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Published on Friday, 01 April 2005 00:00
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Written by MamboHut
Page 3 of 9
Creating
a Section
The first thing we are going to do is create a section – that is, a general,
high-level subject which will later be divided into categories. To create a
new section, click on the Section
Manager icon on the home page, or select the option from the
‘Content’ menu, as illustrated in figure 3.
Figure
3 – Accessing the Section Manager
This will take you into the ‘Section Manager’ screen, which allows you
to add or edit sections. In the example shown in figure 4, there is already a
section called ‘The News’, and one called ‘Newsflashes’. If you wanted to edit
either of those sections, you would just click on the orange link (or
alternatively, check the box next to the link, and then select ‘Edit’ from the
toolbar). To create a new section, just click on the ‘New’ toolbar button.
Figure
4 – The Section Manager
This will take you into the section editor. Whenever you enter an editor
like this in version 4.5.2, the main menu disappears (including the option to
return to the home page, which might be disconcerting for some!). Don’t panic
though – there is a good reason for this. Whenever you enter an editor, the
item you are editing is ‘checked
out’ to you. This means that if there are other users who are
also allowed to access the administration tool, they will not be able to edit
an item while you have it checked out.
In order to check an item back in (and therefore make it available for
editing by any administrator), you need to either click on the ‘save’ toolbar
button (if you want to keep your changes), or the ‘cancel’ toolbar button
(which will discard your changes). Once you click on one of these buttons, the
main menu will magically re-appear. In previous versions of mambo, you were
able to just jump straight to another menu item, and this meant that the item
you were editing would be left checked out – and unvailable for others to edit.
The section editor allows you to enter a title and name for your section, and any
introductory text you wish to add. The ‘title’ is intended as a short word or
two which can be used as the text for menus or lists, whereas the ‘name’ can be
slightly longer and can be used as the heading for the page. You can use the
same text for both the title and the name if you want.
You can also specify an image to associate with the section. Images can be
uploaded using the Media
Manager – see the official documentation on the Mambo help website
(http://help.mamboserver.com) for
more information on how to do this. The ‘Image Position’ option allows you to
specify whereabouts on the page your specified image (if any) should appear.
For now, we can ignore this and the other options on this page, and move onto
the ‘description’ area which is the large grey box at the bottom of figure 5
(it might not be grey on your system – it depends on your template).
Figure
5 – The Section Editor
The ‘description’ area allows you to describe the contents of the section.
Remember that the contents of a section will be one or more categories, and
when the end user (a visitor to your website) sees this description, it will
also be accompanied by a list of the categories within the section.
The description area actually makes use of a third party (ie. non-Mambo)
component, known as an HTML
Editor. Mambo allows you to use any one of a number of
different HTML editors, but the recommended one, and the one illustrated here,
is called Tiny MCE.
This editor produces HTML code which is compliant with international standards
as set by the World Wide Web consortium. Don’t worry if you don’t know what
that means, but just be aware that it is possible you might see a slightly
different editor to the one shown here.
If an HTML editor does not appear on your system, you will need to
install and/or activate an editor. Mambo comes with Tiny MCE already
installed, but for some reason not activated. For details on how to activate the Tiny MCE editor, see appendix B.
You can use the toolbar area at the top of the description box to modify the format of your
description – to add bold, italics, bullet points, etc. The
‘Styles’ dropdown box lists all of the pre-defined style settings that have
been set up for the template you are using. The effect this has on the
selected text could be anything from changing its colour, to changing its size,
to adding a background image, and many other settings. There might not be any
styles available to you, but if there are, you can highlight some text and
select a style to apply to that text.
Next to the ‘Styles’ dropdown box is another dropdown which allows you
to specify the type of
information that you are writing – for example you can specify
that the selected text be formatted as a main heading, or a sub-heading, or
just the text of a paragraph. The manner in which these options affect your
text depends on the settings of the template. The other options in the toolbar
are very similar to the types of options that you get in most word processors,
so their operation should be reasonably familiar to you. You can click on the
question mark icon for more help if you need it. (See figure 6.)
Figure
6 – Tiny MCE HTML Editor
When you have finished creating or editing your section, click on the
‘Save’ toolbar button at the top-right of the screen to save your work. This
will take you back to the Section Manager, as shown in figure 4 above. Note,
you can also use the ‘Apply’
toolbar button to save your work without leaving the editor (this is a new
feature in version 4.5.2).
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