The Content > Pages Screen

This transcript document is associated with the third video, "The Content > Pages Menu", in the Using Omni CMS Udemy course.

Let's go ahead and explore the "Content>Pages" menu. So wherever you're at, you can go ahead and log into Omni and then go to content and pages. One thing I didn't, I don't think I touched on in the last menu in the last video. If you are someone that has access to multiple websites, this picker up in the top right lets you switch between those. Your list is probably showing you every website at TTU, but you only have access to certain ones. So go ahead and select the one relevant for you. You should have access to this Omni Training site, which is a test site we use for our training environment. You can use things in the Omni Training site. Just know that we will periodically delete content in the site that is no longer relevant. We try to keep this kind of clean. So keep that in mind. You have access to work in here, but anything you do in here, we can freely delete since it's our site.

So I'm on my site that I care about. I'm in content and pages. Like I said before, this is where you're going to be doing the bulk of your work. I just want to give you kind of a feel for what you can do in here. We see an upload button, so we can go ahead and click that. You can add files just as you would any standard file uploader from your computer. You can add files here as you would want. You can kind of ignore most of these. You can technically, if you have a zipped file structure, you can import it, and it would maintain that zip structure. I've only even done that like once. If you're uploading an image, you can upload it and then directly go into edit it, which again is something I've not really ever done. More likely you're just going to hit upload files, add those and go on. If you are uploading a file that the name already exists in this directory, it's going to give you a warning. It's basically saying like, "Hey, you're trying to create a document and that document already exists here. Are you sure you want to do this?" Which is great because if you have contracts.pdf and a contract.pdf already exists on here, it's kind of a flag for you to go, "Oh, this file is actually different from what's on the server, so I need to rename this document to be like, it's a different kind of contract." That kind of thing. Or if you check this overwrite existing box, that's basically you telling Omni, "Yes, I know this file already exists on the server. I'm specifically replacing it." We kind of recommend that anyway, especially with something like a contract. If you are having that thing, it is specifically a new version. There's no reason to have seven different versions of a contract on your website. You can have your current contract, even if you are someone that maybe you have a contract for current students and a contract for new students, something like that. You can just name things. Here's our current contract. Here's our previous contract. Here's our next contract, something like that. You just switch up a file with whatever's relevant. In that sense, you could say, "Hey, I know that contract exists on here. I'm updating a new version of it. I'm going to keep the file name the same so that all of my links still work. I'm specifically going to replace that file." That's how the overwrite existing works. It's saying, "Yes, go ahead and replace whatever file is there with this new file of the same name." Everything that you upload, remember in Omni, you're working with two different web servers. That's going to update the Omni server, the staging server, but not actually update the website. To update the website, you would need to upload the files and then also hit publish. You would need to upload and then publish as well.

In the new button, you'll see a variety of things that you can add. These are the default option, bio page, org folder, new web page, and web page section. You have two different ways of creating folders on your site, organizational folder and web page section. For organizational folder is meant to contain anything that's not a web page, basically. It's going to be documents or images or custom code files, things like that. In fact, you should probably have an images folder and a documents folder, those kinds of things. They're not going to hold web pages. They're going to hold more static content that would be referenced by web pages. The web page section is meant to have web pages. If you're having an events section of your website or if you have new programs and new initiatives, you'd want to make a web page section folder to create that branch of your website. You can see that on our site, if we go to part of the web accessibility resources site that you hopefully have seen, you can see this breadcrumbs in the top section. TTU Technology Support, Overview of Web Services, Web Training, Accessibility Overview, and now we're on a Text web page. These breadcrumbs can help your users, it's actually an accessibility thing, let your users know what part of the site they're on. That's going to be a good thing for your users to find that out. They can also click these links to navigate through different tiers of your site. That's super helpful to do. Whenever you make the web page section, it basically creates the file to build out that breadcrumb section. Keep that in mind if you're making a folder for web pages, it's a web page section. If you're making a folder for documents and images, it's an organizational folder.

