1 Introduction to Content Executive
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Content Executive is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) capable of satisfying the web-development needs of a vast array of different users. Content Executive gives nontechnical people the ability to quickly add, edit, and delete content on their websites by using a highly-intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI). While many CMSs use GUIs to make web publishing more user-friendly, most of them separate content and controls, forcing site administrators and users to edit content from the “back end”. Content Executive is unique because the controls are integrated directly into the website, almost exactly as it would look to a public visitor to the site; so what you see is truly what you get. Because these controls are embedded directly in the site, the pages can be updated from anywhere with an internet connection.
The following is an instructional user-guide intended to be used as a starting point for new users of the Content Executive CMS. Because the system is very user-friendly, this manual may seem overly pedantic at times and may actually slow down many users. Users such as these are encouraged to “tool around” the interface independently in order to learn the system more quickly.
1.1 Laying the Groundwork
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Content Executive’s permission-management controls allow site administrators (e.g. home-user webmasters, IT staff, department managers) to delegate site maintenance duties to any number of site users (e.g. fellow bloggers, staff members, suppliers) through user and group permissions. Permissions can be set as restrictively or permissively as needed and can be changed quickly and easily.
The content in a site using the Content Executive CMS is arranged in any combination of movable [[Content Executive Modules]]. There are text, calendar, image management, news feed, and weblog modules, as well as many others. All of these modules can be modified easily within Content Executive’s GUI and are subject to the permissions set by the site administrator(s).
1.2 Modules and Modularity
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In order to learn the basic operations within Content Executive, it is important to understand what modules are and why they make the CMS work. As was mentioned in the introduction, modules are the constituent parts of the site that contain many different kinds of content. In fact, without modules, an Content Executive site would have no content whatsoever! The simplest type of module is a text module. These modules are very simple: they can contain formatted text and images, and any part of the text can be programmed (easily) as a link to another section, page, or site. While that about describes the capabilities of a text module, most other modules have a considerable amount of features. A calendar module, for instance, includes several options for viewing, posting, and scheduling events.
All modules are movable, addable, and deletable: you can change where they exist on a page and in what section; you can add unlimited instances of the same type of module (or the exact same module, i.e. with the same content) in any location; and you can remove any module that is no longer useful or no longer relevant. Modules are, quite literally, the building blocks that connect to form a useful, well-organized site.
An understanding of user accounts is critical to the operations of an Content Executive site. Just like you would log in to check your email or online bank account, you can log in to Content Executive by entering your user name and password. Nothing on the site can be changed without first logging in. Or course, not just anybody can make changes to the site. When a normal user account is first created that account has no permissions whatsoever: that user cannot edit text, post news items, add events to the calendar, add modules, etc. Permissions enable users to do these things. Administrators are users that automatically have all permissions on the site, including the permission to assign permissions to other users. In other words, an administrator can assign User X the permission to edit text content on the home page, and User X will be able to write freely when he/she logs in next.
Groups can also be created by the administrator(s) and assigned permissions as if they were individual users. Users are assigned—again, by administrators—to these various groups, at which point they acquire all of the permissions that were assigned to the group. This allows administrators (or users with administration privileges, as we will see later) to manage many users very quickly. Users can be added or removed from any group with the check of a box, and their permissions will change almost instantly, even if they are logged in (the browser will refresh automatically and the user’s/group’s permission will change accordingly).
Now that we have established a basic understanding for modules and permissions, we will briefly explore the relationship between these facets of Content Executive. While modules work together to communicate information to site visitors and users, they are completely independent of one another; one text module does not rely on another for its content, even if keeping one piece of information and losing another is impractical in a real-world sense. Because of their inherent autonomy, modules are the starting point for setting user and group permissions. An administrator, or a user with the administration permissions, assigns who is permitted to perform various changes to different modules on a per-module basis.
1.4 A Useful Case Study
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For the purposes of this guide, we will frequently refer to a hypothetical company called Smith’s Frob Incorporated (Frob Co. for short). This company will serve as a case study with the purpose of organizing the forthcoming operational information in a more meaningful way. That is to say, Frob Co. is our model organization whose general operations should (hopefully!) be analogous to those of many others, presumably your own.
