What to do first?

First of all, bookmark this site so you can find it again!

What to do next?

Poke around. Create some content-- maybe document what you did this morning. Upload a picture or two. Don't worry, you can always move them or delete them later.

Berylium stores webpages as "objects" -- image objects, document objects, that kind of thing. Once you get used to working with objects, you'll discover that they all behave in pretty much the same way.

You can move them from folder to folder, hide them from non-members, delete them.

You can attach files to them -- this bit that you're reading is actually an HTML file that was attached to this document. You can attach PDFs, Word documents, audio files -- whatever will allow you to best communicate the information you want to distribute on the web.

Some of the whizbang features

If you're using IE5.5+ or Mozilla 1.4+, you can edit HTML documents in your browser, which is really cool. To try it, click here -- if it doesn't work in your browser, well it's cutting edge stuff, what can I say? You can still edit your HTML locally using Dreamweaver and upload it, which is almost as convenient.

Every Berylium folder has an RSS Newsfeed for instant syndication on the web.

Members can subscribe to receive announcements from your site by HTML email. Whenever you add a new document or image there will be an "Announce It" link.

Members with weblogs (Blogger, LiveJournal, other Berylium sites) can easily republish your content on their weblog, complete with a well-formatted link back to your site. The more you're blogged, the more attention your site will get.

Customizing Berylium

Looks a little plain, don't it? Don't worry, that's a feature! Berylium pages are built simply, using XHTML -- the modern rewrite of HTML. You can change the entire look of the site with one CSS stylesheet. Put the navigation on the left, put a logo in the corner, make all the text purple cursive, it can all be done sitewide with just one file.

Or on a folder by folder basis if you like to color-code things.

If you require bigger changes, that's not so difficult. Berylium uses a template system that allows you to override the default templates where necessary. The templates are "smart"-- you can run PHP code in them -- which makes for a very powerful system if you know what you're doing.

Performance

Berylium is not lightweight-- the functionality provided by the template system comes at a price when the server needs to render a page that has forty different objects listed on it. In fact, rendering a complicated page can take a second or two, which is an eternity if your server is getting a million hits a day.

Fortunately, most Berylium objects don't need to be rendered each time they're viewed. In fact, most only need to be rendered when they are created or updated by the author. High volume Berylium sites can take advantage of this by publishing rendered pages into a normal web directory, where they can be served by Apache with very little overhead.

Alright, that's enough yakkin.