Auto-Assign Rules

Auto-Assign rules help you achieve two things:

• Assign your posts to books in bulk

• Automate assigning future posts to books

When a post title contains "eldrath", Cereal will assign it to "Shadows of Eldrath: Volume 1"

How the Rules Work

Unfortunately, Cereal can't see any "tags" you assign in Patreon. Because of this, we don't know how posts are related even if you are using tags.

But if you set up "rules" we can automate grouping chapters together.

A rule is a pattern of words in your post titles you assign to a book.

When you set up a rule, we'll look for that pattern and if we find it, move the chapter to the bottom of table of contents in that book (you can update later from the book page).

Rules must:

• Be applied in order. If multiple patterns apply to a title, only the first rule will determine assignment.

  • If two rules overlap, the chapter will be assigned based on the first rule.

  • Example: Two rules are created with "Adventure" 1st and "Minnesota" 2nd. Posts titled "Johnny's Adventure" and "Adventures in Minnesota" will both be assigned to the first rule's book, as the "Adventure" rule is triggered first.

• Be exact pattern matches.

  • You can use multiple words but they must appear in exactly that order in your post title

    • For example: the rule "Minnesota Adventure" does not produce a match with "Adventures in Minnesota" as they are in a different order. The rules "in Minnesota" or "Minnesota" would return matches.

  • The pattern is not case sensitive

Applying Rules

For Past Patreon Posts

The first time you import posts from Patreon no rules will be applied.

You can set up your rules, then choose "Apply Auto-Assign Rules" in the table containing your unassigned posts. This will sort all of your existing posts.

For Future Patreon Posts

We'll automatically apply your rules when you publish the post on Patreon. You now no longer need to login to Cereal to assign the chapter to it's book when you publish.

This works well with scheduled Patreon posts.

How the Automation Works

When you connect your Patreon account, you gave us permission to have a "webhook" with your data. That means Patreon made a note that whenever you publish, update, or delete a post they should tell Cereal immediately. In the future, we get these "publish" alerts and apply your rules as we get them from Patreon.

Hassle free for you!