Documentation: start here

Hi, and Welcome to PublicSquare. Documentation is really under construction here (I’m tempted to dig up one of those old signs form the 1990’s…) so WRITE US if you have questions: “help” @ you know where….

Getting Started


Okay, first a caveat! PublicSquare is not a tool designed for blogging, though you could use it as such. So you may be surprised when you first play with it. You don’t just write and publish. It was designed for people to work with editors. Just something to remember! It DOES take 3 steps to publish, not one, but that’s part of the big picture, so bear with us.

Public Square is based on a extracted, simple version of publishing workflow, with a strong emphasis on COMMUNICATION rather than CONTROL and open to the entire community. It’s a virtuous cycle:

1. Readers submit Ideas
2. Readers rate and comment on Ideas
3. Publisher accepts Idea; Idea becomes a STORY
4. Author and Editor work to refine Story
5. Publisher publishes Story
6. Readers rate and comment on Story
7. Comments can become Ideas…

Customizing Your Design


You can work on a design of a template without upgrading BUT to apply it to your site you will have to upgrade to a paid plan. This is nice, because this way you don’t have to pay while you figure out Liquid templates, and work on making your design purrrfect….

To Customize, go to your dashboard, and click on the “design” tab. Now MAKE A COPY of a template you want to start from. This is much easier than starting from scratch, believe you me.

Liquid is the name of the templating system we use.


  • a geeky guide
  • a less geeky guide