How to use the Content management System

A Content Management System (CMS) is service that allows anyone with the right credential to post content to the website. The Content Management System is a modified version of wordpress 3.2. It’s a stripped down version to increase the security and usability of the system. A

Generally, for ibte.edu.bn, A post could have these things

• Title
  • The title of tge page or headline of the post. This should generally not be too long.
• Content
  • The content of the page or post. This can be formated text or HTML (for those who can do it). You can use the WYSWIG to create the content
• Featured Image
  • This sets the top “Hero Image”, which are the images that appear at the top of the post and also appears in site links and also the “Carousel”, which is the “Rolling Banner” found at the front page of ibte.edu.bn
• Tags
  • This sets what kind of information that may be contained in the post. A good tag for example could be something like “isq”. A post/page can have more than one tag. And you can create any tag that you feel is appropriate. This will help when you want to show a page of all the relevant information about “isq” for example. Or “job-fair”. Generally we would try to use “-” instead of a space for tags.
• Permalink
  • This is the link that will be displayed for the page. Generally the CMS will automatically generate the link from the title. But for example, for the page “Maktab Kejuruteraan Jefri Bolkiah” which would give the link as “http://ibte.edu.bn/maktab-kejuruteraan-jefri-bolkiah/” , we might want to manually edit it to ibte.edu.bn/mkjb/. We generally want an easy to remember and type permalink for pages, but not necessarily that important for a post.
• Publishing Status
  • Publishing status could be either “Draft”, “Pending Review” and “Published”. Only “Published” posts and pages are posts that have been edited and reviewed for publishing. We will use this for the content creation workflow.
• Visibiliy
  • This can be “Public”,”Private” and “Password Protected”. Public can be seen anyone who has the link to the page (which may or may not be in the front page). Private can only be seen by privliged users. And password protected can be seen by anyone who has the link and knows the password (which the writer/editor has set)
• Revisions
  • The CMS stores the different versions of each page and post. We can revert back to an earlier revision and we can have multiple revisions of the same article by different authors. This will be useful for us when we develop our content creation workflow

There are two types of content when posting to the Content Management System (CMS).

• Pages
  • Pages are static information that may not be related to a specific date. For example. school information. Pages has parents and children. So for example, you can create a page titled
• Posts
  • Posts are generally for “News Items” or things that happen on a specific date. So for example, events and announcements would go here.

Along with the general things that post and page have, specific to pages the can have

• A parent.
  • This will be helpful to create heirachal content such as departments, courses information, etc. The permalink of the page will be based on its parents so for example a page on “MKJB” under “Schools of excellence” will have the permalink of “http://ibte.edu.bn/schools-of-excellance/mkjb”
• Template
  • This allows us to set the “template” of the page. Template is how the CMS will show your site and is created by the site developer. Currently there are two templates “With sidebar” and “Without”. Generally, unless you understand HTML, it’s best to leave this set to the default (wth sidebar). More templates will be created in the future, but this can only be done by the site developer.
• Order
  • This will be used when listing out all the “children” of the “parent”.
• Custom Fields
  • This is currently not used but will be used in the future for custom made pages (like profiles)

A post can have

• A category
  • This is the kind of article or post it is. For example is it an announcement, an event or a press release? You can also put this information in the tag, but it is important to set the category as this is used to show the various items in the front page. Most importantly, if you want your post to be featured on the “carousel” you need to set the post as “carousel” category. You can set more than one category for a post.
• Format
  • This is the post’s version of a template. For now it’s not currently used but in the future this will allow us to post galleries, events and links.
• Excerpt
  • This is the short “blurb” that will be shown in the front page or anywhere where this article will be linked. This will be automatically generated if the left empty but it will usually cut off in the middle of the sentence which is not ideal. Having a short description of the article is beneficial for archiving purposes