Diary Chapters

Well, glad to say that the Diary Chapters function is finally online – sorry about the delays, but as they say, “the best laid plans…” Actually, I’m not sure what comes after that. The best laid plans what? Blow up real good?

I digress. If you are an OD Plus member, you now have access to Diary Chapters through the Chapter Manager (which you will find on the Diary Maintenance menu).

Pay attention here – because I know people will be confused by this part: any person reading a diary with chapters will see the chapters, whether they are an OD Plus member or not. However, only OD Plus members can actually use chapters in their diaries.

Here’s some more information about how chapters work:

Adding Chapters to Your Diary

By default, all diaries do not have chapters in them. If you are an OD Plus member and you decide to use chapters, you must specifically add them to your diary. If you do not use chapters, your diary will appear as it always has – nothing will look any different.

At this time, you may have up to nine (9) chapters in your diary. I may expand this in the future, but I want to wait and see what the system impact of a limit of nine is first.

To add a chapter to your diary, first go to the Diary Maintenance menu and click Chapter Manager under the OD Plus features.

The Chapter Manager will display all the chapters in your diary (if there are any). For each chapter, you must provide a name, and you can provide an optional description. To add a new chapter, click the “add new chapter” link in the left-side menu.

You will be taken to a new screen, where you can add the chapter name, and (optionally) a description. The description can be up to 500 characters long, and will appear with the chapter name on your diary contents page.

Once you click “Save”, you will return to the Chapter Manager screen. If you want to add more chapters, just follow the same procedure.

Using the Chapter Manager

In the Chapter Manager, you will see a set of links to the right of each chapter name and description. These are “edit”, “delete”, “move up”, and “move down”.

To change the name or description of a chapter, click the “edit” link. You will be taken to a screen similar to the one where you added chapters, and you can edit the name and description.

To delete a chapter, click the “delete” link. Please note that deleting a chapter will not delete the entries in that chapter from your diary. Those entries will simply be assigned to no chapter.

To change the order that your chapters will be displayed in your diary, use the “move up” and “move down” links. The chapters will display in your diary contents page in the same order that they appear in the Chapter Manager screen. Moving chapters around will not change the order of entries in your diary – they will remain in the same order regardless.

Putting Entries into Chapters

There are two ways to assign entries to chapters – using the Entry Manager or on the Entry Edit screen.

If you have chapters in your diary, you will see a new column in the Entry Manager. This column (surprisingly enough) is “Chapter”, and will show a dropdown list of all your chapters next to each entry. To change what chapter an entry is assigned to, just change the dropdown and click the “Update” button.

On the Entry Edit screen, you will also see a new dropdown (if you have chapters in your diary). You can use this dropdown to assign an entry to a chapter when you write it, or change the entry’s chapter when you edit it.

Removing Entries from Chapters

Please be aware that all of your entries do not have to be assigned to chapters. You can have entries that are not in any chapter, if you wish. To remove an entry from a chapter, go to the Entry Edit screen or the Entry Manager screen, and select “none” in the Chapter dropdown.

Entries that are not assigned to a chapter will still appear if you look at the diary in a “date view”, just where you left them. However, they will not appear in the “chapter view”.

Reading Chapters

Once you have added chapters to your diary, you will see a list of your chapters appear in your diary description. On the right side of your diary contents screen (where you would normally have the list of your entries) will be a list of the entries that are in that chapter. To get to the entries, just click their name in the list (alright, that part you already knew). By default, the chapter at the top of the list will be highlighted, and the entries from that chapter will be displayed.

To see the entries from a different chapter, just click on the name of the chapter in the chapter list. When you do this, the list of entries on the right side of the page will display.

Once you have clicked on an entry, the entry display is the same as always, with two differences.

If the entry you are reading is in a chapter, the chapter name will be displayed above the entry title (like “Chapter: The Best Poems I Ever Wrote”). The other difference is in the previous and next entry links. If you have come to the entry through the chapter list, these links will say “previous chapter entry” and “next chapter entry”. Clicking them will take you to the next or previous entry that is assigned to that chapter, not necessarily the next entry in the diary.

Time to explain an important aspect of this diary chapter thing. Assigning entries to chapters does not change their physical order in your diary. However, when you are reading a chapter, you will see all of the entries in that chapter in the order that they were added to the diary.

Seeing things the old way

If you want to see a chapter diary in the “classic” view, there is a link that says “date view” at the top of the entry list. Click it. To go back to chapter view, click the “chapter view” link in the same place.

I’m sure I’ll think of more after I post this, but hopefully it will all be pretty easy to understand.

I will say that I’m not entirely happy with how the chapter contents page looks, and I will probably be moving things around a little. I’ve tried about fifty different layouts, and still haven’t found one that is just right. I don’t like that the page doesn’t show you the total number of entries in a diary anywhere (if you are looking at the chapter view).

If anybody has any suggestions, I’m always happy to hear them.

The DiaryMaster