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Quick Guide (Version 1.3)
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Welcome
to the Microsoft Homepage Starter Kit, an easy ASP.NET 2.0 based Content
Management System to build your own dynamic website. This guide will
provide you a quick walk-through to the site administration and the module
features.
If you are looking for something special, use the "Find" feature
of your browser to look for certain terms. This CMS has many features to be
discovered.
For additional questions, news, releases and the project's news feed visit
the My
Web Pages Starter Kit project on Codeplex.com.
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Table of content
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Administration:
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1. Set up a site
First thing before you start creating content is to set some global
parameters and information for your new website. When logged in for the
first time go to the Administration
menue and select CMS
Setup:
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The
following page allows you to change some global parameters and even change
the complete layout of your website, even after all content has been added!
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Description of items:
Title
The title is the name of your website and will be shown within the header
image of the website.
Language
Future releases opf the CMS will be available in different languages.
SMTP-Server
If you want to use features that require e-mails to be sent, you need to
define your e-mail server.
Footer line
Contact details or masthead information can be provided here and will be
shown at the bottom of each page.
Website description and Website keywords
You can add the appropriate meta information for the header sections of the
website here.
Reset Website
Will clear all fields again.
RSS Feeds
Many of the modules are RSS feed enabled. A checkbox "Enable Section
RSS" (not visible on this screenshot) can be activated to show RSS
icons below these sections. Users can subscribe to updates of this specific
module's content by clicking the icon.
Select Theme
A really cool feature of this CMS is that you can switch the design and
layout at any time with only one click. All content will automatically be
rearranged and new style sheets will be used.
Simply select a new theme and click on it. Done!
If you are familiar with .Net and Visual Studio you may even want to create
your own templates?
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2. Manage Pages and Navigation
Select Pages and
Navigation to take control of your site's structure,
arrange the navigation and create new pages.
The pages are listed in the order in which they appear in the navigation.
Indented items (like "...Press") are subpages of the page above
them and will be shown in a secondary navigation.
To add a new page simply click the button "New Page" and an empty
page appears at the end of the list.
To move a page within the navigation hierarchy or to make it a subpage of
its parent, activate the page by clicking on it and use the blue Move
arrows at the bottom. The right arrow will make it a subpages, the up and
down arrows change its position.
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Description of items
Page Title
This name will be shown in the browser window.
Navigation
Name of the page in the navigation.
Allow Anonymous
By default everyone can visit your pages. If you wish to have a restricted area for members
you can uncheck this box and only registered users will be able to see this
page. (-> see 3. User
Management )
Editing by power users
If you activate this button, power users can edit this page. This enables
the delegation of administrative areas (-> also see 3. User Management )
Visible
Uncheck this if you want to hide this page, e.g. because you are still
working on its content.
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Virtual
Path:
With a dynamic CMS new pages will have generic IDs. You may want to make
the URLs of these pages more user friendly by assigning a virtual path
name.
Simply type in the name of the page, e.g. "About me". Instead of
having a generic URL like www.yoursite.com/default.aspx?pg=3cb13823-a424-4761-81c1-5fa9da24db43 you can now use the short version "www.yoursite.com/aboutme.aspx"
This way printing a URL on promotional material or sending it by e-mail
becomes much simpler!
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3. User management
The CMS provides a simple yet powerful user management that can be used to
create restricted areas.
Please keep in mind that there are 2 levels of rights available:
1. Registered
Users: Pages that are not visible to everyone (-> 2.
Manage Pages and Navigation) can be visited by registered users only. There
is only one level of registered users.
2. Administrators:
Among the registered users there can be one or more administrators.
Administrators have full access to the backend and can edit the site,
create and delete pages and mange user profiles.
3. Power-User:
Registered Users can be defined as Power Users. Power Users have
unrestricted access to pages, for which have been given access set by
Administrator. The Backend is only accessible for Administrators.
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To
create new users simply add name, password and e-mail and click "Create User".
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Clicking
the Edit-Button will allow you to change name and e-mail. And you can
assign administrator rights to the user by checking the box "Is
Administrator".
The last login of each user is also tracked within this view.
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The modules:
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Every
new page is empty and will display the module selection drop down element:
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There
are 10 modules available to create your page. You can add as many modules
to your page as you like and arrange them in any order. Add the bottom of
each page you will always find the module selection, each new module will
be added at the bottom of the page.
To change the order of modules you can click the up and down arrows in each
module's header which will move the whole module section up or down.
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Delete
Section will delete the complete module.
Many modules will have a rich
text editor to create new content. It allows the basic text
formatting tasks and even table creation - find out yourself what can be
done with these tools...
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To
add a picture click the image icon and either select a picture from the
server or use the upload feature to add new pictures. If you are familiar
with HTML, you can toggle views between the design view and the HTML view
with the tab "Source" above the editor's window.
View and Edit mode
To provide administrators with a real preview of their work without the
need to log out, the modules have a view and edit mode. One can toggle
between them by clicking the View and Edit buttons.
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Send
to sidebar
Gewisse Module bieten das Feature "Zur Sidebar hinzufügen" an.
Some modules offer a special feature "Send to Sidebar".
If you activate this option, the content of the modules will be highlighted
in the sidebar which can be used as a quick link section or latest update
section.
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1. Contact Form
Stay in touch with your friends, colleagues and customers and provide an
easy way to send messages to you: the Contact Form module. Please note that
you must have
specified a SMTP server during setup for sending e-mails.
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The
contact form backend serves three purposes: To create the contact form,
define where the contact requests are sent to and to provide a thank you
message to the user.
The first three fields recipient e-mail, Copy to and Subject define how
mails are delivered to you.
The Introtext
is the teaser text to invite people to get in contact.
The Thank you
message is displayed on the screen after a user has used
the contact form.
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2. Download List
To share documents on your website use the Download List module. It allows
to upload many different file formats and these will automatically detected
and an appropriate application icon is added to the list view.
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3. Easy Control
Would you like to integrate your own UserControl in the CMS? Nothing easier
than that: the Easy Control is the section of your choice! Just create your
own UserControl as you normally would and place it inside the EasyControls
folder in the CMS root. You can even copy existing UserControls you have into
that same directory. When you place an Easy Control section in one of your
pages, all controls inside the EasyControls folder are automatically listed
in the dropdown, which you see in the administrative view of the section.
Just select the control you want to show up and you're done. Easy, isn't
it?
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4. Event List
Invite some guests and get your events online. The Event List module lets
you create events, set their date and time.
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Create
an event item:
Select the event date with the dynamic date selection.
Select the time by using the hours and minutes drop down.
The "show from" is like the publication date. If you select a
date here, the event will only be visible on and after that date.
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5. Gallery
To share your photos use the Gallery module. Files can be selected and
annotated like in the Download module.
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Thumbnails
will be created automatically once the images are upoaded.
Also a preview image will be created that fits into the dimensions of the
gallery module. The original file is available via a download link.
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6. Guestbook
Let your guests leave their comments on your site. The guestbook is easy to
set up and even comes with an AntiBot image for more security.
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In
version 1 you cannot edit entries on the web frontend.
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7. HTML Content
The most important section of all - as it allows for the most flexibility.
With the rich text editor you have extended possibilities to change text
style and formatting.
To add a picture click the image icon and either select a picture from the
server or use the upload feature to add new pictures. If you are familiar
with HTML, you can toggle views between the design view and the HTML view
with the tab "Source" above the editor's window.
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8. Link List
The Link list module works in the same ways as the Download or Gallery
module. The URL is added and the target can be selected separately.
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9. News List
Add news to you site. Select the "Show from" and "Show
until" dates to specifiy when and for how long a news chapter will be
displayed on you website.
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10. Subpages
If you have a page that has several subpages it might be interesting to have
a link list to all these subpages on this parent page, like a table of
content for a category of your website.
The Subpages module does just that: Simply add it to your parent page and
it will list all subpages as a link list automatically!
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11. Blog
The Blog Module provides you with all the advantages of a Web log:
- Publicity
for your Website: the ping function attracts more visitors to your
Website.
- Topicality
of a selected thread: keep the visitors posted (travel diary, progress
of a project, monitoring of publications in the Internet, knowledge
management, etc.).
- Communication
and exchange of ideas: read the comments of your blog visitors and
reply to them by updating your blog entry or posting new entries.

