Content Management

"Content" by definition, is anything that is added to your web site. Whether it is a new page, book or story. Content is the key component to any web site; how it's used and how it's navigated is critical to using the system. Beyond that you will also be introduced to some key terminology that will help you better understand the rest of this documentation if you understand what that terminology means and is associated with, so pay attention!

Each piece of content has many options available to it, many of which will never need to be touched if you choose not to, but in the interest of complete information, we'll cover them anyway. So, when you click through any link under the "Create content" menu item you will see a list of the available content types, those being page, story or book page (each will be discussed later). Click in to which type you want to create and you will see a form with some basic common options (as well as some content type specific options we will discuss later). Those common options are:

Title - The title of the page, event, newsletter, etc...
Menu settings - Defining where in the menu hierarchy the content will appear, if anywhere.
Body - The content itself.
Revision information - You can create revisions of content as it changes if you choose to, which, if you have mistakes, will allow you to roll back to previous versions if you have access to revision control. This revision control can keep one or many version of content on hand to roll back to the previous, or any previous version, as long as you save it as a revision.
File attachments - Uploading images or other files that may needed for the content. These files can be any number of different file types from images to display in the page to document downloads to link directly to as described in the WYSIWYG section. Uploads are limited to 1 MB each, with any number of uploads per document.
Comment settings - Allows you to set if the content allows logged in visitors to leave comments on the content. Comments can be enabled or disabled with each piece of content that is created. Comments will be emailed to the site admin for moderating before being posted live to the site.
Authoring information - Keeps track of the author of the content by storing the username of the person making it. This allows for site content auditing, and is typically more useful in larger sites with more content contributors. In the typical small site with one or two people managing the content, it likely won't come in quite as useful.
Publishing options - Gives you options to publish, to move it to the front page or to sticky it at the top of lists for importance.

Set these options and any other content type specific options that may be present, fill out the title and body content as you desire, submit the form and you have just created you first piece of content. You are not finished yet, though, as it's not yet visible on your web site. In order to make it accessible you need to add it to one or more of your navigation menus unless you do so within this form.