Content Overview
The principles of storing information within BookStack is based of the ideas of a normal stack of books. Just like normal books, BookStack books can contain chapters and pages. You start off by creating a book which acts as the highest level of categorisation. Ideally you’d have separate books for separate topics.
Within a book you can directly create pages or you can first create chapters. Chapters provide an additional level of page grouping to keep pages organised but are optional. All the information you write is held within pages. Although books and chapters do not hold information they can be given a short description to assist with searching and visibility.
Once you start to stack-up books you can start to use Bookshelves to organise your Books. Bookshelves can contain multiple books and a single book could be placed on multiple Bookshelves.
Default Colour Coding
Bookshelves, Books, chapters and pages have set colour coding in BookStack to ensure they are easily identifiable. The below examples show the default color scheme. Note that this may be overridden by your administrator.
Books Chapters Pages Draft Pages Bookshelves
Starting Out
When you start out with your new BookStack instance you can organise things in two ways; You can plan out your book/chapter/page structure or you can let things grow naturally over time. If you know or already have the content which will be going into BookStack then it’s probably best to plan early otherwise, if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll want to let everything find its own place.
If you decide to grow naturally then you’ll likely start with a book for each major category and add pages directly into those books. As you start getting a lot of pages in each book you’ll start to use chapters to group those pages. Once a chapter gets too large you may find it better to split it out into its own book. Within BookStack you can easily move chapters and pages between books and chapters so you shouldn’t worry about having to move things around in the future.