Creating a new Category in Radio

Now that we've seen how to create a new Folder in our Weblog and publish files to it I want to talk about creating a new Category for our files.

Why a Category?  There are several reasons.  Again, thinking like a FrontPage user I was dismayed to find that Radio didn't allow sub webs.  In a normal web site (when I use the word "normal" I'm referring to a non-Radio web site), you can create sub webs under the root of your main web.  

The advantage of sub webs is that they are independent of the root web (webs unto themselves) and therefore they can have a completely different look and feel than the rest of the site.  In addition, sub webs are a great way to break up your site into smaller, more manageable pieces for editing or for sites with multiple authors.  For example, you can set up a sub web with unique permissions from the root so that different authors can only access their sections of the web site.

But wait a second.  What are these "Category" things?  Sub webs!  Well, that's not entirely true since they lack many of the special features a sub web can have, like unique permissions but it'll serve our purpose. This is because of the hierarchal way Radio looks at special files and folders.  See Radio UserLand for Developers for the intimate details.

Categories are unique in that you can apply a completely different theme (look and layout) from the root to them.  Because of this feature a category can be considered Radio's "poor man's sub web".

So let's create a new Category for our files in preparation for integrating them with our Weblog's theme. You can create a new Category in Radio by choosing Prefs from the top menu of your Radio Home Page.  

1. Select Categories from the list
2. Check the box that says Check this box to enable category routing for your weblog
3. Click on New Category page
4. Enter a Name and Description for your Category
5. Check Check this box to render this category in HTML if you want the page rendered as HTML (Recommended)
6. Check Check this box to notify Weblogs.Com on updates to the HTML rendering of this category.  (Recommended)
7. Select a Theme for your Category or leave None if you want to use the same theme as the rest of your site.
8. Select a Language
9. Click Submit

Radio will create a new folder under the WWW folder in your local Radio directory, located at C:\Program Files\Radio UserLand\www (in a typical installation), and place one file in it; #prefs.txt.  If you open that file in Notepad you see one line containing a # (pound) directive called #categoryName which contains the Title of your new category, Ex:  #categoryName "My New Category"

I created a new category for these tutorials called "Radio Tutorials" (as you can see in the URL for this page).  Now let's move to the next section and see how we can integrate our files with our Weblog's theme.

Last update: 1/20/2003; 8:30:50 PM.

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