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Quick-Guide Add Content

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In this guide we will introduce in a few steps the way of adding content to your elxis powered site.

Contents


Content addition is possible through site's fronted or backed(Administrator Area). In order to add content first you have to prepare your site, this can be done only from elxis administrators area.

Administration gives more flexibility and more options over content nanagement.
Fronted has limited control over content, you can find more information about this here.

How and Where to Start

So we must start from Administrator area, but first is necessary to make clear some basics about how content is organized in elxis cms.
Content in Elxis cms Handled in two different ways:
A- By Autonomous pages
B- By Sections and categories under them

Autonomous pages exist in order to handle content like an "about us" or "privacy & policy" page. Although you can create and publish unlimited autonomous pages and host all your content in them is not the recommended way to do it!
Elxis recommends using sections and categories in order to manage site's main content because of the simple reason that sections and their included categories gives the ability to easily manage your categorized content!

In this guide we will explain the progress of adding content through the recommend way, by sections!
Before we proceed lets make clear some basic rules:

  • Sections in Elxis are made in order to include only categories, can't contain content items.
  • Each category can be assigned only to one section.
  • Categories can not contain other categories, but only content-items!
  • content-items can be assigned only to one category at the same time!
  • You can create unlimited sections with unlimited categories containing unlimited content items.

A typical content structure in elxis cms looks like the diagram bellow:

Following the above rules... in order to start you have first to create a section, then a category inside this section and last add your content-item(s) inside that category!

Lets start preparing site to accept content, step 1.. creation of a new section!

Create Sections

Now we are going to see how easily a Section can be created with a few clicks!

pic.A Create new section progress
pic.A Create new section progress
  1. Log-in the Administration control panel of your Elxis site.
  2. In the top menu select tab "Content" (pic.A-1).
  3. Click where it says "Sections Manager" (pic.A-1) to open sections manager.
  4. Once section manager opens look at the upper right corner.(pic.A-2). To create a new Section click on "New" button
  5. Section's detail page appears, now you can see all "Section Options"(pic.A-3)

In this page listed various options controlling section's operation .

To create the new section the only mandatory fields are :
a) Give a Title to the new section.
b) Give a Name to the new section.
c) suggest a SEO title by pressing the "suggested seo title" link under title-input fields.

you can now press "save" button(upper right corner... pic.A-4) and section will be saved...
Elxis will use for all other options pre-configured values. No other action needed and pre-configured options will fit the majority of web sites.

Optional you can set in which languages or user access level this section will be visible.
These and all other options listed such as suggesting(write) your own seo title or write a small description to introduce occasionally the section to site visitors, image to display(already uploaded inside images/stories folder) beside section's title.... are not mandatory and you can modify, enable or disable them now or any time in the future.

So..for now we save(pic.A-4) the new section(upper right corner) and Continuing to next step, creating a category under our newly created section.

Create Categories

pic.B New Category, assign your new category to a section!
pic.B New Category, assign your new category to a section!

To create a category we are following almost the same way as when created our section above:
In this case we open Categories Manager under content tab in top-navigation bar at administrator's area, the working area here is almost the same as in case of section above. Press new to the upper right corner and...
a) Give a Title to the new category.
b) Give a Name to the new category.
c) suggest a SEO title by pressing the "suggested seo title" link under title-input fields.
But in case of categories we have one more field to setup:
d) assign category to a section(pic.B).

All above fields are mandatory to create a new category. As in case of sections categories either have options for language, user access level.. etc. Again elxis is able to create the category and use default options for those secondary non mandatory fields. If you want you can modify now or any time in the future.

We save category by pressing save button (upper right corner) in category manager page!

after that our site is ready to accept content, we have at least one section with one category assign to it! In that category we will create our first content item.

Create Content items

To add content items you have for one more time to hit content tab in top navigation bar and select "display all contents", it will transform you to "content manager" page.

There you will see our familiar button "new" to the upper right corner of the page, press "new" and a page will open like in screenshoot bellow.

Pic.C Minimal required fields before save new Content-Item.
Pic.C Minimal required fields before save new Content-Item.