Frob Co. is in the business of, you guessed it, manufacturing frobs. Never mind what, exactly, frobs are; that consideration is irrelevant to our contrived model. Frob Co. is headed by Alice, the company president. She has two vice presidents under her: Bob, Vice President of Internal Communications, and Candice, Vice President of External Communications. Bob is responsible for communicating all relevant information to the entire staff while Candice is responsible for communicating with customers and the general public. Bob and Candice are both responsible for their respective subordinates. Dale is in charge of employee-relevant news and Emily is responsible for scheduling and agendas; they both work under Bob. Frank does PR and advertising while Georgia takes care of customer service/customer relations; they work under Candice.
If you are setting up an Content Executive-based site yourself, then all of the Smith family Frob Co. users will exist in the initial installation of Content Executive, each with assigned permissions based on their needs. If this is the case, than following imperative portions of this guide can be used quite literally, like a tutorial. If you are a new user of an existing site (one already set up by an administrator, webmaster, or third party) then the following portions of this guide will serve more as a framework with which you will apply methods and procedures that are relevant to your own needs.
2 Content Management Basics
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A Content Management System or CMS is a software tool that simplifies and automates the process of authoring, editing and maintaining the content of a website. Set-up and configuration of the website and CMS will still be completed by a web developer, however ongoing content updating, ownership and maintenance can be devolved out to non web-expert personnel. This can have significant benefits in terms of reducing the cost of ownership of online services, as everyday web maintenance tasks do not have to be outsourced to third parties such as an external web developer.
Content, in the context of the web, is information that is displayed or made available on a website. This may include (but is not limited to) web pages, images, video, animation, Word documents, PDF files and information stored in databases that are accessed from a website. In the past, management of information required specialist knowledge and technical skills. Today, a Content Management System can be used to enable non-technical personnel to perform tasks.
In order to get their jobs done, members of a website team have different needs to access elements of the website. A sophisticated web content management system must provide great latitude in allowing assignment of permissions. For example some users might need to have permission to create content but not publish it. Others may have access to edit existing content but not create new content and a very few members have access to delete content.
In addition, when content is workflow-enabled, the process is even more sophisticated and secure. For example, when a newspaper author finishes an article, the editor is alerted that the story is waiting for review and approval. Once editing is done, the story is either sent back to the author with comments or is passed along to the legal review team and so on.
By default, all of the Smiths have been given user names identical to their first names, and everybody’s password is “password” (passwords are case-sensitive, so make sure “Caps-Lock” is off). Type “frank” into the user name field (the field on top) and “password” into the password field (the field on bottom). Click the “Login” button.
Once you are logged in to an Content Executive site, you will notice many small icons located in, on top of, and around the modules. Icons are essentially the graphical “buttons” that are used to access the controls to add, move, edit the content of of, assign permissions to, and delete modules on your site. They behave very much like the icon-based buttons within many familiar programs, except that they are web-based so you do not need to have any actual program installed on your computer to access (except of course for a web browser to access the site in the first place).
'''Placeholder for screen shots of various icons'''
2.3 Previewing Content
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Click on “Preview”, an option directly under where the login fields are (at the upper left of the page).
3 Interacting with Modules
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A brief description of the steps users will be taking to modify and expand various components as part of the daily usage of an Content Executive website.
In this section, we will log in to the site, edit a text module, save the changes, and preview how the changed content will look to public visitors.
At Frob Co., Frank (remember: he is responsible for PR) needs to inform the public of a new frob plant opening in June. This is considered very important news, so he is supposed to write an announcement for the home page, where public visitors are most likely to see it. First he needs to access the website and log in.
NOTE: Your browser will need to be configured to accept cookies from your server/domain. Visit http://scholar.google.com/cookies.html for more information on enabling cookies on many different browsers and versions. You may also need to reload or restart your browser after enabling cookies.
Now that we are logged into the system, you will notice that the main body of text on the home page (the text that we intend to edit) has a small icon of a pencil and paper above the header “Welcome to Content Executive CMS”, but is otherwise unchanged. This is the “edit” button. Click it to enter the “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) text editor.
Clicking on the edit button has brought us to a new page with a header that reads “Edit Page Text.” Below this header is the aforementioned WYSIWYG editor.
Enter this body of text by clicking your mouse anywhere in the field, and a blinking cursor will appear. Editing this module is highly intuitive; it was made to behave like a rudimentary text editor, with the added ability of creating hyperlinks and including pictures. Select all of the text in this field and delete it. Click on the “www” image and delete it as well. We now have an empty field to work with.
Now it is time to make the big announcement, about the frob plant opening in June. In bold, underlined, or capital letters at the top of the text (just to call it out as the header) type something to the effect of “NEW PLANT TO OPEN IN JUNE!” and hit return/enter once. Now, in regular (unformatted) text, make up a story for the plant opening (or type a bunch of random gibberish, whatever you want to do to fill up a dozen or so lines).
