Hiveword Plus: Quick Start

This is a quick start guide to Hiveword Plus which is a paid upgrade to Hiveword that offers advanced features.

Introduction

The free version of Hiveword allows you to organize your novel with a pre-determined set of story components such as characters, settings, items, etc. With Hiveword Plus you can augment the existing story components with extra fields that you need. Perhaps better than that is that you can make your own story components which are called custom types.

Here's the complete list of extras in Hiveword Plus:

• Custom types (aka "things") with fields that you define
• Custom fields that you can add to the default components such as characters, scenes, etc.
• Global text search
• Text search filtering on component list pages
• Images that can be attached to any story component
• Notes that can be attached to any story component
• Bookmarks for tracking your web-based references (the web pages are searchable, too!)
• A writer's journal
• Dark mode

You will find a quick overview of these features below. In order to follow the steps you will need to have upgraded to Hiveword Plus, of course.

Custom Fields

Let's say you want to add a Theme field to the story detail page. You can with the custom extension fields feature!

It's pretty easy to do:

• From the main menu, click Tools and then Types and Fields
• Click the "Built-in Type Extensions" tab ("Types" and "Story Components" are synonymous)
• Click Story since we want to add a Theme field to stories
• Click Add New Field
• For the Field Name, type "Theme"
• For Visual, select Textarea
• Click Save next to the field

You'll now see a preview of how your new field will be displayed. In this quick start we'll ignore descriptions and field group names (e.g., "Custom") for now.

Let's have a look at a story detail page now:

• Click the Hiveword logo or Stories in the left sidebar
• Click on your story
• Behold! The Theme field appears at the top of the story detail page. Like the other fields on the screen, text you enter in the Theme box will be saved with the Save button as you'd expect.

Learn more about custom fields

Custom Types

You saw in the last section how to add a new field to an existing type (e.g., story component such as scenes and characters). In this section you'll learn how to create an entirely new story component.

Let's say you want to track magical spells. Spells have names and various properties such as description, energy type, range, effect area, and so on. So, what we'll do is add a new custom type for spells and add a few fields to it.

• From the main menu, click Tools and then Types and Fields
• The "Types" tab ("Types" and "Story Components" are synonymous) should already be selected
• Click New Type
• On the popup, enter the singular and plural form of your type (for this example, it's "Spell" and "Spells," respectively). You can change these entries at an time by clicking on the custom type name on its details screen.
• Click Save

You now have a new type called Spells. We'll ignore the description for now but feel free to enter one. We'll now add a couple fields. If you worked through the previous section on Custom Fields you'll be very familiar with how things works since they are the same.

• Click Add New Field
• For the Field Name, type "Description"
• For Visual, select Textarea
• Click Save next to the field
• Click Add New Field
• For the Field Name, type "Energy Type"
• For Visual, select Textbox
• Click Save next to the field. Notice the preview of the fields at the bottom of the screen.

You now have a custom type for Spells with two fields to describe it. Now, let's create a spell in a story. This is the same as creating a character, for example. You can create as many Spells as you'd like.

• Navigate to your story (or create a new one)
• Notice that the story component sidebar on the left has an entry for spells but there are none so far.
• Click on the list icon () next to Spells. You are now on the list page for Spells.
• Click New
• Enter a name for the Spell and click Save

You are presented with a screen for your new spell. It has the name you just supplied but the fields are blank. You can add data to those and click Save, as usual, to save them. Note that the story sidebar now shows one spell (you can expand that list to see the name of your spells).

It's as easy as that!

Learn more about custom types

Notes

You can attach notes to any story component. Notes can also be unattached in case you have an idea you want to track that doesn't belong to any existing story yet. Either way, what you consider a "note" is up to you and you can reassign notes at any time.

There are two ways to create a note and they revolve around the context of where you are. If you are on a story component detail screen, notes are embedded on the same screen and are thus attached to that component. If you are on the notes list screen, creating a note there will create an unattached note.

Let's start with creating an unattached note since it's the easiest:

• From the main menu, click Tools and then Notes
• Click New
• Boom. You now have a new note. Well, you have the placeholder for a note. Enter some text and save it and then you'll have a proper note.

Now, we'll add a note to a story component. This note will be attached to the component but the thing to remember is that deleting the story component will delete any attached notes.

• Navigate to a story component (either create one or use an existing one)
• Click the Notes button (if you had any notes they would be displayed)
• Add some text
• Click Save in the notes area
• You now have a new note that's attached to your story component
• Optional: On the main menu, click Tools -> Notes and note (ha!) that your note is at the top of the list and references what it is attached to

Images

Images work exactly the same way as notes. They can be unattached or attached to a story component. The only real difference is that rather than typing text for a note, you'll upload images.

To try it, we'll do what we did with notes above and upload an unattached image followed by an attached one.

• From the main menu, click Tools and then Images
• Click Upload
• Click Choose Images to Upload
• Choose one or more images to upload from your computer. You can also drag and drop image files into the drop zone.
• The images should upload to Hiveword.

Now, we'll add a image to a story component. This image will be attached to the component but the thing to remember is that deleting the story component will delete any attached images.

• Navigate to a story component (either create one or use an existing one)
• Click the Images button (if you had any images they would be displayed)
• Click Upload Images
• Click Choose Images to Upload
• Choose one or more images to upload from your computer. You can also drag and drop image files into the drop zone.
• The images should upload to Hiveword
• Optional: On the main menu, click Tools -> Images and note that your uploaded image is at the top of the list and references what it is attached to.

Bookmarks

There are several ways to create a bookmark. The simplest path to creating an unattached bookmark is:

• From the main menu, click Tools and then Bookmarks
• Click New
• Enter (or paste) your link in to the Web Link textbox
• Click Save and you're done

Learn more about bookmarks

Filtering and Search

Global search allows you to quickly find anything (characters, scenes, journals, images, etc.) matching your search terms.

Filtering, on the other hand, allows you to reduce a list of something (scenes, images, bookmarks, etc.) by a number of attributes including text search.

While both filtering and search are easy to understand and use, quick steps here won't do either justice so please have a look at the link below.

Learn more about filtering and search

Journal

The Journal feature is quite simple and is just what the name implies. While you can use it for anything, it's intended to be a writer's journal. Many folks use the process of writing a journal entry to think about and work out problems in their story.

Creating a journal entry is super easy:

• From the main menu, click Tools and then Journal
• Click New
• You can edit the name of the entry if you'd like and type as much as you want in the entry
• Click Save and you're done