Using CMS - An example

Creating an Example Site, Using CMS

Site Page Includes are a good way to create reusable common content which can be added in multiple site pages. By default quicklinks include is created by CMS. You can edit its content and / or create new includes. For example if your site needs a different set of links in the quicklinks for different sections of your site, then you can create different site includes corresponding to each section.

Let's take an example. Suppose we are building a site with following sections, and under each there would be multiple pages (except the home section, which will have only 1 page)

  • Home
  • Products
  • Support
  • About

Home Section

By default CMS creates an index page when you initialize the CMS. Or you can create a new site page and name it index (without any extension, and everything in lowercase). You can edit the content of it in the editor. By opening the properties, you can notice that its TEMPLATE property is set to Home

Products Section

For the products section, we would need following.

  • A landing page - create a new site page with name products. This page would be available via http://<site>/oltpublish/site/cms.do?view=products url
  • Create all the individual pages you need and name them according to some naming convention. E.g. we can name them product_pricing , product_specifications etc. Its recommended to keep the names short and have no spaces or special characters in it. You should just use alphabets, digits and underscores in the names because it becomes part of the URL
  • Create a Site Page Include with name quicklinks_products (name can be anything) and add the content you want to show in the right nav bar on all product pages. E.g. you can add the links to the pages you created in products section, either using the internal link button in the toolbar, or using the url example http://<site>/oltpublish/site/cms.do?view=<page_name>
  • Edit all the pages and open their properties, enter quicklinks_products (or any different name you have used in previous step) in the QUICK_LINKS_INC property. If on any page you don't want to show the quicklinks, set QUICKLINKS property to false

Other Sections

  • You can build the other sections of your site in the similar manner, just keep creating the pages and assign them names according to a naming scheme.
  • Create a include to create navigation bar for the specific section (e.g. quicklinks_support, quicklinks_about)

Template Change

  • You need to make one more change in the site templates. Edit home and detail templates and change the property INCLUDES to contain a comma separated list of names of the includes from all sections. E.g. quicklinks_products,quicklinks_support,quicklinks_about

Make sure that all the pages and includes are checked in (published) individually. Then go to CMS browser and click Publish button. This action performs the site publishing operation by copying all pages to the sites' published area, from where they are available for viewing by all users or visitors (depending on settings).

Secure / Non secure pages

If you want users to login before they can access a page, change its property SECURE to true. After you make any change in property you need to only go and publish the site.

Header / Footer / CSS

You can Placements to create a custom header / footer / css which overrides the default one. Read this example to learn about how to create a custom header.

 


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