ZEN Masters (i.e., publication "molds")
There are two key ZENPRESS concepts. The first are what we call “ZEN Masters” (or publication molds) and the second are what we’re calling “Smart Style Objects”. I’ll talk more about Smart Style Objects in a later section.
Before that, I’d like to introduce the concept of a publication mold. In keeping with our ZENPRESS name, we call these ZEN Masters. Let’s start off with the general concept of a mold. A mold is a shape or structure used to crank out more or less identical objects. Usually, the shape or structure of the object remains the same (like with a Jello mold in the shape of a star), but the ingredients or style of the object might change (like when you get an orange Jello star or a grape Jello star).
ZENPRESS molds are somewhat similar. We pour in content (like articles) and out come publications. Our publication molds are much more than templates, they're smart content.
Most of the automated content management systems out there (of which there are quite a few intended for Web-based design) including Frontier, StoryServer, Reveler, Allaire's Cold Fusion and others, are really intended for highly technical programmers and webmasters.
At a lower level are the Web page layout tools like PageMill, FrontPage, HomePage and NetObjects Fusion. Those are really intended for graphics designers, general market users, and hobbyists. But there really wasn't anything that was intended for use by the editorial team itself that created something that was an analog to the physical world.
In other words, you might build a Web page or Web site using some of the other tools, but those tools don’t know what a magazine is. Those tools don’t know what a technical reference manual is. They don’t know about specific kinds of publications – they just know about Web pages. And that's what our publication molds, or ZEN Masters, are. They’re tools that know what a certain kind of publication is and how it works.
"ZEN Masters (or publication molds) are tools that know what a certain kind of publication is, how it works, and how it’s structured."
|
Let me give you an example. One of the natural attributes of a magazine is that it's divided into issues. It's a periodical. One issue comes out shortly after the other and as a result you're going to have a variety of articles in an issue and a series of issues that form a library of back-issues. And so, if you're going to build a publication that's works and feels like a magazine, you're going to want to have something that knows about those issues, articles, and back-issues.
By contrast, if you're going to build a technical reference manual (for example, a manual on a programming language or development tool), the structure will be radically different. You're going to want a User Guide, which is divided into chapters. But since we’re talking about a technical reference manual (a certain, very specific kind of publication) you're also going to want what's called an API (or Applications Programming Interface) Reference Guide which contains each and every command (i.e., element of the programming language) on its own page.
This structure for a Reference Manual is nearly universally standard in the technical documentation world. When you go online (when you make the publication available on the Internet instead of paper), you’re going to want to have a structure that mirrors what a technical reference manual is supposed to be. But because you’re doing it online, you can add value. For example, all those API commands can cross-referenced in the User Guide, so that when a given command is discussed in the User Guide, you can click a link and immediately get the full detail description of that command from the Reference Manual.
What I’ve shown you are two types of publications that are radically different in structure. A User Manual and an API Reference Manual need to be structured and behave very differently than the way a magazine needs to be structured and behave.
This is where the ZENPRESS publication molds come in. Each mold knows about a certain kind of publication and how it is structured and how it needs to work. As far as I know, this is unique and new technology. The closest analog is what are called templates, but templates don’t have elements of workflow and document intelligence built in. A template is like a simple jig or a rubber stamp. Our publication molds handle not only the basic structure and look of a publication, but how that structure changes over time, and how the information flows through the publication over time.
"ZENPRESS publication molds handle not only the basic structure and look of a publication, but how that structure changes over time, and how the information flows through the publication over time."
|
So far, we've built four different publication molds:
- ZENPRESS JournalMaster: We've built a mold for a magazine with back issues, tables of contents, mastheads, author bibliographies, ad management, and much more.
- ZENPRESS NewsMaster: We've built a mold for a daily news center that provides daily news updates and information.
- ZENPRESS ManualMaster: We've built a mold for technical reference manuals.
- ZENPRESS HubMaster: We've built a mold for a publication hub, which is basically a mini-portal. The publication hub brings together and displays the portions of a variety of publications. A publication hub automatically aggregates contents from selected magazines.
With the power of our ZENPRESS technology, there are other types of publication molds that we can build. We could build a mold for books. This would be an outgrowth of the technical reference manual. We can also build events calendars, product catalogs, buyer's guides, and classifieds. Even an online bookstore and an auction system can be built with these molds. Once you've got the mold, you flip a switch (actually, pull down a menu item) and out comes the publication of that type.
We've actually combined the JournalMaster mold with Adobe Acrobat and Word to produce our Solutions Guides. We export formatting from a series of articles into Microsoft Word and then, directly, generate an Acrobat e-book from that export.
Remember that when we talk about “magazines”, we're also talking about “journals” or “newsletters” -- anything of a periodical nature that has a variety of articles in it and is published on a regular basis. The cool thing is, once you've built one of these molds (or ZEN Masters), you can generate that kind of publication over and over again with virtually no effort. So this means, for example, once we built the magazine mold -- and we did it originally for PalmPower -- creating DominoPower Magazine proved to be extremely simple, as did all our subsequent publications. All we needed to do is throw in the content and the structure of the publication built itself up automatically. This is one key aspects that’s possible with the unique power of our system.
Previous | Table of Contents | Next
|
|
