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After requesting a new site from th public web skeleton you will receive a site template which (although you may not see it) the site, a theme (which makes the site look like the OUICE style) and brand module.
When you first get the site there will be small amounts of dummy content to give you and idea of how your content might appear - for example there will be a block on news on the home page with a news story with a title 'First News Story' and underneath a few lines of text which reads 'teaser test'. Once you have entered some of your own news items they will replace these (the most recent three items will be included in the block). You may wish to delete the dummy content when you start building your suite for real. More on this below.
In the events block on the home page will be two events - first dummy event and second dummy event. When you enter your own real events these dummy events will be replaced (the two events with the closest start date to the current date will show in the block). You may want to delete the dummy events when you begin building your site for real. Again more on this below
on your homepage (and indeed across your entire site) you will see a blue strip with 'Home', 'section 1', 'section 2', 'section 3' - this is primary navigation.
Before you begin entering content on your site you are going to need to customise both the primary navigation and the context navigation (menus that appear on particular pages) so that it reflects the content you want on your site. For example you may wish to change section 1 to about us and change section 2 to Meet the Unit
If you are logged in (you do so via the OU header) at the top of the page you should see a black strip (called admin bar) which starts with an OU shield. The second item in the list should be 'site building' and in the dropdown list should be an item called menus. click on the text menus. In the list of menus you will see one called primary links, click on it. This takes you to the area where you can change the names of your rprimary navigation items. In order to change the name click on the edit link to the right of the screen - on the resultaing page you should change the text in Menu Link title and Description fields. DO NOT CHANGE ANY OTHER VALUES. Once you have done this press save. If you go back to your homepage you should see that the item has been updated. You will see that there are ten items in the primary links list - it may be that you do not have ten areas on your site that require primary navigation items. Instead of deleting the ones you don't want you should just uncheck the enabled box as this makes it easier to add an item a few months down the line if your site expands.
If you click on one of the primary navigation items you will see that on the left side there is a menu block with a title appropriate to the section (so if you clicked on section two the menu block is called Section 2 menu). When you begin to create you site and change the primary navigation names you will also want to change the names of these context navigation blocks.
in order to do this you should again click on 'site building' from the admin bar and click on menus. In the list on the page that appears you will see items for section 1 menu, section 2 menu etc. In order to change the title of these to be appropriate for your site click on the one you want to change. One the next page you will see three links towards the top of the page (list items - which will likely be in a blue box, Add Item, and Edit Menu). Click on Edit Menu. On the next page you can change the text in the Title field to what you need (you should avoid using underscores, hyphens and punctuation). If you wish to change the description field you can do this too.
When you go and edit the pages in each section it is important to understand that changing the title (for example the title of the section 1 page is 'section 1' will change the URL of the page. This will mean that you context navigation will no longer appear on the correct page. In order to fix this you will need to hover over site building on the admin menu and select blocks.
On this page you will see the section 1 menu block - it will be listed in Region 2. To the right of the screen you should click on the word configure. At the bottom of the page is a field called pages. If you have just received yor site the values already in this field should be section1 and section1/* (if you are editing the section2 block they will be section2 etc). Please note that section1 means that the menu will appear on the page open.ac.uk/yoursitetitle/section1 and section1/* tells the site to put the block on every page below it e.g. open.ac.uk/yoursitetitle/section1/page1 and open.ac.uk/yoursitetitle/section1/page1/subpage1. If you change the title of the section 1 page to about us then you will need to change the values in the pages field to about-us and about-us/* (note that the site will always put a hyphen '-' in the URL when there are spaces in the page title and it is really part of the URL that you are entering this field.
When you receive you site you will have a number of content types. You can see these listed by clicking on 'content types' option under the 'content management' link on the admin bar. These are blog entry, Document store, event, FAQ, forum topic, News item, Poll, Post reminder, webform, feature, page, project, project sector, project type. It is very likely that you will not use most of these content types. The most commonly used content types are event, news item, feature, page and project (associated with project are project sector and project type).
