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Writing Copy in Backlight

In Backlight, you may author copy for any page, album or album set appearing on your site. For explanatory purposes, we might categorize copy as either Templated or Instanced.

Templated Copy is a part of a template's design, and appears on every album or album set assigned to use that template. For example, you might want to create a template for client albums with a paragraph providing contact details and instructions that do not change on a per album basis.

Instanced Copy is specific to a single page, album or album set. A personal biography on your About page, or the description for a specific photo album would be examples of instanced copy.

Writing Templated Copy​

Templated Copy can be made a part of your album or album set templates.

In Backlight's Designer, edit or create a new album template or album set template. Under the "Album Copy" and "Album Set Copy" headings, you will find text areas for Main Copy, Pallet 01 and Pallet 02. Copy entered into these boxes will be a part of the template's design.

Writing Instanced Copy​

Instanced Copy can be supplied when creating individual pages, albums or album sets.

For Pages, look under Backlight's menu; go Designer => Pages. Edit or create a new page, then look under the "Page Copy" heading. Here you will find text areas for Main Copy, Pallet 01 and Pallet 02. Copy entered here will appear only on this specific page.

For Albums and Album Sets, instanced copy is provided via the publisher (Backlight or Lightroom Classic), when creating or editing an album or album set.

When entering instanced copy for albums and album sets, you also have the option to place instanced copy above or below any existing templated copy, or to replace templated copy entirely. The latter allows you to use a template contained Templated Copy, even if you don't want that copy to appear on a specific page. Convenient!

Providing Album Copy via Backlight's Publisher​

In Backlight's admin menu, click Publisher. You will be presented a list of top-level album sets on your site. Click "Edit" to edit copy for this set, or click "Albums" to view its contents.

To edit the copy of an enclosed album or album set, click "Edit" in its respective row in the table.

Providing Album Copy via Lightroom's Publisher​

In Lightroom's Publish Services, access the TTG Publisher to edit an album or album set, or to create a new one. Under the "Page Content" tab, you may enter Page Copy, Tray 1 Copy or Tray 2 Copy 1.

Copy entered here will only appear in this specific album/album set, making this the appropriate place to write about the photos appearing in the album, for example, "These images are from my vacation in Italy ..."

Formatting Copy​

Backlight does not include a text editor, but supports HTML and Markdown formatting in all copy areas. We recommend authoring your copy in an external editor, then copy-and-pasting into Backlight's copy areas.

For best results, use a plain text editor, or Markdown editor. We do not recommend writing in for-print word-processors, such as Microsoft Word or Apple's Pages.

Writing With Markdown​

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid HTML. Markdown can be learned in a matter of minutes, as you write your content, or you can use a Markdown editor for visual formatting.

A complete guide to Markdown syntax may be found on John Gruber's Markdown page.

Free Markdown editors are also available for download. Use them to write and style your content, then copy-and-paste into Lightroom:

There are many other editors available, both free and premium. A quick Googling should bring up myriad options apart from these two. Personally, I like Byword for Mac.

Shortcodes​

New! in Backlight 5.

Shortcodes can be used to insert links to albums and photos anywhere that Markdown is available, such as in page and album copy areas, email templates, etc. Shortcodes require a relevant ID, discoverable from within Backlight's album management.

Some examples:

[album:123456]

... where 123456 is an album ID, would output the absolute URL for that album.

[photo:123456_12345]

... where 123456_12345 is a photo ID, would output the absolute URL for that photo's "photo" rendition. In Kookaburra albums, this leads to the 1x size photo.

[single:123456_12345]

... where 123456_12345 is a photo ID, would output the absolute URL for that photo's single-image page, the same page we use for image permalinks.

[thumbnail:123456_12345]

... where 123456_12345 is a photo ID, would output the absolute URL for that photo's "thumbnail" rendition. In Kookaburra albums, this leads to the 1x size thumbnail.

These shortcodes may be mixed with Markdown:

[View album]([album:123456])

Or with HTML:

<a href="[album:123456]">View album</a>

New! in Backlight 5.1.

Shortcodes have been added for displaying content to logged-in or logged-out users.

  [logged-in]
    Will only display when a user is logged in.
  [/logged-in]

  [logged-out]
    Will only display when a user is logged out.
  [/logged-out]

You can also print a logout link to the page with:

[logout]

This creates Markdown of [Log out](./?logout) which in turn gets turned into a link in Markdown processing. The text for "Log out" is taken from the existing language setting for "logout". There aren’t any smarts to it, so for text items that are available whether the user is logged in or not, it will need to be placed within a [logged-in] ... [/logged-in] block.

  1. Here we have some outdated terminology having been carried forward. “Tray” is now “Pallet” elsewhere in Backlight; “Page Copy” is equivalent to “Main Copy” elsewhere in Backlight.↩