Magazines

Curation as creation: rule-built magazines and their sections.

Curation is an act of love.

A Magazine is curation as creation: a front page you design once, whose sections fill themselves by rules. "Newest from the trip." "Everything about Grandma." "The year's moments, oldest first." You write the rules; the magazine stays current forever after - it's the same idea as a rule-built album, one level up, arranging whole stories instead of photos.

Sections and their rules

The editor gives the magazine a masthead (title, a line about it, a cover photo) and then its sections. A magazine has three slots - the main column, the side rail, and the bottom strip - one section each. Every section has a display name and any mix of rules:

Rule	Curates by…
Tag / NOT tag	Stories carrying a tag - or everything except one.
Categories & collections	The collective's own shelves and doors.
Story types	Only reflections; only moments; anything you like.
Authors & subjects	Told by someone - or about someone.
Date range, order, cap	A season or a decade, newest or oldest first, at most N stories.

The magazine editor showing a real section's rules: 'Four tellings, one trip' curating story type Reflecting, max 4, oldest first — A real section being written: "Four tellings, one trip" - story type Reflecting, at most four, oldest first.

And here is what those exact rules become - the same section, printed:

The finished EuroTrip magazine: main column of the trip's stories in order, a side rail of moments, and the Four tellings strip — The outcome: one trip on one front page - main column in trip order, moments in the rail, the four tellings along the bottom.

Readers only ever see their rung. The rules gather stories, but each reader's privacy ladder still applies - the same magazine quietly shows a guest less than it shows a member. You curate once, honestly, for everyone.

Where magazines go

Give the magazine an alias and it lives at a clean address like +family/front-page. Owners can go further and make a magazine the collective's front door - the first thing people see at +family - with different front pages for members, guests and the public if you like (that's set in Collective setup).

Rules lean on names. Sections search the collective's categories, tags and collections - which is exactly why those lists are add-only and never renamed (the admin track explains). Rules written today keep working in ten years.

Open the live one

EuroTrip '18 - the magazine is the real page in the screenshots, live in +demos. Open it signed in, then signed out - the "Four tellings" strip quietly shrinks from four to two, because two of the reflections sit above public on the ladder. That's rules and privacy working together.