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Tuesday, March 16, 2010
  Basic Operation  

Each VCSSO CMS site is made up of a hierarchical collection of pages. A skin is applied to each page to give the page its overall look and general layout. Additionally, the page is divided into one or more content panes. Within the content panes users add modules that contain the actual page content.

Pages not only are used to place content on but also are used to create the structure of your site. This structure is what the CMS uses to build your sites menu. For instance, if you create a new page and assign an existing page as the parent page your new page becomes a sub-menu item of the parent page.

Skins are are similar to templates like what you might find in a word processing program. One copy of your skin is loaded and applied to all pages in your site. You will not have to worry about creating your sites skin. TS and Graphics will work together in creaing your skin prior to bringing your site online.

Content Panes allow you to divide your pages into content areas to give you that frontpage newspaper look. The content panes and their layout are part of your sites skin.

Modules come in different types. The type to use is based on what type of content you would like to present. You would use a Links module to display a list of hyperlinks whereas the image module can be used to display a single image.

    
  Basic Administration  

Your site will contain 1 or more users of which at least 1 user will have administrative permissions. Users that have administrative permissions, when logged in, will have an Admin menu item added to their main menu. The Admin menu will give the user access to admin tools such as re-organization of the site's page structure, the ability to create new user accounts, set user permissions and recovery of deleted modules and pages.

Depending on how your site is setup the login link may or may not be hidden (this will be determined at site creation and cannot be changed using the admin tools). If you intend to have your general users login to access controlled content such as document downloads then your login link will be displayed. If the only access that requires a login is for administration and editing of content then your login will be hidden (when hidden the link is placed in a specific place on your pages and assigned a color that matches the pages background).