Content Management
Using Topics to Organize Your Site
Topics are a simple way to organize your site in a hierarchal structure. Topics play a less important role with the Layout > Site Menus function now available (drag-and-drop your content into a site tree-style menu). However, they are important a) if you want to create topic homepages or blogs or, b) if you use breadcrumbs in your web design.
Essentially, topics serve four functions:
- Generate breadcrumbs for content items automatically.
- If created in Content > Site Topics & Blogs (and not from a content item), the topic home pages will serve as a blog of all of that topic’s content postings.
- Allow for inclusion of content into RSS feeds which include content based on topic.
- Ease content management by showing more organizational data about each content item in the control panel.
If a topic is created from an Article / Page content item (by selecting Create topic from article?), the topic home page will be the page in which that option was checked. So, instead of seeing a blog or list of topic content, one would see that content page if they were to click the breadcrumb link.
Page Information: Cross-Content Details
When submitting any type of content, you will see a similar box in the form called “Page Information”. This standardized box serves to unite all of the different content types you submit (articles, pages, forms, galleries, files, topics/blogs, and RSS feeds) in the database. Below is a summary of those fields and some noteworthy points regarding them:
- Type specifies a subtype of the individual content. For example, you may create a “Document” article sub-type which uses a different display template (a cleaner, lighter template, perhaps).
- Title specifies the page title.
- URL String is the location the content shall be placed at your website. This string must be URL friendly (and will be converted if unfriendly) so no spaces or special characters are allowed other than forward slashes (e.g. “/company/about-us/contact.html” is acceptable). Leave blank for auto-generation from Title.
- Publish Date, if modified, will postpone the publishing of the document to your public site. It will be available for editing/deletion in the control panel.
- Summary is a text description of the content. It is optional for articles but, if your article is being published to a blog topic, you should complete it as it will be what’s posted to the blog (the Body will be available when the user clicks the article link).
- Feature Image is an image that will be displayed in your content. It’s rarely used in production sites but provides a quick and simple way to add an image to content.
- Resize Feature Image will resize the uploaded feature image to whatever dimensions you select. The dimension options are editable in Administration > Settings as the “imagesize” setting.
Streaming Videos (FLV Format)
You can add streaming videos to your website easily through the Content > Files section of the control panel. Caribou includes a Streaming Video (FLV) file format by default. Files submitted here will work with a special file download template that includes an FLV video player. No longer do you have to fumble around with JavaScript or Flash to get streaming videos on your website – just upload and go!
Restricting Access to Usergroups
Every piece of content, store item, and menu link has the ability to restrict its viewing/access to certain usergroups. This is the heart of Caribou’s subscription system. You may select one or more usergroups to gain access to the content.
As will be repeated, usergroups do not equal subscription packages. Multiple subscription packages can upgrade a user to the same usergroup. This allows for greater flexibility in who can see the content.
Forms: Manage Anything
The Forms module in Caribou allows you to manage any type of content in the backend that you would like as well as receive form submissions in the frontend. The two types of forms are frontend forms and backend forms.
Frontend forms can perform simple tasks like Contact Forms or more complex tasks where users must submit data on your website. Form submissions can be emailed to an email address but, by default, they are stored in a database accessible via the control panel in Content > Forms. In the form’s row, there is a link to view the current entries in the database. You can view and edit these entries at that link. To extend frontend forms into more complex things (such as having user’s fill out profiles or submitting new site content) can be done with form plugins. Form plugins are discussed in the documentation and apply to backend forms as well.
Backend forms have one purpose and that is to create and store new content or database information. For example, you may want to create a form called “Books” and store a list of books there. With the database created in just moments and full create-update-delete functions handled automatically, publishing this database to your site is easy for a developer.
The simplest way to publish Forms-managed content is to create an article of a new article type with a View Template that points to a new template you create. In this template, call a template plugin which you must also create. This plugin can query the database and load the content to the article page’s template. If you need to pass arguments to the plugin, have the template call the plugin and pass article variables like Body which will, in this case, include arguments (e.g. {customplugin type=$body}) will pass whatever you put in the article body to the plugin.
Using the Content Queue
If an administrator’s current settings are to have all of their content queued before publishing, it will appear in the Content Queue. Only administrators who have privileges to review and accept/reject content from the queue will be able to make the content active on the site. These privileges are managed in Users > Staff.
