PyroCMS Pages

What are Pages?

Pages are the containers of the actual content of a web page for the site.

The content of the page is text that formatted with headings, paragraphs, various other typographical structures and images in much the same way as a page might be formed with a word processor. The formatting is detailed in other pages of this guide.

Structure

Pages are grouped into a logical structure that related to they way they are organised in the Navigation Menus. The Navigation structure should closely match the page structure. The structure also relates to the usage of different languages in the system which is discussed in details in the Languages and URLs page.

Creating a Page

A new page can be created by clicking the "+ Add Page" button at the top right of the page. After entering information for the new page created in this way the page will appear at the bottom of the structure list. You then have the task of dragging and dropping it into the correct logical place in the structure of pages.

The simpler and easier way to create a page is to locate the page in the structure that is the logical parent of the page you want to create. Click this page name to select it and then look at the panel to the right of the page structure for information and options of the page you selected.

The first button in the options for that page is "Add Child". Use this button to create the new page, the information you provide for this new page is the same as you would provide using the "+ Add Page" button, but after saving the page you will see that it logically positioned below the page you first selected.

After clicking the "Add Child" button you will see the following screen

This is the same options that you get when editing an existing page, with one exception. Only at page creation do you get the option Add to Navigation. Use this option, it will save a lot of time and effort. When you click in this field you will see a list of Navigation headers:

Although it may seem that simply selecting the Navigation Group, in PsMs case these are groups that match the languages of the pages and menu, having the page linked as a Navigation Menu entry by the system saves time and effort. Select a Navigation Group from the list and after saving the page entry for the first time the Navigation Menu entry will be created. Remember that this will be at the bottom of the Navigation Group list, NOT in a logical place relating to the page entry in the Pages structure. You must remember to immediately switch to Navigation and drag and drop the new entry to its logical place in the structure.

*TIP When creating a page the Title you provide is important. It should be as short as possible. It is shown in browsers in their title bars and used by search engines when indexing the pages. It's also used to generate the slug for the page, the last part of the URL.

Here you see a long Title being entered. The Slug field below it is automatically generated from the Title, it's long and messy, not something simple you can give to people when saying "look at this page on the site". If the Title needs to have several words, then see if you can manually alter the Slug to something shorter. The Slug must of course not be a duplicate of another page slug!

The remainder of the page creation is identical to editing a page, see below for details.

Editing a Page

Select the page you want to edit by clicking the name in the structure of pages in the left display of pages.

Now look at the panel to the right of the page structure for information and options of the page you selected. Click the "Edit" button

The page selected presents several Tabs where you can enter and control page content.

  • Page Details - Naming and status of page
  • Page Content - The viewable content of the page
  • Meta data - Information about a page used mostly by search engines
  • CSS - Extra formatting for content - System experts only
  • Script - Extra Javascript for page - System experts only
  • Options - Extra options about page behaviour - System experts only

The only two tabs you need to consider are the first two, others have default values that work for nearly all pages.

Page Details

The Title of a page can be changed at any time with no consequences, it's just the name.

Changing the Title of an existing page will not modify the Slug. You can modify the slug, but doing so may have consequences. If the page is referenced elsewhere in the site, those references will remain the same, they then point to a URL/Slug that doesn't exist any more.

Status simply controls the visibility of a page. In Draft mode the page cannot be seen on the public site. The page can however be viewed by anyone logged in as Administrator. Further, if the page is referenced by a Navigation Menu entry, the Draft status stops the menu from displaying that entry. This allows easy testing of a page before it is viewable to the public.

 

Page Content

The rest of this guide contains information about the usage and how to format the content!