Welcome to CMS. This guide serves as an introduction to your responsibilities and abilities as a new site owner/manager. It is not comprehensive of either your responsibilities or abilities in the CMS system.
If you are neither an owner nor manager, but you are the primary content provider for a site, this guide may also apply to you in part.
As you read the documentation from the online knowledge base, keep in mind that CMS is used by many people for many different purposes. The documentation may be too generic for your case or may describe something that doesn't apply to your site/template. We are in an ongoing process to provide more documentation that is more specific and more explicit about the target audience.
Welcome topics
A new site was created, now what?
Mimimum commitment
The bare minimum amount of effort you must put into this new site is
- Populate the home page with content
- Populate the contact page with content
- optionally uncheck the "hide in menu" page property if you want the page to appear in site navigation
- Populate the footer(s) with content
- Add other pages and contents to support the purpose/plan of the site
- Add a publisher
- Publish the pages and contents
- Go live
- Maintain the site contents to be up-to-date and correct
The time to complete these tasks varies, but if the site is small and if you are a fast learner and can follow documentation in the knowledge base, you may be able to complete these tasks in only a few hours.
On the upper end, if the site is large, you may spend a significant amount of time making a plan for the site and creating contents to satisfy that plan.\
Plan for additional time commitment if you will attend in-person CMS training .
Your CMS experience will be improved if you take the time to create a site plan before beginning to create content in CMS. It will reduce your CMS frustrations and shorten the time-to-go-live if you plan first and execute second!
Default/required pages
When a site is created, it contains the basic pages required for a CMS site.
Departments and organizations with top-level directories (URLs like www.ndsu.edu/yourorg instead of like www.ndsu.edu/faculty/yourid) must maintain a few critical pages. You should review the list of default pages and be familiar with what you should/not do on these default pages.
Even if you take over ownership of a site that has already been populated with content, you should familiarize yourself with the default pages and avoid deleting or incorrectly modifying them.
Add other users (authors/publishers)
For department/organization sites only:
Add a publisher for your site. Since you are limited to 10 publishers per workspace, you were not automatically granted publisher permissions in your workspace. If you will be the a content publisher, you should grant yourself publisher access using the NDSU Admin module.
If you don't plan to be the primary content author for the site, or if you just want to add other authors to the group, you should add other CMS members to your group using the NDSU Admin module.
As a site owner/manager, you are responsible to add/remove other members from your site group. If you do not yet know how to manage permissions, you should review the documentation now.
Training
If you want to attend CMS training, see the training schedule or contact the training group to schedule a training session.
Regretfully there is no e-training option available (as of October 2009). If you prefer a self-paced, online learning style you can browse the CMS knowledge base until an e-training option is available.
The pages in your site don't look like other CMS sites you've seen
Since CMS version 1.1, the default NDSU template is also the default CMS template. Sites created before version 1.1 were "grandfathered in" using the VPs only template.
The page layout you see is most likely correct/as intended. A
page created with the NDSU default template looks like
Learn how to change page/content templates.
NDSU Faculty sites
The NDSU official templates are not available for NDSU faculty sites. Instead, two choices of faculty templates are available. Preview a faculty site at http://www.ndsu.edu/faculty/berkeley/ (click Faculty I template to see the other template option).
Learn how to change page templates. The process to choose between the two faculty templates is the same as choosing between templates for NDSU department sites, except that the available choices are different.
Where is all the content from your old site?
If you request a new site in CMS with the intent to replace an existing site on another server, like Webdev or Pubweb, you are responsible to "move" the information to CMS.
NDSU IT does not currently offer a content moving service.
If the "old" site contains updated information, you should be able to copy-and-paste most page content directly into the rich text editor. If the information needs an update/refresh, this transition period is an excellent opportunity to move and update simultaneously.
What is your new site's URL?
New department sites are not available under www.ndsu.edu until go-live. But what will the URL be?
Once your site goes live, it will be available at the Web address you requested, for example www.ndsu.edu/yourorg. The future URLs for pages are listed in page preview (as shown below). The Web address (link) will not work until your site is live and the page is published. The preview message tells you what the link will be once these conditions have been met.
If you want to send a link to someone else in your organization so they may preview the page before your site goes live, you can still create a preview link to send to them. The preview link works only for 48 hours so don't publish it in any brochures or on your "old" site!
Faculty sites are available at the advertised address as soon as the site is created.