Pages - Introduction

Seeds CMS allows you to manage your website's pages easily. The system was designed to help organise your website with a few clicks, and with internationalisation in mind. Each page can have a translation link, which will help with your website's performance in Search Engine Optimisation.

The system being fairly new still, here is a "brief" outline on how to create a page, and how to edit its content. We have designed Seeds CMS to make it as easy as possible for everyone, no matter their degree of computer literacy, to manage their website.

Create a page

To create a page, you need to follow these few steps:

  1. In the admin panel (see Accessing the Admin Panel if needed), go to the pages section.
  2. At the top, click on the " Add a new page" button. (UPDATE: a "new page" button is now also available ion the Toolbox of the inline editing mode, and functions in the same way as the rest of the following instructions)
  3. In the popup, add the title of the page. Note that the popup will automatically try to provide the new page a URL based on the title you typed. You need to make sure that this URL is unique.
  4. Optionally select the language of the page if it is not pre-selected, and if you have more languages.
  5. Select the type of the page. If you are unsure, stick with  Page. The options are:
    1.  Page: a standard page,
    2.  Link: a link to another resource (simply add the URL for the link in the 'special content' field which appears when you select this option - Note: these links are being given a rel="nofollow" attribute, which is an instruction to Search Engine Robots to ignore them!)
    3.  Plugin: a link to a plugin (does not work yet!)
    4.  Javascript: a function that will be executed upon clicking on the link
  6. Select the template for your page. Some templates are installed by default (1 and 2 columns page layouts for example), and others will have been created specifically for your website. If you need help with this, please contact your developer, or email open@sesameweb.net .
  7. You may select a parent for your page, which means it will be shown as a sub-page and the URL address for it will be preceded by its parent(s).
  8. Keywords and description are important for Search Engine Optimisation. If you do not provide these details for your page, the system will attempt loading the default keywords and/or description that you can set in your Website Options.
  9. Finally, note that a page can be excluded from the automatic navigation menu if required (by setting "include in menu" to "no"), and it can also be de-activated, which means that it will not be shown on the website, and if a visitor visits the page's URL address, they will be shown an error. De-activated pages do not feature in the automatic navigation menu.

A page can be set as the default page for its language by clicking on the asterisk (  ) button on the right hand side. An asterisk to the left of the name of the page will indicate which is the current default page for each language.

Order your pages

Ordering pages is necessary mainly for the automatic navigation menu that is created. Seeds CMS has a easy drag-and-drop tool, allowing you to order your pages easily. Simply drag the pages in the order you would like, and save!

Important points to consider:

  • The order is saved independently for each of your website's language, regardless of translation links.
  • Parent pages can be 'expanded' to reveal their sub-pages. You may move these sub pages, and the parent-child relationships will automatically be updated. You may drag a page to the right (or left) if it is underneath another page, which will then make it a child (or sub-page) of that page above. Dragging left will have the opposite effect.

Edit your page's content

We have designed Seeds CMS with efficient simplicity in mind, and therefore tried very hard to make it easy for anyone to modify the content of their webpages. You can click on the "edit content" button (  ) to the right of your desired page, or simply open the page in your browser if you are logged in.

A toolbox will be shown, which you may move around by dragging the title-bar of the toolbox if necessary. Resetting the toolbox will simply 'forget' you moved it, and put it back in its original position.

If you already have content on your page, you can right-click the content block and select the option from the drop-down menu to edit the block. This will enable you to edit the content directly on the page, as it would appear on the page.

 Don't forget to save your content after editing! If you are typing lengthy texts, or are not editing for a while due to a distraction, we recommend you save your content, and re-open it for edition.

Note that saving content will first save it as a draft. This means that anyone that is not logged in to the admin panel of your website will not see your changes until you right-click the edited block (after saving!), and select the option to publish the edited content. It allows you to prefect changes to your content and save them without making them public straight away.

Some areas of the page may also be editable snippets of content. These can be edited in the same way as 'standard' content, with the only difference that it does not get saved as a draft, but is immediately saved as a public content block.

If you do not have any content blocks to edit

If your page doesn't have any content yet, then you should add a new block. Do so by clicking on "Add new zone" on the page toolbox, which will:

  • show you the various types of content blocks available for you to drag into your desired content zone
  • highlight on your page, in a light green colour, the various areas where you may drop new content blocks.

After adding a content block, you can edit it by following the same procedure as above. If you do not edit a new block, it will not be saved at all and will need to be added again if needed.

Notes on content formatting

The formatting options in the content editing toolbar (which is displayed when you edit a content block) are either general or specific to your website's theme. Note that you can change the size (and sometimes colour) of your text but we recommend that you do not use these functionalities. It is better practice to apply styles specific to your theme and you can read more about this in our best practice guide. If you need styles added or modified, please contact your developer.

Viewing your content

Don't forget to publish your content! We recommend you check in a different browser (or in a 'Incognito mode' window of your current browser for example) the look of your new published content, to make sure you are happy with it. If your open a browser where you are logged in to your website's admin panel, you will be shown the draft content if any is available, rather than the public content.

Another way of previewing your content is to add the URL parameter ?preview to the address that your page is at. If you already have a question mark in the URL, make sure you add &preview rather than ?preview. Important: preview mode can be accessible to anyone adding the parameter to the URL of your site, even if they are not logged in, which also means they will be able to see pages which are not active as well as draft content. We therefore strongly advise against sharing links to your website with the preview parameter to people (except those who need to see it in preview mode). In preview mode, other functionalities such as Google Analytics tracking snippets are also disabled, and the web page contains instructions for Search Engine Robots to ignore all content and links.