Content management system

By Content Management System (or CMS) I refer to a functionality that allows you to add text (and/or other content snippets) to many different ContentItems or just to normal static pages.

Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that has very readable source text, and renders to plain simple HTML.

In most cases where we wanted users to provide simple text with some optional formatting we ask them to provide it in markdown format, which forces user not to complicate things too much.

Here is useful markdown primer

CMS Pages

Cms pages functionality allow you to create static (that is not changing) pages at designated urls in the interface.

These pages may (and should!) be translated to languages for your users.

To create a page:

  • Go to admin page

  • Add new Translatable page.

    Here just fill page slug, if your site is at olcms.example.com and you add slug equal to mycmspage your page will be visible at http://olcms.example.com/mycmspage

  • Add page translations:

    • parent — translatable page (created in previous step)
    • language — translation language. See here on how to tweak available languages.
    • title — page title
    • default — if true we will present this page if we don’t have “proper” language for user.
    • content here you add content :)

Required CMS pages:

  • about — contains generic about information
  • terms — contains terms and conditions

Page Blocks

Page blocks are, hackish way to include content in different parts of page.

Page blocks use markdown formatting.

Adding page blocks is very similar to adding CMS Pages:

  • Go to admin page
  • Add new Page Block. For a page block to be displayed you need to add it a known slug (known: means one that OLCMS understands — list is below)
  • Add new Page Block Translation which works pretty much like Page

List of page blocks:

  • landing-page-help / landing-page-help-nomenu first paragraph of text visible when user enters landing page. Should explain what is in the menu (and probably how to use the system)

  • discipline.<slug> / discipline.description.<slug> where <slug> refers to a <slug> of a discipline (See tagging system for explanation)

    This adds descriptions for disciplines on discipline landing page, that is: when user enters discipline/medicine, they’ll see descriptions from discipline.medicine and discipline.description.medicine.

  • wofkforce.<slug> — displays workforce information on all content items that belong to a given discipline. That is you’ll see workforce.medicine when visiting any Content Item.

  • <slug>, used to display small tooltip near any domain that explains meaning of this discipline.

When you start application in DEBUG mode you’ll see missing blocks like on below screenshots:

../_images/missing-blocks.png

Main page links

You can programmatically add links to about menu and main page sidebar, by:

  • Go to admin page
  • Add new Menu link
  • Add some translations for the link label.