Article: The Admin Area

[westis]

Please read, correct & modify. Is it too much here, that should rather be in the section about each part of the admin area?

The Admin Area

The Admin Area is the heart of CMS Made Simple. This is where you will work from. Here you add pages and fill them with content, choose the layout and style of your pages, install extensions for extra functinality, set permissions for users and groups and other things.

The admin area is the backend, as opposed to the frontend, which is what visitors of your site can see.

You log in to the admin area through www.yoursite.com/admin. During the installation you chose a user name and password for the administrator. As an administrator you can add additional users.

Everything in the admin area is accessed through the horizontal menu. When you first enter the admin you also see a sitemap of what can be accessed through each menu. Actually, for any top level you select in the horizontal menu (Main, Content, Layout, Users & Groups etc.), all sub-items to that menu are shown.

A quick walk-through of what’s in the admin area.


Content
Here you manage the content of your site: add and edit pages, upload and manage files and images and add, edit and remove news. If you have other content type modules installed (like a guestbook) they may also be accessed through this menu.


Layout
This is where you style and format your page to look the way you want. For the general layout you use what is called templates. For each page you can select what template to use. A template is the html code with placeholders (Smarty tags) for content, menus and modules. Read more about templates in the Layout section of the documentation.

In the layout menu you also access the stylesheets, which are CSS files that are saved in the database (you can also use external stylesheets). With CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) you can style different elements of your page. For example to select the font size for text in a paragraph (within tags), you only need to change that once in the stylesheet and all text within tags will be affected.

Lastly, in the layout menu you can create something by the cryptic name of HTML Blobs (not blogs…). HTML Blobs are chunks of content that you can place in your pages or templates. If you use a particular code in different templates or pages you can create an HTML Blob and insert that in the templates or pages instead. That way your templates will be more clean and easy to overlook.


Users & Groups
Through this menu you can add users that should have access to the admin area and select what permissions they will have. You can put users in groups, to easily select permissions for the whole group at the same time.


Extensions
This is where it starts to get fun! Extensions are add-ons that give extra functionality to CMS Made Simple. By purpose the basic install of CMS Made Simple only includes the basic features, to make it easy to set up a page. But with extensions you can add more or less any functionality to your site. This is where you install new and upgrade old extensions.

Extensions can be either modules or tags (also called plugins). A module can add a lot of functionality to your default install.  It can consist of many pages and do just about anything. You could compare CMSMS to an operating system for a computer. Modules are then like programs such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver or Word. They add functionality to the basic install, but requires the operating system to work.

A tag, on the other hand, does one small and specific task and displays the result in your page.

Some modules and tags are already included when you install CMSMS. Depending on what version of CMSMS you use these modules are pre-installed:

Version 0.10.3: PHPLayers, News, Comments, RSS, TinyMCE
Version 0.11: CSSMenu, News, Comments, RSS, FCKeditorX


Site Admin
This is where you change settings and preferences, both for the admin area and settings that affect the entire site. You can also add administration bookmarks to create shortcuts to the pages you use the most in the admin area. Everything you do in the admin area is logged and in the admin log you can see what changes have been made, when and by who.


View Site
Click here and your site is opened in a new window.


Logout
Click here to log out from the admin area.