HOWTO:Get Started With the Content Management Plugin

[Jimmi08]

Contents
1 Before you Start!
2 Step 1: Know your Content
3 Step 2: Know your Users
4 Step 3: Build Your Category Tree
5 Step 4: Kick the tires with a sample category hierarchy
5.1 Create a category path
5.2 Learn the relationship between the options and URLs
5.2.1 Open 2 browser windows
5.2.2 Tinker with the options
5.3 Decide how your users will populate content
5.4 Tinker with the templates
6 Step 5: Contribute to the Wiki

Before you Start!
Remember that Content Manager is a powerful - but complicated - tool. With great power comes great responsibility - ok, maybe not responsibility, but upfront planning before you begin working with Content Manager will make your job much easier. Make sure Content Manager is the right tool for you.

Step 1: Know your Content
Before you even install Content Manager, take the time to segment your content into main categories. Are you planning on hosting Product Reviews? HOWTO guides? Media Articles?

Each one of these broad content areas is a Main Category (or main parent category) in Content Manager. The plugin is designed to allow you to create different types of formatting, menus, editorial control and navigation for each.

You may only have one main category. For instance, you may sell books on your site and want to allow people to post book reviews. "Book Reviews" would be your only Main Category with sub-categories such as "Cookbooks", "Sports Books", etc. Normally you would not create a Main Category for "Cookbooks" and another Main Category for "Sports Books" even though you have only one content type.

To Summarize: Make each broad class of content with unique formatting, editorial control, navigation, list of top ratings/authors, or menus, into a Main Category.

Step 2: Know your Users
Ok, you've got 1 or more Main Categories. Now the real thinking begins. How do you want your users to submit, review, control, edit, and post the content? Do you anticipate people submitting directly to the site or do you want control over the content. Will site admins be controlling the content or will you delegate this responsibility to specific users or user-groups?

You need to map out the rough user behavior for each Main Category, although Content Manager does allow you to further customize sub-categories. These decisions are important because they determine how you setup the Admin->Submit options and Admin->Personal Content Manager options.

Generally you will give Personal Content Manager control to non-admin "editors" in a category. Depending on your configuration settings, these users will be able to submit, edit, delete, etc. content in a category.

Submit functionality is designed for day-to-day users of the site to allow them to submit content in a category that may (or may not) be approved by an admin.

Step 3: Build Your Category Tree
For this step you will need a pencil and paper. Actually you can also use software like Visio to build your category tree, but the point is that you want to map out your category tree that will contain your content and sub-categories.

For each category you create, make note of the following:

Will it contain sub-categories?
Will it contain content?
Will it simply be a generic container like a folder in a file system or will it contain text, pictures, directions, etc. and associated information to describe the category?
These are just a few of the questions you will need to answer about each category. There are dozens of other options in the Admin section under Admin -> Options -> (category or default) -> Content Item preview and Category pages. When you consider the ability to customize the templates of Content Manager, there are an infinite number of ways to customize each category.

The general point is that Content Manager - as was stated before - offers an incredible amount of flexibility that will quickly become overwhelming if you don't start with a plan on how your category tree will work.

Step 4: Kick the tires with a sample category hierarchy
After you have installed the latest version of Content Manager into e107 on your development environment you will want to get familiar with the basic functionality, particularly the Options before you start customizing.

Create a category path
From the Admin screen, create your first main category, sub-category, and content item. You can use one of the (at the time of this writing) main categories (Review, Content, Article) that come with plugin. You basically want to build a single path from the parent to the lowest-child (a piece of content) in the tree. The categories can be dummies and the content can be the word "test" repeated 300 times. It doesn't matter at this stage, so just get them built.

Learn the relationship between the options and URLs
Ok...time to take off the training wheels. BEFORE you jump into customizing the Content Manager you need to understand the options that are built out of the box. This is going to take a long time. So kick back, grab a cold one, start tinkering, and be patient. You will want to keep Content Management Url Explained handy and refer back to it often.

Open 2 browser windows
In one window you will have you site as seen by the user. In the other window you will have the e107 Admin screen open. Content Management Url Explained will be your key between the two screens.

Tinker with the options
Go to Admin->options and select your main parent (or default) and begin learning the relationship between what appears on the screen and what is set in the Admin->options. For instance, you will want to see what changes in content.php?content.X when you modify Admin : Options > Content pages.

By this point you might be getting pretty frustrated and confused. Words such as "category" and "icon" are used repeatedly in different areas and with different context. This might be a good point to evaluate whether Content Manager is right for you.

Decide how your users will populate content
Basically you need to decide whether you will use the Personal Content Manager (PCM) or Submit Items or both. The functionality overlaps somewhat, but PCM is generally more appropriate if your users are editors with control over their own or others' content submissions. Play around with both tools.

Tinker with the templates
The template system provides even more control over the display of content. It is highly advisable that you copy all of the templates into a content directory within your site theme. Of course you don't want to modify templates until you first understand what you can do from the options menu. For instance, if you delete a shortcode from the templates to {SHOW_THE_BLOODY_ICON} (just an example - this doesn't exist), you may screw-up the Admin-Options function that controls this function. A better approach is to leave the template intact and remove the icon from the Admin screen.

Step 5: Contribute to the Wiki
"Contribute? Why I hardly understand how to use the Content Management Plugin!" Yes, this is a great time to contribute. You now have the benefit of basic familiarity with the plugin and yet you are new enough to give it a fresh set of eyes. Update this page with additional steps you took to learn the plugin. Did you have a nagging question that wasn't answered after following the steps above? Post it to the Content Management Q&A.