The building block of your site will be the page content type. you can create a page by clicking on highlighting 'content management' from the admin bar, hovering over create content and selecting 'page'. Each page requires a title - this will be the H1 on the page when it is published - it is important therefore that this title relates to the content of the page (this will help it rank higher in search engines).
The body field is where you add the main text to appear on the page. It is important that you do not simply copy and paste your content in from a Word or similar document. Because Word carries with it a lot of styles applied to the text copying and pasting into your site will also copy these styles. These styles will frequently cause your site to look strange. Hero images are large images that appear at the top of a page. If you want such an image to appear at the top of your page you should use the browse button to locate the image and then the upload button to upload it. It is important that you fill out the information in the alternative text field and title field in order that your site is accessible and meaningful to visitors using screenreaders. Once your hero image has been added you can place it in the body area using the token [[[hero]]]. Hero images can be small medium or large and the site will automatically resize the image for you if you use either [[[hero-small]], [[[hero-medium]] or [[[hero-large]]] tokens. If you want to add more hero images (not really advisable!) you can click the 'Add another item' button. image - if you want to add images to the page you can do this in the image field - again by using the browse and upload buttons and again filling in the alternative and title text fields. If you want to add multiple images you simply click 'Add another item' button until all your images have been uploaded. Once you have added your images you can use the [[[image]]] token to place them anywhere within your body text. If you have multiple images the first one you added is inserted by using [[[image-0]]], the second one is [[[image-1]]] etc. Again the images are automatically resized for you by the site (you should upload the largest version of the image for best results) and you can use these by using tokens such as [[[image-0 small]]] or [[[image-3 large]]] or [[[image-5 medium]]]. To add additional flexibility you can position these images left or right so the tokens become for example [[[image-0 small left]]] or [[[image-3 large right]]] or [[[image-5 medium right]]] Block quote - sometimes on a page you may want to pull out and highlight a quote for users to read. You can enter this quote into the blockquote field. If you want more than one block quote you can click the 'Add another item' button. Once you have entered you quote you can use the token [[[quote]]] to place the quote anywhere in your body text. Again the first quote is [[[quote-0]], the second [[[quote-1]]] etc. If you want to place your quote on the left or right of the page you use the same syntax as for images e.g. [[[quote-0 right]]], [[[quote-1 left]]]. if you want to add a podcast to your page you can paste the embed code into the podcast field. If you want more than one podcast click the 'Add another item' button. Once you have entered the embed code for your podcasts you can place them in the body of your page by using the token [[[podcast]]]. Again the first podcast is referred to as [[[podcast-0]]], the second is [[[podcast-1]]] etc.
if you want to add a video to your page you can paste the embed code into the video field. If you want more than one video click the 'Add another item' button. Once you have entered the embed code for your videots you can place them in the body of your page by using the token [[[video]]]. Again the first podcast is referred to as [[[video-0]]], the second is [[[video-1]]] etc.
??????do the books automatically update once you have updated the primary nav areas????????? Book Outline - from the dropdown list you should select the primary navigation item to which the page is related. in menu settings you should enter the title of the page in the menu Link title field. If the title of your page is very long you should consider shortening it but ensuring that the two are closely related in terms of the words they use. Under parent item you should select the primary navigation item to which the page belongs. Under publishing options you should tick the published option otherwise page will not appear on your site! you should not check either of the other two options.
It is important to note that the URLs of each of you pages are determined by the title you give a page. For example section1 page is at www8.open.ac.uk/yoursitename/section1 because the title of the page is section 2. If you click on section 1 from the primary navigation and click the edit button you will be able to change the title of the page to demonstrate this. if you change the title from section 1 to 'about us' you will see that the URL has changed from www8.open.ac.uk/yoursitename/section1 to www8.open.ac.uk/yoursitename/about-us
Becuase you have changed the URL of the page you will need to edit your context navigation blocks in order that they appear in the right place. In order to fix this you will need to hover over site building on the admin menu and select blocks.