We also have this bio page, which is kind of a different type of web page. The bio page, whenever you make those, they're basically meant to be web pages about people. If you have a section of your website that is all information about people, your staff, your students, your faculty, whatever that is, bio pages are kind of meant to be pre-formatted ways of having that information. One benefit to that, every department around campus that is doing bio pages for their personal information, the content looks exactly the same, which could be kind of nice, but a page about TTU people looks the same, whatever site it's on. We also have a variety of tools that you can use to display a folder of bio pages in a gallery or in a list that's searchable with images, those kinds of things. Also the UI to edit those is a bit different. I'm going to show this Raider Red bio file here. I'm going to open that up and we can see a bit here. Instead of going to an edit menu over here, I'm going to go over here to multi-edit. And now I see what very much is more like a form to fill out. We have the head content section, so if I had custom JavaScript or CSS, I can add that to the site. I also have a photo field here, so I can change for a headshot. Image description, often in these kinds of cases, you don't necessarily need an image description since it's very likely going to be a headshot of that person, but I'm going to go ahead and put their name in here as well. So we have our image. First name Raider, last name Red, that seemed fitting. We have department and job title, email address. I left a phone number blank. There's a summary field, just kind of blank text you can have. And then a variety of other fields. We have these section headings and then sections, so you can use these however you want. They basically just have other headings on your page. I'm using work history, educational history, and hobbies, almost if this was kind of like a resume or CV. So we have information there. You could use these for fun facts, if it's like what are your favorite movies, what are your favorite things to do in Lubbock, what's your coffee order, or what is your publication history, what is your work history, those kinds of things. You can kind of use them almost however you want, whatever your needs are for your departments. We give you four of these sections to have headings and then body content under those. You can see these text editors. It very much is a visual editor that's like what we'll see in Omni here in a minute, but it's also very much even easier than the visual editor in Omni, a pretty easy form kind of style to fill out. Once you hit publish there, you can see the actual webpage. We see here we have all of that information that we entered pre-filled out with this context here. We have the name, title, department, email address, that bio link, or that summary I had in here, and then those kind of sections of their content below. This can be like I said, standard for all, bio pages for all, pages about people at Texas Tech. They would all look fairly similar to this.

Honestly, if we go to something like the Staff Senate, right now with the Staff Senate website, the current Senators page is using bio pages, so every Senator is in a bio page. We have these galleries that are showing and listing off those people. Based on data within here, they've kind of taken one of the fields for EEO classification. Here's all the clerical professional or clerical and secretarial staff members that are part of Staff Senate, and they're listed off in here with our images, with our titles. We have some code like that if you want to have bio pages with your people information and then show a directory list kind of thing. We have those in our wiki. If you go to add-ons and then OU wiki, it should be under I believe advanced. So general, assets and components, Directory of Bios, this kind of gives you the information of what a bio page is and how you can add the directory onto your site. So we have some information in here. So in the OU wiki, which you can find from the add-ons, you can go to general, assets and components, and then directory of BIOS to find more information about how to set this up. And IT Team Web is happy to help you as well. It does require you to put a little bit of source code onto your page, but it's really not that hard to work with.

I'm going to go back to content and pages. So in the new button, we've talked about bio pages, organizational folder and webpage section. All that's left is the new webpage. We're going to go ahead and click that. And we see here we have a form to fill out. Basically, every time you create something in Omni, you're going to have a little form to fill out and have a little bit of extra information. Page title, that's going to be used as the main heading on the webpage and also is used in the browser tab for the site as the title attribute. So you can set that to something descriptive of what the page is about. You likely want to keep the author roughly the same as this. You may not want to put your personal name because you may not always be the one in your role working on this website, but something like your departmental name or the program name or stuff like that might be appropriate as well. Keywords and description, just ways that you can describe this content description is, you know, summarizing what the page is about, what information is on the page, keywords, what would the user be searching for to try to find that page. We can kind of help your page show up in search results if you care about those things. Give it a file name you have, you can give it a file name that ideally is descriptive of what the page is about. It shouldn't just be like page one, page two, page three, you know, make it be contracts or residence halls or whatever it is that you are working with on your site. And you can kind of ignore the other settings here.

In this folder list, you have a variety of things to do. You can click on several items here and you get some tools to move, copy, recycle, and publish so you can have some tools to do actions in bulk with files on your site. On each of these items, you do have this three dot menu over on the right that you can click on to do some kind of things. Under file, you have again, rename, move, copy, recycle, helpfully view published page. So if I wanted to see what this page looked like without even typing in its URL, I could just open it up in here and hit view published page and bam, I'm taken to what this web page is. That's super nice. And then yeah, you can publish it. You can review the edit log of the page and then you can edit it in the various ways that you would need to edit the document. But that's kind of it for getting around the content pages menu. We've talked about everything. In the next video, we'll actually be editing the sample file.