Now that we’ve entered the information we want visitor’s to see, we should save the changes and preview what they will look like to the public. Click on the “Save” button underneath the text that we have just edited.
The use of calendars on websites has become widespread throughout the web, and with good reason: They are perhaps the most practical organizers of information available. Whereas the vast majority of these sites are only capable of managing a single calendar (or a few identical calendars), Content Executive allows users to create multiple calendars, each with its own content separate and unique from one another. This can be particularly useful when managing the presentation of information to more than one audience. For example, a site may want to have separate calendars for suppliers, customers, laborers, and managers, instead of one very busy calendar with many categories.
Content Executive’s calendar module provides users with many of the features of other popular scheduling/date management programs like Microsoft Outlook. Calendars can be viewed in multiple different ways, including a monthly view, monthly list, mini view, and weekly view, depending on how a user wants information to be displayed.
Events can be scheduled to the minute or as day-long events, and can be scheduled to recur daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, if desired. An event consists of a title, which succinctly defines it, and a description, which can be a longer explanation of the event. In each view, only the title of each event will be visible. Clicking on the event will take the user to a new page with the full description.
Returning to our case study of Frob Co., we will walk through the steps of creating a calendar event and a category. We will log in as Candice (since she is responsible for employee-related scheduling), create a weekly event (“Chili Dog Fridays”) on the calendar module on the “Staff Only - Hidden Section” section, and finally categorize this event as an “All Staff” event.
3.2.1 Creating Categories
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'''Documentation Todo'''
Need to rework parts of the Calendar documentation. For instance, you don’t always have to create categories. The configuration of the module for category support should be fully covered fist.
First we need to log in (if you are following our case study, then type in username “emily” and password “password”, otherwise use your own). Now access the “Staff-Only” section by clicking on it in the navigation bar, or go to any section with a calendar.
Now we can see a calendar module, probably in monthly-view. First we want to create a category for the event, and then we want to create a new event (Chili Dog Lunch) that recurs every Friday from noon until one o’clock and that falls under the category we create.
Click on “Manage Categories” at the bottom of the calendar module, under where it says “Create Event.” This will redirect us to the category management page. Now click on “New Category” to create a new category. This will bring us to a new page where you can enter two simple pieces of information: the category’s title and color-label.
Enter a title such as “Employee fun” and then enter an RGB hex value to indicate the web color that you want for your category. “F F0066” is an example of such a hex value (it is a shade of magenta). Now click on “Save” and we will return to the category management page.
NOTE: For a good list of RGB hex values and the colors they generate, visit http://www.htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/color.cgi.
3.2.2 Creating Events
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Now we will create an event and identify it as being categorized by the category that we have just created. Return to the section that contains your calendar module (in the Frob Co. case, this is “Staff Only - Hidden Section”). Click on “Create Event” at the bottom of the calendar module. This will bring us to a new page where you can enter in all of the parameters relevant to a calendar event.
Give the event a name (such as Chili Dog Lunch) in the “Title” field and enter a brief description in the “Body” field (this can be gibberish or a haiku, anything to fill up some space).
Now we want to set up when the event will occur, for how long, and when it will recur. These controls are all beneath the Title and Body that we entered above. Use the menus labeled “Start Time” and “End Time” to set the event to occur at 12:00 PM and end at 1:00 PM. Use the “Recurrence” menu to make the event occur weekly, and use the “category” menu to classify this event as “Work Fun” (or whatever you named the newly created category). Now click “Save”.
Log out (or enable Preview mode) and return to the main section that contains the calendar module, to see how it will look with the new event listed.
Now we will create a one-time event that occurs for a full day. Frob Co. will be upgrading their servers on the first of the next month. Since this information is relevant to both clients and employees, it should be posted in the public “Events” section of the site. Georgia is in charge of customer relations, so she may as well take care of this task.
Log in as Georgia (user name = “georgia”; password = “password”).
Go to the “Events” section, and click on “Create Event” under the calendar module in monthly view. Title the event “Upgrading Servers” and give it a quick description. Engage the “Date selector” located to the right of “Event Date” (by clicking on it) under the body/description of the event we have just entered. A small calendar control-window will open up. Since we want to schedule this event for the first of next month, we need to click on the single arrow “ > “ to advance to the next month. Now click on the “1″ at the beginning of the new month. Once we have clicked on the date that you want to set, the small window will disappear and our date will be set.