On this page you will see the section 1 menu block - it will be listed in Region 2. To the right of the screen you should click on the word configure. At the bottom of the page is a field called pages. If you have just received yor site the values already in this field should be section1 and section1/* (if you are editing the section2 block they will be section2 etc). Please note that section1 means that the menu will appear on the page open.ac.uk/yoursitetitle/section1 and section1/* tells the site to put the block on every page below it e.g. open.ac.uk/yoursitetitle/section1/page1 and open.ac.uk/yoursitetitle/section1/page1/subpage1. If you change the title of the section 1 page to about us then you will need to change the values in the pages field to about-us and about-us/* (note that the site will always put a hyphen '-' in the URL when there are spaces in the page title and it is really part of the URL that you are entering this field.
Many of the pages that you enter your content on will support the use of tokens. These all take the form [[[tokenname]]].
On some types of pages you are able to add hero images (a hero image is typically a large image that appears at the top of a page. In order to add your hero image click on the browse button and fill out the alternative text and title text fields. Once you have done this click upload. If you want to add more hero images (not really advisable!) you can click the 'Add another item' button. Once your hero image has been added you can place it in the body area using the token [[[hero]]]. Hero images can be small medium or large and the site will automatically resize the image for you if you use either [[[hero-small]], [[[hero-medium]] or [[[hero-large]]] tokens.
if you want to add images to the page you can do this in the image field - again by using the browse and upload buttons and again filling in the alternative and title text fields. If you want to add multiple images you simply click 'Add another item' button until all your images have been uploaded. Once you have added your images you can use the [[[image]]] token to place them anywhere within your body text. If you have multiple images the first one you added is inserted by using [[[image-0]]], the second one is [[[image-1]]] etc. Again the images are automatically resized for you by the site (you should upload the largest version of the image for best results) and you can use these by using tokens such as [[[image-0 small]]] or [[[image-3 large]]] or [[[image-5 medium]]]. To add additional flexibility you can position these images left or right so the tokens become for example [[[image-0 small left]]] or [[[image-3 large right]]] or [[[image-5 medium right]]]
Sometimes on a page you may want to pull out and highlight a quote for users to read. You can enter this quote into the blockquote field. If you want more than one block quote you can click the 'Add another item' button. Once you have entered you quote you can use the token [[[quote]]] to place the quote anywhere in your body text. Again the first quote is [[[quote-0]], the second [[[quote-1]]] etc. If you want to place your quote on the left or right of the page you use the same syntax as for images e.g. [[[quote-0 right]]], [[[quote-1 left]]].
If you want to add a podcast to your page you can paste the embed code into the podcast field. If you want more than one podcast click the 'Add another item' button. Once you have entered the embed code for your podcasts you can place them in the body of your page by using the token [[[podcast]]]. Again the first podcast is referred to as [[[podcast-0]]], the second is [[[podcast-1]]] etc.
If you want to add a video to your page you can paste the embed code into the video field. If you want more than one video click the 'Add another item' button. Once you have entered the embed code for your videots you can place them in the body of your page by using the token [[[video]]]. Again the first podcast is referred to as [[[video-0]]], the second is [[[video-1]]] etc.
If you have created features on your site you can also add these to a page using tokens. In order to do so you will need to know the node ID of the feature. On your admin bar hover over Content Management and select Content from the list that appears. The page you are presented with shows you all the content on your site - click edit for the feature whos ID you want to find. On the edit page look at the URL and after the name or your site wyou should see /node/[a number] (e.g. www.open.ac.uk/mysite/node/123). The number is the node ID.
In order to add the feature into your body text use the syntax [[[feature-nodeID]] ([[[feature-123]]] in the example above). If you wish to add a number of features side-by-side in the page you can use [[[feature-123,124]]]. You can collect four features in this way.
