The Full Editing Interface
Beyond the QuickEdit interface Serckit also provides a more complete Full Editing interface accessible through the 'Full Editor' link that is visible in the bar at the top of the page to be edited. This is also the interface accessible through the administrative site for Serckit (more on that later).
In addition to being able to click the various sections of text to activate them for editing (as with QuickEdit) the Full Editing Interface allows you to:
Change the page title
Just click it to enable editing. This text appears across the top of the browser window, in search engines and bookmarks. It is also used in navigation menus as well as (in most templates) being plastered across the top of the page itself. So choose something concise and descriptive with due consideration to all the contexts in which folks will try to make sense of the title.
Change the url
Urls need to be unique, and you should stick to lowercase letters and numbers--no spaces or funny business (underscores are fine though). A changed url will break any links to it (in Serckit or elsewhere) so in general urls for live pages should be left as is.
Note that the /dev is automatically added on dev pages and the leading part of the url is set to reflect the current module (and it's relationship to any parent modules).
It's important (for navigation purposes) that each module have a 'main' page that serves as the starting point for the other pages in the module. The web convention is to give this page the url 'index.html'. We've followed this convention and Serckit assumes there will be an index.html page in each module (well, mostly anyway). In general when you start with a fresh empty module your first act should be to create a new page and name it (and we mean the url here, not the title) index.html. (Of course we're only talking here about the 'end' of the url; if your module url's all start with /introgeo/models then your main page should be /introgeo/models/index.html)
Make the Page Live
An interface for replacing the current live page with the contents of the dev page. Or for making it live for the first time. When a page is first made live the date and time is recorded and displayed (in the page footer and often near the title) as the 'Initial Publication' date. If a page is made live a second (or third or nth.) time you'll be prompted to indicate the nature of the update. For anything other than a minor typo you'll be prompted to give a description of the update. This update history will be displayed along with the initial publication date so that visitors can understand how the page content has evolved over time.
Manage Forms, Browses, Catalog Links and more
These tools are collapsed in the sidebar along with the normal file management tools.
Edit text in HTML mode
A link at the top of the green box allows you to toggle between the normal "richtext" view of the editing windows and an "html" view that may be handy for diagnosing strange formatting behavior. Only a small subset of html tags are allowed as described on the previous page.
Change Other Page Metadata
Below the text boxes there is a collapsed section where you can modify a number of other page settings. Normally the defaults are fine.
- Navigation Menu: the local navigation menu for this module. Set to the match the parent module in the case of mini-collections.
- Chrome and Footer: set to match the look and feel of this project.
- Page Template: controls which fields appear on the page.
About templates
The words you carefully craft in the CMS are ultimately fed into a web browser following rules encoded in the template you've choosen. Normally you choose a template when you first create a page, often just leaving things set to the default (which will vary from module to module). The template determines how many discreet element there will be on a page and how they'll be arranged.
Many templates have only two page content elements: the Main Page Text and the Page Name. In most cases you ignore the Page Name element (pages normally draw their 'name' from the title field we'll get to a bit later). Main Page Text is where all the action is. It's where you'll do the bulk of your work. In some areas of the site folks have wanted a bit more consistent structure from page to page and so have broken the page text into distinct element (e.g. author, description, goals, teaching materials) which are reflected in (and enforced by) the page template. You'll edit each element separately and the page template will take care of compositing a final page. Be sure you're working with the right template and try to use it in the spirit intended.
- Search Boost: Used to bring a page higher (or lower) in search returns when compared to otherwise equivalent peers.
- Hide Next/Previous: Hides the Next and Previous links at the bottom of the page. Use for search pages where these links get confused with the pagination provided by the search engine.
- Hide this as a mini-collection: When set this page will not be returned as a 'hit' in a search across mini-collections. Used for secondary (and tertiary) pages associated with the single entry in a mini-collection.
- Suppress Full Navigation Menu: When set this page will only show the local navigation.
- Show Link for Starting New Discussion: Does what it says but only in certain templates.
- Server: use this only if you really know what you're doing. And your name is Sean.
- Thumbnail Image: This controls whether the page image associated with the page that shows up in search results and the like. By default the system chooses an image from the page falling back to a screenshot if no appropriate image is available. You can choose to manually specify a particular image (it need not be in the page) or force the system to use the screenshot.
Add New Fields to a Page
On occasion it may be useful to add new fields to an existing page. The most common case is when you need to associate vocabularies or keywords with a page to support particular search behaviors. Note that in general new fields won't actually be visible on the new page unless the template already supports them.
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