CMS - Content Management System

Creating Custom Web Pages in Microsite

The built in light weight content management system (CMS) allows adding new homepage and other pages in your microsite. Here are some quick steps to get started with CMS

CMS Concept Overview

There are following types of items in CMS
- Site Page: site page become the fully addressable url after you publish the pages. You can create all the content for the page in these site pages.
- Site Page Include: includes allow creating fragments, which can be added in multiple pages. How these includes are used depends on the templates
- Site Template: templates are used to create the final output page by applying any presentation logic on the page content.
- Data Source: these are items used for advanced customization of the microsite.
- Certificate Template: as the name suggests, these are code snippet used to create customized certificate template which can be attached to different courses or programs.
For this discussion, we'll focus more on Site Page, Site Page Include and Site Template

Site Page Include

Site Page Include is the reusable content snippet which can be added in one or more site pages.
An include can't be viewed on its own. And it doesn't have a template to render it
By default CMS contains an include named quicklinks, which is shown on the right bar on site pages by the default detail template

Site Pages

Site page contains the HTML code and any optional embedded javascript in it. The page can be created using built in editor which provides rich text formatting, adding images and other attachments etc.
Each page needs a template for rendering, which can be specified by TEMPLATE property of the page. By default two templates are created during CMS initialization, home and detail. Home template displays the full content of the page as-is while detail template adds a Quick Links sidebar on the right. If there is no templated specified for a page, it uses detail template
Any number of pages can use the same template

Site Template

Site template contains the code to create final output html for a sitePage
The code for home and detail templates is bundled as part of the application and can't be viewed from the user interface.
New templates can be added and currently they need to written in Velocity script language
The primary responsibility of the templates is to aggregate multiple Site Page Includes and the Site Page content and create final html

Default Template

Any template for which DOCUMENT_TYPE property is set to SITE_PAGE becomes default template.
Code for templates can be added using Velocity scripting language, currently home and detail templates are provided as built in templates

CMS allows creation of content and publishing. Pages become visible only after publishing, and the URL of any page after publishing becomes this - http://siteurl/oltpublish/<theme>/cms.do?view=<page-name>

Getting Started

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