Tech Insights

By: Jason Eveland, Instructional Technology Systems Manager

OmniUpdate Web Content Manager

WYSIWYG Editors

What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get, or “WYSIWYG” for short, is the most common way for users to edit pages in the CMS.  The WYSIWYG editor allows for a familiar experience of editing a page in a word processor.  If you have already gone through the CMS training and looking for a way to improve your skills or just need a refresher please join me Thursday February 16, 2011 in HH111A at 11:00.

1.     Directory Structure – The directory structure of a website describes the way in which the webpages are organized. Directory structures, like search engine optimization, require serious consideration if you hope to create a website that’s effectively found, crawled and indexed in SERPs.

2.     Adding New Pages – New files and directories can easily be created in one location with the press of a button.  Click on content tab and select new, from the drop down select the template of the page you would like to create.

3.     Page Structure – H3, H4, H5, P, Unordered Lists, and Ordered List can keep you webpage clean and easily navigable.

4.     Inserting Links – Easy as highlighting the text you want to be a link and clicking on the insert/edit link button.  Add the url or browse your directory and then click insert.

5.     Inserting Images – To insert an image place the cursor in the place you would like to have your image and click on the insert/edit image button.  Browse for you image or upload a new image from your computer.  You will need to add alt text (descriptive text about the photo) and some styling.  Once you have styled the photo you can insert it by clicking the insert button.

6.     Open Forum – Any topic users are having difficulty with.

CMS Advanced Features – Assets and Asset Manager

If you want a way to control your website assets the asset manager is for you.  Assets are reusable content such as text, images, media, code blocks, links, etc. Reusable content is convenient when working with multiple files that require the same information.  As reusable content, assets allow users to easily change an item that is used on several pages.  Once an asset is updated and published, all the pages using the asset will also be updated and published.

Time:  February 23, 11:00am – 12:00pm.
Location:  HH111

Creating assets

To create an asset, follow these steps:
1.  Navigate to the Content tab, and select the Assets subheading.

2.  This is the Asset screen. Select the New link in the upper right corner of the Assets box.



Selecting this link will open up a screen similar to template tabs for pages:

3.  Select which asset is appropriate.  If the Web Content (generic) asset type is chosen, a form with the WYSIWYG editor will appear. A Text Only asset will display a simple text editor.  The Code asset will display the source editor.  The following picture displays when a Web Content asset was selected:

This is the text asset creation screen:

This is the source code asset creation screen:

4.  Fill out the form with the appropriate information:
Asset Name - Enter a friendly name that will be displayed through the whole system.
Description – Give a brief description of what the asset does.
Tags – Tags are used to categorize the asset and will be used in future features.
Content – Fill out the contents of an asset.

Note: Some Tag keywords have been pre-defined at the system level. Use of these tags can help in searching and filtering assets (upcoming release). These tags can be used in addition to any keyword tags of the user’s choice. The following is a list of the pre-defined tags: Image, Text, URL, Link, Name, Address, Media, Include, Script, Email, Phone, Date, Quote, Document, PDF.

When searching and filtering is added to the Asset Manager, the the search/ filter results will only be able to present those assets that have been tagged appropriately. For example, the system will not know that an asset is an image, unless it has been tagged with the word: Image.

5.  Press the save button and the asset will be created!  It is good to note that assets have a lot of the same features as pages.

These features include:

• Access settings
• Log
• Backup
• Revert
• Rename
• Delete

Naming assets – Give your asset a unique name and a descriptive name.  All assets are stored in the same directory, if you have lots of assets it will be easier to find them if you have named them correctly.

Inserting Assets

There are two methods to inserting assets.  Assets can be entered into pages using the WYSIWYG editor and by using the source editor.

1.  While in the WYSIWYG editor, place the cursor to where the asset will be entered. Then find the Asset Manager icon in the toolbar.

2.  After clicking the icon, an asset selection screen will appear.  If the account contains multiple sites with assets, the selection tool will first ask to select a site.  Otherwise, a list of all the assets will be on the left, and a window to preview the assets will be on the right.

The icons found to on the left denote what type the asset is:

	Generic / Web Content
	Text Only
	Source

3.  Select the asset to be used, and press the “Select Asset” button.  The asset will be entered into the page where the cursor was placed. If the asset is a Text Only type, or a generic asset with no block level HTML code (such as p or div tags), the asset will preview with the content inside of a wrapper:

If the asset is a generic type with block level HTML code, or a source code type, it cannot be previewed in the WYSIWYG editor, but will still have a wrapper:

Note that even though the asset is not displayed in the WYSIWYG editor, it will still render in the page preview.  However, source code assets will not render with preview.