Since this event could potentially last all day-long, click the small box that says “All Day Event” under the event date. Since this type of event does not reccur regularly, leave the “Recurrence” form at “None.” Always remember to click “Save” when done creating or applying changes to a module.
Toggle preview mode to see how the new event will look to site visitors. You will probably notice that the calendar is still blank! That is because we are still in the current month. To view events in the next month, click on the blue circular arrow at the top right of the calendar. This changes the calendar to display the next month.
Now click on the new event (Upgrading Servers). This brings us to a page where we can see exactly when the event occurs and read a detailed description of the event. This is how site visitors are able to learn more about a scheduled event. Now log out of Georgia’s account.
3.2.3 Creating Calendars
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Now we will create a new calendar which will display the same content as another calendar, but in a different location. We will also change the view of the new calendar.
This time we will log in as Bob because he has the permission to add modules to the Staff Only page, and we will create a new calendar which mirrors the content from the “Events” page. We will set the view to monthly-list so that employees can easily scan what events are published on that page. Log in as Bob and navigate to the “Staff Only - Hidden Section” page.
In between all the modules within a container module are blue circular “plus/addition” buttons. Click the one in between the existing text and calendar modules.
This brings us to the module creation page. Select “Calendar” from the drop-down menu labeled “Module.” Now set the “View” to “Monthly List.” Do not bother giving the calendar its own title, but click the “Use Existing Content” circle. Now click on the “Use Existing Content” text itself.
This will open a new window where we can navigate to an existing calendar module and select its content to be mirrored by our new one.
NOTE: It is possible for a poorly-programmed pop-up blocker to interfere with this new window. If you are having difficulty, consider disabling your pop-up blocker while you work with your site.
Click on the “Events” section in this new window. The existing calendar, which should be in monthly view, will say “Use this Module’s Content” at the upper right. Click on this text and the new calendar we are creating will automatically display the same data (the same events, categories, etc.) of the existing calendar.
Click “Save” and enable preview mode. Now we have two identical calendars in two separate locations, whose views are independent of one another! Because these two modules refer to the same date in the database, they do not need to updated manually or independently. Also, the views of calendars (and many other modules) can be changed at any time, not only when they are first added/created. Refer to the beginning of this section for a visual-list of calendar views.
The “News Feed System” module is similar to the calendar module in a few ways. A calendar is basically an organizer of events created by users of the system, and these events can be viewed in a variety of ways. Clicking on a particular event will bring a visitor to a page with a more detailed explanation of that event. Likewise, the news feed system is an organizer of news posts (again, created by users) and can be viewed in two different ways. Just as clicking on a calendar event directs visitors to more information, clicking on a news item from the feed system will bring the user to the complete article that the title refers to.
In this section, we will log in as Dale and create a news item that alerts site visitors to a recent, highly-favorable stock-analysis of Frob Co. Since this report will not be made public until the 31st of the month, we will set a publish date which makes the system store the news item without posting it until the programmed publish date. Then we will briefly examine the view options for news feed systems.
3.3.1 Creating News Items
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Log in to the site (user name = “dale”; password = “password”). Navigate to the home page/section if you are not already there. The news feed system is located to in the container module at the far right of the page.
Click on “Create News.” Once again we are brought to a new page where we will configure our entry. Make the headline “Frob Co. Profits Are Up!” and enter some text into the body field (this is the content of the news article itself; when a site visitor clicks on the headline, they will be brought to a page that displays all of the text in the body field).
Remember that we do not want this news item to be visible until the 31st. To accomplish this, we use the simple “Publish on” control below the body of the news item. Uncheck the “Publish immediately” box. This enables the “Publish on” field. Use the small calendar control (just like we did with calendar modules) and select the 31st of the month. Now click “Save.”
NOTE: Both the “Publish on” and “Unpublish on” options are independent and optional; you can have one, both, or none of them, depending on when you want information displayed and removed.
Do not be alarmed that your news item does not appear in the news feed module. Unless it actually is the 31st, the news should not be visible yet!
Now we will change the view of the news feed system to “default” view (it is currently in “summary” view).
While still on the home page, click on the blue gear/cog at the upper right of the news feed module to change this module’s layout.
Now simply change the view from “Summary” to “Default.” Click “Save.”
