This section explores how assignments are created and organized within issues. It also discusses how to search for and rank assignments. Assignments are the most basic unit of organization within the system. Every article and image you want to publish must be tied to an assignment. Assignments also have a specific location: they always exist in a specific issue and section. The intention of an assignment is to also have a distinct author or assignee, though an assignment is not required to have one.
Please note that iWebPress is currently designed to publish entire issues at a time. For that reason, we say iWebPress is an issue based publication system. This means your staff will upload all the content for a given issue, and then the issue will be published to web as a complete unit. Of course, you can always go back and make changes, or publish an assignment after the issue has been put on the web. See the Web Publishing section for more information on publishing to the web.
iWebPress is also designed to integrate into your workflow. For that reason, there are often several ways to accomplish the same task. Rather than forcing you to work a certain way, iWebPress was designed to speed your publication process up.
Please also note, iWebPress serves two basic functions. It is a management tool, enabling you to track your content submissions and editorial review. It is also a publication tool, enabling you to publish to web instantaneously. Many of the management features explained below are useful tools designed to help your publication, but are not necessary for iWebPress to function. Some customers choose to utilize only the publishing tools by creating assignments and uploading content in one step, skipping all of the content management entirely. While this method does not make use of iWebPress' extremely powerful content management features, it is one possible way to utilize only the web-publishing features.
