Faint idea to published website. An OpenWGA Tutorial, Part 2
Seite 2 von 52. The page hierarchy
We can now move away from the
start page, even if we made a draft copy and started editing it (the
copy will stay until we continue working with it), just by clicking some
links on the page.. The "Edit Content" action on the right panel will
always allow us to edit the page we are currently seeing on the website.
But
how are those pages organized? Where can we add new ones, where do we
get an overview whats currently available on the website without
clicking through it? Well, there is another panel for that sitting on
the left side of the UI, which is currently collapsed to a narrow bar:
The "Siteexplorer". You can click on that bar to let it appear
temporarily or you could click on those "double arrow" symbol at the top
of the bar to bring it up permanently. We should do the latter now.
What you will see is a hierarchy of page documents which form your website:
There's
a lot to explore here. But first, let us again click on some links on
the website to see how the currently displayed page will be highlighted
in the explorer. That way you might get an idea on how the organisation
of this hierarchy maps to the organisation of the website. You will see
that the menu structures on the site match to a certain hierarchy level
in the siteexplorer. For example: The navigator showing "Products",
"Service", "Downloads" etc. exactly matches the titles of those pages
below the "Home" page in siteexplorer.
3. Creating new pages
Here we could now just add a new "Product" to the "Products" menu of the site. There are many ways to do this:
- Klick on the "Create..." Button in the menu, then either on "New Rootpage" or "New Childpage". A root page is a page on first hierarchy level which will represent a new menu point on the navigator to the top right which currently contains "Home", "Sitemap" etc. A child page is a page below the page that is currently selected in the site explorer
- Click on one of the the little plus symbols in the site explorer. A new page below the page belonging to the symbol will be created. For "Area contents" this will be a root page, for all other pages a child page of that page.
- Btw.: An "area" is a
container for a website hierarchy. It is no visible page itself. There
may be many areas on an OpenWGA website but this one has one only one
named "contents".
I usually prefer the second way. Clicking it will let you create a new page which directly is "below" the page you clicked in hierarchy. Have a try and click the "plus" symbol on the right of page "Products".
This is what you will see. Give your new page a new title then hit "Create Page". Now a new page entry will appear below "Product 2". Also the new page will be opened in the central part for you to edit. This again is a draft copy, so before you publish your new page nobody is going to see it (assuming that this would already be some live server).
This new page is first completely empty. It therefor shows you the sections with content modules in a different way:
The content modules sections (there are even three of them in this page type) tell you to use the action "content modules" in the right panel to fill them with something useful. We know better, we just click those sections with the same effect of having the module management editor come up. Here we can add "Richtext field" modules to these sections by clicking the "Add" button. You might want to try that. :-) After that there should be red edit buttons available to fill those fields.
So, why do we suddenly have this additional column on the right with its own content module section? Because we did not disable it. Yet. There are some settings for the layout of this page available when you click the action "Userdefined settings" on the right panel. A small dialog comes up:
I'm afraid this is only available in german for now. However "rechte Zusatzspalte" means "Additional right column" which is what we see here. Uncheck the checkbox to hide this column if you do not want it.
Why are these settings called "userdefined"? Because the web site
designer of this page type composed this dialog, it is not predefined by
OpenWGA. Yes, this is misleading as the "user" in this case is the "designer".
4. Page Templates
You now have learned the very
basics about creating and editing content in OpenWGA. Or at least this
is what I usually tell first timers. Sometimes they might actually be
able to accomplish something with it. Are you? Feel free to tell me in
the comments. :-)
One last topic before we leave the content manager for now. As you might think it is quite some effort to create the layout of each and every page again from scratch. When you are building more complicated module structures somewhere in the future you will want to reuse those structures on other pages without rebuilding them.
This is where page templates come handy. They allow you to store a page whose module layout you want to reuse in a central space. From there it can be used to create new pages. Additionally changes to this "page template" regarding the module layout will automatically be transferred to all pages that were created based on this template.
This is how to do it: Lets assume we want to have the page structure of the page "Product 1" as generic template for creating products. So we create a copy of it in the "Page Templates" area of the site explorer, which you may already have noticed by now:
- Right-click the page "Product 1". From the appearing menu choose "Copy page".
- Right-click the area "Page Templates". From the appearing menu choose "Paste page".
- On the following dialog just hit the "Insert" button
Now a template has been created based on the page. It is shown in lighter gray because it is not published, therefor would not be visible for website visitors:
How do you use this template to create new pages? Simply click some "Create page" button/link again somewhere. The creation dialog now offers you to use the template just created:
Creating
a page with a selected template will automatically copy the content
module configuration plus all the content in the template to the new
page. While you will be able to edit the content itself you will not be
able to edit the module structure of this new page as it is inherited
from the template.
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Ingo Samstag 07. April 2012, 22:17