What we have done is switched the view of our news feed system. Instead of a list of headlines which refer to full articles, we have the headlines with the first few lines of the article underneath. Now, if visitors want to read the entire article, they just click on “Read More…” instead of the article’s headline.
3.4 The Resource Manager
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The last type of module which we will discuss in this user guide is the resource module. The purpose of a resource module is to organize the files which are uploaded to it and thus make these files available for others to download from it. There is no restriction on what types of files can be uploaded and downloaded: music files (.mp3, .wma, .flac), text documents (.txt, .doc), portable document files (.pdf), pictures (.jpg, .gif, .bmp), executables (.exe), compressed files (.zip, .rar), and any other file types are all fair game. The only obstacle one might encounter when uploading files to the resource manager is the amount of data transfer permitted by the server that the site is hosted on; transferring very large files to and from the site will require a lot of data transfer space. Resource modules also have four different views: three which contain icons for different file types and/or summary descriptions for the particular file and one that contains neither.
Resource modules can be particularly useful for helping to create an efficient workflow system. A printing company, for instance, may need to have proofs of a brochure posted for a client to download and review. The client can then mark the brochure with notes and upload the new file, or “update” the original file (which will effectively replace it with the newer version). Now the printing company can make the requested changes, and once again relay the proof to clients. Users with appropriate permissions can also “lock” files that have been uploaded so that others can not update (overwrite) them until they have been unlocked. These features allow users to work collaboratively on projects through the website.
NOTE: As with any modules in an Content Executive-based site, the resource manager module can be configured so that only appropriate site users have access to it (and therefore the files that it contains). Also, just like any module, multiple resource manager modules can be created in different locations on the site, with different files available for download.
Getting back to our contrived case-study, we will demonstrate the usability of the resource managemer module by creating a dummy text document (to serve as the new frob “technical specifications sheet”) and uploading this document to the resource manager on the “other modules” section. Than we will edit the existing offline text document and update the online version. Finally, we will log out of the site and download the newly updated file.
3.4.1 Uploading Files
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We need something to upload before we continue, so create a simple text file on your desktop (for ease of finding it in the following steps) and name it simply “resource.” You do not need to type anything in the actual file, we just need a dummy file for instructional purposes.
NOTE: Most Windows, Mac, and Linux users can create such a file by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on the desktop.
Once again, we must log in before we can get anywhere. Log in as Candice (user name = “candice”; password = “password”). Navigate to the “other modules” section of the site. The resource manager is located below the body of text headed “Other Modules.” Its own header, “Content Executive Resources” is just the particular name that was given to this resource module when it was created (it is customizable).
Now click on the “Upload Resource” option located at the bottom of the module. This brings us to a new page with very familiar features. By now you have probably noticed that most new items—whether they be text items, news alerts, calendar events, etc.—have a field for a name/title/header and a description. Enter any old name (“text file” will do) and write a quick description if you want to see how it will look when we return to the resource manager on the “other modules” page. Now click on the “Browse…” button at the bottom of the description field and locate the simple text file that we created in step one. Select this file and click “Select” or “Okay” or “Open”, as the case may be. Now click on “Save” and the file will be uploaded.
We have now returned to the resource manager and can see the text file that we have just uploaded appear below the existing documents. Click on this file to reveal the four options associated with uploaded resources. These options are “Download”, “Update File”, “Lock”, and “Revisions.”
NOTE: When a site visitor (or user without resource module permissions) clicks on a resource, the only option they are presented with is “Download.” This module can, along with any others, be made invisible to public visitors so that only users can even access the resources at all.
Clicking on the “Download” option will initiate a download of the accessed resource. “Update File” will open a file-browser for uploading a new version of the existing file. “Lock” will prevent users from accessing the resource at all (this is an effective solution for workflow problems where workgroup members independently perform redundant additions/changes to a project: locking the file prevents wasting time on work that someone else has already done or is currently working on).
In order to demonstrate the “Update File” option, we will now modify the text document that we recently created and upload the new copy, overwriting the old version online. For the sake of our case study, we will say the the frob technical specifications have been improved and the documentation needs to be updated.
Find the text file that we created in step #1 of the previous operation and open it up. Modify the file in some way, either in its content or title. Save the new file and close it.
Now return to the resource manager module. Click on the original text file that we uploaded, and then click on “Update File.” Once you are prompted with the file browser window, navigate to and select the newly-edited text file. Now click “Open/Select/Okay.”
Now the edited file will replace the orginal one. Anyone who downloads the resource will get the newer file. The original file will, however, still be available through the “Revisions” option.
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