PublishWay documentation
PublishWay is a single-publisher e-paper platform: the publisher uploads each edition as a PDF, the platform turns it into a readable digital paper with clickable articles, and the same articles power a full news website — listings, topics, authors, search and sharing. This page describes every feature and how to use it.
Overview
The platform has two faces:
- The public site — homepage with the latest edition and latest news, the e-paper reader, article pages with Google-News-style URLs, topics, author pages, a month-by-month archive and full-text search.
- The admin (
/admin) — where staff manage editions, articles, media, users and site settings. Every admin action is permission-checked by role.
Content flows in two ways: articles can be written directly in the article editor, or extracted from an uploaded edition with the zoning tool — drawing a box over a page pre-fills a new article with the text underneath it.
Roles & access
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| superadmin | Everything, including managing other superadmins. |
| admin | Site settings, branding, users, plus everything an editor can do. |
| editor | Create/upload/publish editions, zone pages, edit and publish anyone's articles, assign article authors, manage media. |
| author | Write drafts, edit their own unpublished articles, submit for review, upload media, maintain their public profile. |
| user | A reader account: satisfies the login-to-read gate and can clip & share. No admin access. Created via public registration. |
Whether reading requires an account at all is an admin setting — see Site settings → Access. Listings and covers are always public.
Editions & the PDF pipeline
Admin → Issues shows every edition as a card with its front page, status and actions, with filters for title, status and date range.
- Add New Issue — give it a title and date, and optionally attach the edition PDF right away.
- Processing — every page is rendered to web images (full, medium, thumbnail) and its text layer extracted for search and zoning. The card shows live progress; when it finishes the issue becomes ready.
- Publish — immediately, or Schedule a date & time and the platform publishes it automatically. Published editions can be unpublished back to ready.
Each issue page also offers Edit (title/date) and Replace PDF — replacing re-renders all pages and re-extracts text; article regions drawn on the old pages are removed, and a published edition returns to ready until re-published.
Status lifecycle: draft → processing → ready | failed → published.
E-paper reader
Readers open an edition at /read/{id} and get:
- Zoom & pan — buttons, Ctrl+scroll, drag, and pinch on touch; zooming past 150% switches to the full-resolution page image.
- Thumbnail strip & page navigation.
- Article hotspots — regions drawn by editors are clickable and open the article page.
- Search highlights — arriving from search results highlights every matching word on the page.
- ✂ Clip & share — signed-in readers drag a rectangle over the page; the platform crops it server-side and returns a share dialog with a public link (WhatsApp / X / Facebook / copy). The share page carries proper social preview tags.
Zoning editor
From an issue page, Zone articles opens a page overlaid with an editing canvas. Everything uses coordinates normalized to the page, so regions stay accurate at any screen size.
- Draw a rectangle over an article block — the text under it is extracted automatically and pre-fills a new article (title from the first words, body from the rest).
- Create article & link publishes (or drafts) that article and links the region, or search and link an existing article instead.
- Click a region to select it; drag to move, use the corner handle to resize; the extract refreshes as you adjust. Blue regions are linked, amber are not yet.
- Linked regions become the reader's clickable hotspots, and the article page lists where it appears ("page N").
Note: editions set in legacy non-Unicode Hindi fonts extract with perfect coordinates but transliterated Devanagari text; OCR support is planned. English text extracts cleanly.
Articles & the editor
Admin → Articles lists everything with search, status filter, and per-row Edit/View actions.
- Workflow — authors write drafts and submit for
review; editors and above publish. Publishing stamps the
permanent, dated Google-News-style URL
/articles/YYYY/MM/DD/slug. - Editor — a rich-text editor in two flavours chosen in Site settings: Basic (headings, bold/italic, lists, quote, link) or Advanced (font sizes, colours, alignment, code blocks, video embeds and images from the Media library). The heading dropdown formats whole paragraphs; "Text size" styles the selected words only.
- Excerpt — optional; when empty the site derives one from the body for listings and social previews.
- Tags — comma-separated; they become the public topics.
- Edition link — optionally attach the article to an edition; the article page then links to the e-paper.
- Author — editors and above can credit any staff member.
- Editorial — mark an article as Editorial to make it eligible for the homepage editorial slot; "Place it on Homepage as Editorial" does both steps at once (admins).
Media library
Admin → Media holds images for article bodies: upload (multiple at once), search by file name, copy a public URL, and delete (editors and above — a file may be used by someone else's article). The advanced editor's image button opens this library as a picker, with inline upload. Thumbnails are generated automatically and images are served publicly with long-lived caching.
Topics, archive & search
- Topics (
/topics) — every tag with published coverage, shown with its freshest headlines; each topic page (/topics/{slug}) lists all its articles. - Archive (
/archive) — every published edition grouped by month. - Search — the header search box covers article text and the full text of every e-paper page; page results deep-link into the reader with all matches highlighted on the page image.
Site settings (admins)
- Branding — publication name, tagline, masthead logo, site title & description (browser tab / search results), contact email, frequency.
- Theme — four looks that change layout, not just colours: Classic (broadsheet), Modern (compact sticky bar), Dark (newsstand), Emerald (editorial). Applies to all visitors on save.
- Homepage — choose the current homepage editorial from editorial-marked articles.
- Article editor — Basic or Advanced toolbar for all staff.
- Notice bar — a dismissible-by-you banner across the top of every public page; toggle it without losing the message.
- Access — "Require login to read": when on, covers and listings stay public with a lock mark, but opening an edition or article requires a free account.
Each section saves independently with its own Save button.
User management (admins)
- Admin → Users — search, filter by role and status, and see who is active or disabled at a glance.
- Add New User creates a staff or reader account with a role; creating lands on the user's page for further setup.
- Per user: edit name/email/password, change role (superadmins are guarded), disable (signs them out everywhere, blocks login, keeps their content) or delete — a deliberately slow "danger zone" action that requires typing the user's name; users who have authored articles cannot be deleted, only disabled.
Analytics
The admin dashboard (editors and above) shows 7/30/90-day totals for edition, page and article views, signed-in readers, clips shared and searches, a reading-activity chart, and the top editions and articles. Events are collected first-party by the platform — no third-party trackers.
Weekly publishing workflow
- Add New Issue with the edition's title, date and PDF.
- Wait for processing to finish (the card shows progress) — then skim the pages on the issue screen; the word-box debug overlay verifies extraction if needed.
- Zone the main stories so they're clickable in the reader and exist as articles.
- Polish important articles in the editor: headline, excerpt, tags, images, author credit.
- Publish the edition (or schedule it), and publish the articles.
- Optionally mark one article as Editorial and place it on the homepage.
- Share — article links and clips unfurl with proper previews everywhere.