Using Hot Ink

Using Hot Ink isn't rocket science. However, it can be a little bit much to take in all at once. Most of the key concepts will be familiar to you, but some of them may not.

This guide provides an overview of how Hot Ink works, while providing links to more detailed information where appropriate.

How it works

Hot Ink expects you to create and upload the articles, blog entries, images and audiofiles that together make up the content your organization publishes. You're encouraged to organize that content by category, tag, print issue, or simply into lists.

Once your content is organized, you're able to make it available to users through both a complete newspaper website and a simple API.

Newspaper website

Your newspaper website is the part of Hot Ink visible to your readers. Sometimes, we call this the "front end" of your website. We refer to the part of Hot Ink that you must access by logging in, including all your admin tools, as the website's "back end".

Hot Ink provides a structure around which you can build a complex, creative newspaper website front end. The structure is simple but flexible and is broken into a series of views. Each view represents a different page of your website. Hot Ink supports nine front-end views:

  • Front page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/
  • Article page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/articles/id
  • Static page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/pages/page-name
  • Category page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/categories/category-name
  • Blog index page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/blogs
  • Blog page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/blogs/blog-name
  • Blog entry page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/blogs/blog-name/id
  • Issue index page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/issues
  • Issue page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/issues/id
  • Search results page - http://yoursite.hotink.net/search

Hot Ink includes a full website design system that allows you to create a custom look for each of the views listed above. The design system includes full access to your newspaper's content and a number of tools for making you site's design easier to build and maintain.

API

Hot Ink's XML API is a technical way to access your data. It's useful for building interesting web tools that use your newspaper's content. You can view an XML version of any view listed above by simply adding a ".xml" to the end of the url.