Post new blog entries or edit old ones.
Tags:
Click on “Tags“ and a little window opens where you can assign tags to
an entry or create new ones.

Keywords can be changed or erased anytime. Just click on Tags in the Edit
mode of the blog.

Weblogs
input notification:
You can decide in the configuration of the blog whether a ping should be
sent to Weblogs.com when posting entries. This will advertise your input
with Weblogs.

Calendar:
The calendar displays the days on which the entries were posted in bold.

Comments:
Visitors can post comments on any blog entry which are immediately
published. An administrator is able to erase these in the Edit mode.

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12. Blogroll
The Blogroll module has a similar structure to the Link List. The only
difference is that the Blogroll displays links to other blogs you would
like to introduce to your visitors.

To post a new entry, please indicate a title and the URL of the post. You
can also add the RSS feed to the post. This enables the user to subscribe
to all blogs with one click (Subscription List).
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13. TagCloud
The purpose of the TagCloud is to visualize keywords used in the blog.
Keywords used more often are displayed in bold. Clicking on a keyword
displays all entries containing this keyword.

You can place the TagCloud as often as you like and anywhere. If you want
your Website to feature more than one blog, the TagCloud groups all blogs
together
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14. Display RSS Feed
Integrate an RSS Feed into your website. You
only need a single Feed URL to complete this and you must also decide how
many elements you want to display.
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15. Twitter Feed Status Display
This module enables you to easily integrate Twitter status updates directly
into your website. In order to integrate the
Feed, all you need to do is enter your Twitter user name and choose a
simple or more complex layout.
You
can also define the maximum number of entries that will be displayed and
move the status display to the sidebar.
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16. Forum
This module enables you to integrate a simple forum into your website. The
forum has a simple layout and you can choose between two different options
during configuration.
You
can choose whether to allow all users to post items in the forum, or only
registered users. Furthermore, you can also select whether the posts can be
moderated or not. If this option is activated, posts will only be displayed
once they have been approved by the Administrator. If this option is
deactivated, new posts will be displayed immediately.
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