The main purpose of this site is to provide tutorial for content management and creation. It is useful to understand some basic concepts as understanding how things are constructed can make it much easier to work within thee system. Most of this tutorial will relate to administering a site rather than using a site but there will be some of both in many sections.
Concepts and Background
Site Organization
There is a simple heirarchy involved in the organization of site content: Levels contain Content Categories which contain Content. Levels will represent a base URL for the content categories within it. Content will generally be represented only within the URL of the content category.
So most sites will look like this:
Home Page URL: http://www.yoursite.com
Underneath that URL will be several levels. Under each level there will be one or more content categories. Each category will contain either content or some other site resource that has been assigned to that content category.
For this site the URL is http://cms.owt.com The visible levels are:
- Introduction
- CMS3
- LMS3
- Advanced Topics
- Contact Us
- Home
There are some other levels that are not visible. This doesn't make those levels any different in how they function - they simply aren't included in any menu. These levels are referred to as "Hidden" levels. Every site will have at least two hidden levels: Admin and Media representing the administration center and the default and optional media presentation level. This concept will be covered in detail later.
In the Introduction level of this site there are several content categories. Like levels content categories can be visible or not and also can be located in three locations within a page: the content area, the left sidebar or the right sidebar. Not all sites will have both a left sidebar and a right sidebar but most will have at least one of them on at least one level. Each level can have a different "layout" which will specify which areas are available. In the Introduction level you will notice the first content category is titled "Introduction to the CMS". Notice also there are other content categories that appear when you "open" this category by clicking on it. Then you see a number of categories indented and visually linked to the "Introductions to the CMS" category. Categories with other categories "under" them are known as "Sub-Groups" and the content categories organized under that group are known as "Sub-Group Items".
Content Categories will, by default, allow for "content" to be assigned to it in the Content manager where you can create as many "articles" as you wish in each category. Content Categories can optionally use a "module" which can assign specific functionality which may link to additional content configured by some specific tool in the CMS. Modules might direct the CMS to display content outside of the Content manager such as a calendar, form or a selection of products.
When you create an "article" in the Content manger you can easily link to images, media, lists of links and photo galleries without the use of a module. In these articles you can include styled text as well as images, multimedia, links and much more using a powerful editor.