Notice the highlighted fields, these are the mandatory fields to fill in before save your content item.

1. Select section and then the category under it to assign your content-item to it.
2. Give a title and press the link "suggested seo title" to generate a seo title.
3. Add your content in the first textarea(pic.c-3) intro-text.

At this point we can just press save(pic.C-4) and you are done!Elxis again will use default pre-configured values for any other option listed. But might you want to explain a few more things:

As you can see this page has a lot of other parameters(right side) to control content-item's behavior and appearance... and a second text-area under intro text-area.

The second text-area works as the main article body while the "intro" as brief introduction to the article, this means that when you list content-items in a page category or section, only the "intro" will be visible with a "read-more" button under each item forwarding to main article. If there is no text in that second area then no "read more" button under the intro text in article lists.

At the right side of the page(pic-C) you can see six tabs:

  • Publishing
    • Show on Frontpage: if you want this item to appear in your front page(only intro), the order of items in frontpage are controlled by Frontpage Manager.
    • Published: Check to show or hide completely this item.
    • Language: Set in which language item will be visible(Ctrl+click to multi-select)
    • Access Level: User access level(group) that will be able to see this item.
    • Author Alias: Use if you want to override Author name, if you don't fill it will be the name you submitted in your profile.
    • Change Creator: Set other user as the creator of this article.
    • Ordering: To change the order of listing articles category or section listing pages... (note that this maybe overridden from links options in menus).
    • Override Created Date: Set other day than the current as creation date, hit the button at the right to pop-up a javascript calendar and select the desired day.
    • Start Publishing: To publish item later on and not right away.
    • Finish Publishing: Date that this item will be unpublished...item not deleted.
    • Reset Hit Count: This will reset to zero value the visitors hits of this item.
  • Images
  • Parameters
    • Page Class Suffix:Css Class Suffix for styling the current page (css knowledge required)
    • Article Suffix:Css Class Suffix for styling the current article (css knowledge required)
    • Other options to control item's appearance, here must notice that if value global(default) is selected then item takes for that option the value which assigned in Global Configuration page if you set other value then item will override global configuration option or values in link-items pointing to the content item!
This options controlling the visibility above or below article's content of information related to what category or section this item belongs, author name, date, back buttons etc...
Note that this options controlling the visibility of that information only when seeing the article in detail view, not when this item appears in listing pages, in that case visibility controlled by link-items inside menus which pointing to the listing pages(table or blog type)!
  • Meta Info
    • Elxis and it's SEO internal characteristics will automatically pull out of your content a short description and keywords meta tags and assign them to page header upon item saved. Here you can override, add or edit more words.
  • Link to Menu
    • You have the ability to create directly a link to an already existing menu with out the need to visit Menu Manager.
  • Related links
    • Add the name and the link of a related to this article page. Those links will appear at the bottom of the article and will open in a new window.
Some parameters of sections, categories and content items maybe overridden by options in link-items inside menus or by Global Configuration page. Ordering, categories-sections images, linked titles, visibility of author, creation date, hits, back button etc...


Prepare For Multilingual Content

As we mentioned above, each section, category and content item have options for the language you prefer them to be visible. If you indent to create multilingual content you must start from here, before proceeding to any other step, first assign each one of them to a language.

You can assign one section for each desired language with categories and content-items under it assigned to that specific language.

Also it is possible to have multilingual sections or categories published to more than one(Ctrl+Click) or even all languages and inside them to have items published to one or more specific languages, or to all languages.

Elxis by default publish English and Greek languages, if you haven't publish other languages when you asked during installation then you can do it now from Languages Manager.

Also read

TinyMCE : Elxis Content Editor and how to format text, or insert images and video inside content!

What Next...

So you have done all above steps and wondering what else needed in order to see your newly created content published online.

You have to link your content with a menu

Elxis apparently of other cms systems won't auto-create a menu and won't auto-publish any link to any menu when you create and save content.

Elxis use an advantaged system, the Menu Manager, to create multiply menus to various positions with many different ways of linking and displaying content.



  • To create a new menu read... Menu Manager documentation page.
  • Also read the Menu links documentation page for details on how to create links inside menus.
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