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ADDING A MODEL
Adding a Model
In Red Queen there are three types of reviewable things: items, members, and suppliers. When Roger creates his directory of models he has to decide which one of the three thing types is best suited to represent a model. However, because it is members who submit reviews, the choice is narrowed to two possibilities: item or supplier. Because suppliers represent the source of items (though suppliers are entirely optional--an item does not need to have a supplier associated with it) probably the most logical assignment is have each model represented as an item. If the model is associated with an external website, it might also make sense to have each such website represented as a supplier. These supplier sites could then appear in their own Yellow Page area, as is supported by Red Queen. However, for the purposes of discussion we simplify things and just look at the tasks Roger faces as he sets up the item branch of Red Queen. Everything said here about adding a model has corresponding, and more detailed, accounts in the Red Queen User Manual under the sections dealing with adding items.
So the first thing Roger does is edit the language templates that control the public pages, via the Template Editor, replacing the word "item" by "model" or "girl", depending on the context of the text in which the word "item" appears. Then he gets on with the job of importing data for each model.
It is not possible to add items in Red Queen without first creating one or more categories in which to place the items. We will suppose that Roger has already done this. Details on the category creation process are covered in How To Create An Affiliate Site under ADDING CATEGORIES. We will assume that Roger has set up a category named Amateur > College and has navigated to it using the administrative Category Browser:
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Amateur (0) |
 College (0) |
Note that the number appearing beside a category name is zero. This is because Roger has yet to add his first model. The default view on the right side of the page consists of just the navigation bar which looks something like this:
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By clicking on the last link shown above Roger invokes the page from which an item (model) can be added. The standard form, before any extra fields have been added to it, will look something like the following (where the values Roger intends to use for the model are filled out):
Fields which are required are those prefixed with a *. These are fields that have been set up so that they should NOT appear as a NULL value in the record for a given model. Presently only a few of the fields Roger needs to describe his model are available. So he will have to add more (and we will see that done later). A more thorough discussion of each of the fields shown above can be found in Editable Item Fields. However, a couple are worth elaborating upon here.
One is the Mouseover URL. If present, the value of this field will be used whenever the URL is displayed either on the page, or in the status bar at the bottom of the browser when the user's mouse travels over the link formed from the URL (hence the name Mouseover URL). In Roger's case, as he wishes to avoid having his Affiliate ID appear in any of the model links, he specifies a separate Mouseover URL.
Words appearing in the Keywords field will be used to create metadata tags on static pages for the benefit of spiders that index Roger's site. These keywords also help the Red Queen Search Engine function more efficiently, so add keywords whenever you can.
Shown in the form above is an image, one.jpg, which has been uploaded using the Manage Upload button. In addition to the full-sized image, a thumbnail image will also be created at the time an image is upload--provided that thumbnailing has been configured from the Thumbnails page of the Configure control panel (in order for thumbnailing to be possible Roger needs to have access to one of 3 alternative image manipulation libraries: Image::Magick, GD, or NetPBM). The default setup in Red Queen is for each item to have a single image field. However, more can be added, and we will see exactly how this is done later in the Image Fields section.
As Roger wishes to collect reviews on the model named Ms Lovely he sets Solicit Reviews to 'Yes'. Less obvious is the meaning of the Unique Review IP field. This can be used to ensure that no more than a single review is submitted from each unique IP address. This is generally an unnecessary restriction on review submissions, so setting the field to 'No' is recommended.
When the fields for the new model are saved, the page refreshes and, in addition to a confirmation message, the Category Browser also updates to show the new number of models contained in the open category branches. From the figure immediately below we can see that the total number of items in the Amateur > College category is 1. We also see that the Amateur category reports 1 as well. This is because the count includes models in subcategories as well as the immediate category, so you can always see the total number of models (or items) in a branch before it is opened.
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Amateur (1) |
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College (1) |
Next Section: ADDING EXTRA FIELDS
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