Quick start

Basic operations

After the login, you are redirected to W3studioCMS editor's page, which is the same page from where you came, but editable. Move your mouse over the page's contents and when a content is editable the Interactive Menu appears and highlights that content. You can start to edit it, simply by clicking over it. W3StudioCMS knows which type of content you are editing and opens the appropriate editor.

On the left side of the Interactive Menu there are two buttons: the first adds a content after the one highlighted, the second deletes the highlighted content.

In the top center of the page there is the Manager Menu where are placed all the commands you need to manage your website. To use it, simply click the tab and the menu will appear. Under every button there is a shortly description of what that command does. If you need more explanations, put your mouse over every image and wait until the tooltip appears.

The first button is used to manage the users that can edit the website. Only an user that is part of the admin group can use this module. The second button lets you to update the theme you are using and/or to load new ones. In this moment there are few templates available and they are used only for testing purpose, but keep in mind that after the first stable version will be released a lot of "ready to use" templates will be published and they will be freely downloadable from the W3StudioCMS website.

Then there is the move button which lets you to drag and drop contents through the page's slots. Next you've got the preview button that let you see a preview of the page you are editing. This is very useful when you've got some contents which are not rendered in the editor, i.e. the script content. Then there is the publish button which saves all the changes you made and publish the new version of the website, for the frontend.

On the middle left it is placed the Control Panel. With this tool you can change languages, groups and pages as you can add new ones or delete others. Here you will find the File Manager tool to move through the pages of your website. At last you can manage the page's Metatags editor to help site engines crawlers, to find your website into the World Wide Web.

Advanced operations - Part 1

In W3StudioCMS the templates are not assigned directly to pages but they are assigned to another entity, called group. Basically a Group is a container of pages. It is an abstract entity, where abstract means that it is not an element you can see in your web page, which groups pages. So when you want to insert a page in W3StudioCMS you must assign that page to an existing group. Every page inherits its layout from the group which it is assigned. In fact every time you create a new group, you have to choose the template which belongs that group.

For example if you browse the W3studioCMS website you can see that the home page has one theme and all the other pages has a different one. This is because the home page belongs to one group and the other pages belong to different groups. In this specific case that's easy to understand this concept: in fact you can see that the templates are different and for sure they belongs to different groups. But different groups can use the same template, in fact the W3studiocms-manual page belongs to the gr_documentation group, while the Download page belongs to the gr_download group. This architecture is very useful because you can create different areas to talk about a specific argument and every area is represented by a group. In this way is simple to create menus for groups of pages, as you can see in the website.

The groups manager interface is placed above the list of pages placed inside the file manager in control panel tool. All the website's groups are listed in a combo box. To add a new group click the plus icon and the interface opens in a new window. The first information needed is the group name that must be unique in the website, then you have to choose the template to assign the group from the "Template name" combo box. Click the Add button to complete the operation. Every page you assig this group will use the template you chose. To delete a group choose it from the combo box and click the minus icon. When you delete a group W3studioCMS will delete all the pages that belongs the group, so be careful when you use this function. The function used to edit a group is not implemented yet.

To build navigation menus you have to use the Menu builder editor. With this tool you can create a set of links connected to internal or external pages. The menus can be textual or represented with images that can optionally can have a rollover image. You can change the links' position simple dragging and dropping each others. But this is simple.

The most interesting Menu builder's functions are in the Options tab. From the combo box you can select a class, if available. This class can be assigned directly to the list elements or to links that composing the navigation menu, by checking the "Set the class on each page" combobox.

When this option is checked the class is assigned to all the pages that constitute the menu. I will explain this concept in detail with an example. Suppose that your menu has three pages: Home, Products, Contacts. When you browse one of those pages, you want to highligh the current page to indicate which is the selected page. The operation you should do to highlight the link, is to enter on every page and manual assign the class to the link that represents the current page. For example if a visitor is on the Products page, the link must be formatted with a different style to indicate that "Products" is the current page. This can be made when a menu is small like that, but can be very boring when you have to manage a menu with several links. This option does automatically this job for you. All the internal pages of w3studiocms web site using this feature.

Advanced operations - Part 2

Click the tab "Page Slots" placed inside the Control panel. The name "Slot" comes from the symfony's slot object, refers to the chapter 7 of symfony's book to learn more about, and it has been chooseb because the technique used to fill every xhtml DIV that build the page its the same. Every slot can have one or more contents and here you can choose how the Slot's contents will be repeated through the site.

The module that let's you change the repeated status of slot's contents can be opened by clicking the Slot's name. The available options are at page level (default), at group level, at language level or at site level. In this case the Main menu has already assigned the correct setting that is the group level.

The same concept can be applied at language and site level. Think about the logo: usually it is the same for every page of the site, so you can assign the site level to the slot that contains the content for your logo, then modify it only a time for every page, from any page of the website.

There are a lot of visual aids that help you to understand which slot you are working on and how the slot's contents are repeated through the site. The first one is when you move your mouse over the page: when a content is highlighted, it changes its color according to slot's repeated status. Green color means that the slot's contents aren't repeated, orange color that are repeated at group level, yellow color that are repeated at language level and blue that are repeated at site level. The same rule is applied to the button placed on the right of every slot name, into the Page Slot tab inside the Control Panel. At last when you place you mouse on the Slot's name the slot is highlighted and colored on the page as explained above.

Note that the ability of repeating contents works only if you use the same Slot's name in every template you are using in your web site. This setting is made when you draw a template and will be explained in detail in the future.

There are others options in the Menu Manager, but they are very intuitive and don't need explanations in this section. Refer the manual if you have troubles.