How to publish a project.

Publishing your own projects here on ShowYourProjects is quite easy. You don't need any special programs or tools. All you need is a member account. So if you're not yet a member, sign up now (it's free!). If you are, read on!

To create a new project, click "Manage Projects" once you are logged in:

Now you are on your personal "Manage Projects" page. Here you see an overview of all the projects you have on ShowYourProjects.com.

As you see in our example, we already have 1 project published here, named "Bugg Zapper". If we want to add a new projects, click "add new project" at the bottom of the page. A popup will apear, asking you for the name of your new project:

Enter the name you want to give to your new project and click "Add Project". Don't worry, you can change the name of your project any time you want.

Now that you've created your new project, it'll appear on your personal Manage Projects page, as can be seen in the screenshot below:

Quite easy isn't it? Of course this just-created project is still 'empty'. The next task is to add pages (text), pictures and other files to it. To do this, click "edit project" at the bottom of the project-box.

Now you come to the Edit Project page. On this page you'll see a few different sections that are important. At the top of the page you see the Project Information:

Here you can change the general information of the project, like name, category, building cost and time, etc. Click on the edit button behind each entry to change it's value.

Just below you'll find the files your project currently exists off. For the moment, our project is still empty so we don't have any files yet.

Now, lets add some files to our project! There are two ways you can add pages to your project. You can use our own online Word-like editor, by clicking "Create new project page" or you can upload your own text/html-file by clicking "browse".

First, let's create a project page with the online text-editor. Click "create new project page" (see screenshot above). This will take you to our online Word-like text editor, which you can see on the following screenshot:

Just type your text, add your images, etc., in the big empty field to create your page. You can do anything you can do in normal MS Word. When you're done, give this new file a name in the small box just below the editor and click "submit". The file will now be saved and you will be taken back to the main edit project page. The standard extension is .html and cannot be changed.

Now we're back at the edit-project page. We could for example upload a picture to add to our project. Just click "browse" to search your computer for the file and click "upload" to upload the file to ShowYourProjects.com. You can upload any kind of file, text, html, gif, jpg, exe, pcb-layouts, etc.

Now that we have created a project-page and uploaded a picture, our file-list looks like this:

But we still have those two errors to get rid of.

First, lets set the thumbnail-picture. The thumbnail-picture is the small picture you and other visitors will see when they browse the projects. It's there to give them an idea of what the projects is about. Click "set as thumbnail" to select the image we just uploaded as the thumbnail picture. You'll see that the first error is now gone.

The next thing we have to do is create a 'table of contents'. Your project will most probably exist of multiple pages. To make it easyer for you and other visitors to this site to read through the projects, all projects have a table of contents at the top of every page. This will show an overview of all the pages the project consists of, together with the title of every page. Even if your project has only one page, you have to give this page a title, and tell our computer that this is your first (and only) page.

First, enter the page title for the first page. In our example it's "Introduction".

Second, click on the empty box in the righ column. A drop down menu will appera with all the text-files available in your project. Select the file you want to use as your first page.

Click "save" to save the changes you made. Since we have only one page in our example, this is all we have to do for now. If you have more pages, just repeat the procedure for all pages and click "save" when you're done.

After saving, our file-list will look like this. Note the extra "first page" note after introduction.html and the "thumbnail" note after thumb.jpg

As you can see, the text-file has been set as "first page" and the picture has been set as "thumbnail". Both these files cannot be deleted at the moment, because your projects must always have a first page and a thumbnail.

After you feel that the project is finished, you have to activate it. This is done in the info-box at the top of the page.

As you see, the status is still "Inactive" this means your project will not show up in the search-results or on the browse-projects page, your project is 'hidden' . Click "edit" to change the status to "active". Your project is now available for viewing to all the other visitors of ShowYourProjects.com.

That's all there is to it! You just created a new project, added a page of text to it, uploaded a picture, set the table of contents, set the thumbnail picture and activated the project. You're ready! Now sit back and see how many people will take a look at your project.

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