Navigating Omni

This transcript document is associated with the second video, "Navigating Omni", in the Using Omni CMS Udemy course.

Let's talk a bit about navigating around OmniCMS. So to log into Omni, from any TTU webpage you can scroll all the way down to the bottom and you should see the date. If you click on that, that will log you into Omni and helpfully it will log you in in the context to edit whatever page you are on if you had access to it. For right now we're going to go to Dashboard and My Dashboard. This is where you can kind of see some tools and insights about your website. The little gear icon can let you add on more tools that we've made available to you. So you can kind of play with some of these to get more insights about your site. I probably can see a lot more things than you can. My Checked Out Content would be a good one to add. It just shows you everything that you have locked that you are editing, and you can go in and check these in if you want. So Omni has a way to prevent multiple users from editing the same document at the same time. It's also a good idea whenever you're done working on something to check that content back in so that other users can go edit that. If you ever need to edit something that's been checked out by another user, you can. ideally reach out to that user and say "Hey, it looks like you're working on this page, can you either check it back in or possibly do this edit that I need to do?" that kind of thing. If you can't get a hold of them or otherwise you can reach out to IT TeamWeb and we can. check that in for you. We kind of recommend going to your colleagues first because it might be quicker for you. to reach out to them if they're in your same office, go down the hall kind of thing. Or it's possible that we could delete some work that they're doing if we check that page back in before they can hit save and publish of whatever they're doing. So kind of keep that in mind, maybe start with trying to go to those colleagues but you know it could even be that it's someone who has left the university, that they've not been working on this page for a couple years, that kind of thing, then definitely reach out to us. Also on this page you will find the Site Analytics. So this lets you select the sites or sites that you have access to. You have date filters here to filter down the time range. And then you can see kind of some baseline Google Analytics data about your site, page views, average time per visit, bounce rate, most viewed pages, views by country, state, browser, operating system, those kinds of things. So like we just talked about or in a previous video we've talked about optimizing your site to work on the browsers and operating systems that your users are having. On this occasion we have Windows devices running Chrome. That's where most of our traffic is coming from so we want to make sure that our site works great on Windows devices running Chrome, that kind of thing.

Under Content and Pages you'll find the folder structure of your site. So these are all the folders and files within your site. This is the actual contents of your website. We'll be working on this quite a bit to show how you can edit your site. So we'll come back to this page, but Content and Pages is where you'll be doing most of your work.

Under the Content menu you also have Assets. Assets is kind of hard to describe. Assets are like reusable content you can reference on multiple pages of your site. Let's say something like you wanted to put your departmental mission statement on the bottom of every webpage. You wouldn't want to have that actual text be on every single webpage because if you ever change your mission statement you could have a couple hundred places to update that text. Often with websites it's best to have your content as few places as possible so if it does change, if you do need to update it, you can update it in one spot and then everywhere else that references it has that information. And so in this case what you could do is you could make an asset with your mission statement with whatever information you want and then you just reference that asset on every page that you would want to include it. So you have exactly one spot in this asset where the actual information is, where the data you're showing the users is placed, and then on all of your webpages you just have a little bit of code snippet on each page that can then reference back to this. So we'll talk about Assets towards the end. Assets is also where you can have image galleries and online forms, which we'll talk about in a later video as well.

Also under Content you have Recycle Bin. This is where you're going to see things that you have deleted that you can then restore, those kinds of things. If you ever delete something accidentally you can check Recycle Bin for that content.

Under Reports, maybe the only thing you have access to or that I think is relevant would be the checked out content. This lets you see anything that you have checked out. I can see everything as an admin but this should only show items that you have checked out. Like I said it's not a bad idea to go in here every now and then, select everything and hit check in just to make sure things are freed up for other people to be working on.

And then the Add-ons menu is really just there to give you some extra references. So we have some helpful links in here that you can use to reference how to edit your site, that kind of thing. Add-ons is just going to be where we can kind of store some quick links for you. And that's kind of how you can get around Omni.