Each user is assigned unique login information and you choose their limitations when it comes to web publishing.
This is only touching on the core function of Hot Ink. I hope to dedicate a blog post to each of these facets in the next couple of weeks. Until then, you can always check out the code and give me or anyone else a shout about something you’d like to see answered on the blog.