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Tutorial

  1. Introduction
  2. Creating Your First Page
  3. Editing Textile Content
  4. Adding an image
  5. Using Snippets
  6. Using Layouts
  7. Using the Faculty Extension

Tutorial #2: Pages

Pages are the basic structure of the Radiant CMS.

They are arranged hierarchically in a “tree.” If page B is below page A in the hierarchy, we say that page B is a “child” of page A.

This section of the tutorial will take you through the process of creating and editing your first page.

Creating your first page

  1. Log into the CMS
  2. Click on the “Pages” tab.
  3. Click on the ”+” next to “Test Area”. This is an area where you can create your own pages and experiment with the content management system.
  4. Depending on who has been going through this tutorial, you may see a number of pages have been created below this one in the hierarchy.
  5. Click on “Add Child” in the “Test Area” row to create a new page below Test Area.
  6. This creates a new page and takes you to an editor for that page.

Editing and saving the page

  1. Set the page title to Test.
  2. In the body tab choose “Textile” for the filter. We’ll explain what this means in a moment.
  3. In the main text entry area, type “Hello World!”.
  4. Set the Status to “Published”.
  5. Now, click on the Save and Continue Editing button. If you get a validation error when saving, it is probably because someone already created a page called “Test.” Rename it to something like “Test5” and click on the Save and Continue Editing button again.
  6. You have created your first page! Open this link in a new browser window: <server name>/test-area/test. Replace <server name> with the actual server that this CMS is running on.

If you chose a different title for your page, then use that title instead of “test”. Use all lowercase, and replace any spaces in the title with dashes.

If you get a “page not found” error, you may not have set the status to “Published”

What just happened

Let’s review what we just did.

Page Title

The page title you chose, by default, becomes the last part of the URL needed to open the page in your browser. This doesn’t have to be the case.

Under the Page Title area, click on the “more” link. Now you will see two additional fields. The first is the Slug, which is what actually forms your URL.

Change the Page Title to “My Test Page”. Notice that the slug changes to “my-test-page”. Since you can’t have spaces in a URL, it replaces any spaces with a dash. It also makes everything lowercase, so that URLs stay consistent.

You can override the default slug by typing in the slug area. If you changed the page slug to “foo” then the URL to access the page would be “[server name]/test-area/foo.

Filter

When we created the page, we chose “Textile” for the filter. Textile is a tool used by many content management systems and blogging sites for editing content. The goal of Textile is to minimize the amount of syntax you need to know in order to create content. It also keeps the content easy to read.

If you needed to use something else, such as HTML, you can do that – you would just leave the Filter set to <None>. But that would just make our lives more complicated than they need to be for now. This tutorial will take you through the basics of Textile. Any time you need something that Textile can’t do, you can always pawn it off on someone who knows HTML!

There are other filters available as well, but we’re going to stick with Textile. They all offer roughly the same features, but some of them are more familiar to experienced bloggers.

Status

The Radiant CMS supports several different statuses. A page starts out in Draft status. This means that no one can get to that page from their browser. When you set the status to Published now the world can access that page. A Hidden page can be used as a folder in the page hierarchy. The “Test Area” page is hidden, because it doesn’t contain any content worth publishing. The Reviewed status is used when teams are working on a page. Normally you won’t need it.

Saving and viewing pages

When editing pages, it is most convenient to keep the editor open in one window of your browser, and the page itself in another. That way, you can work in the following cycle:

  1. Edit the page
  2. Save and Continue Editing
  3. View your changes
  4. Repeat

When you are done altogether, you can choose “Save Changes” and exit the page editor.

Moving on…

Keep the editor open for your test page, and we will move on to editing with Textile.