Collective setup

Names, front pages, and the lists that grow but never shrink.

Admin in the header opens the collective's machine room. It's a quiet page you'll visit rarely - but two ideas on it shape everything else: the front doors, and the lists that only ever grow.

The collective admin page: core details, frontpage aliases, and the add-only media and story lists — Name, description, front doors, lists. Rarely visited, load-bearing.

Front doors - one per audience

What happens when someone walks up to plain +yourfamily? You decide - three times over. The frontpage alias fields point the door at any aliased story or magazine, separately for members, guests, and the public. A family might give members a rule-built magazine, guests a warm welcome essay, and the public nothing at all - three true faces of the same archive.

The lists that only grow

The admin page keeps the collective's shared vocabularies: categories, subjects, story collections, image collections, media folders. One rule governs them all: add-only. Entries can be added any time, and retired ones can be archived out of the pickers - but never renamed, never deleted.

Why so strict? Because everything leans on these names: magazine section rules search them, stories are shelved by them, albums gather by them. Rename "Away" and every rule and shelf that said "Away" quietly breaks. So the lists behave like an archive: add freely, name carefully, never rewrite history.

A new collective starts with five categories - Everyday, Together, Away, Milestones, Looking back - wide enough that nothing feels homeless. Add your own doors as the family's telling finds its shape; the best time to add a category is when the third story wants it.

Worth doing early

Write the description (it greets people on the way in), and check the five starter categories say what your family means by them - everything else here can wait until it's needed.