- Details
-
Published on Friday, 01 April 2005 00:00
-
Written by MamboHut
Page 5 of 9
Creating
an Item
The next thing to do is to create an item – that is, an article of
content that fits into one of your categories. To do this, you can either go
to a section via the ‘Content by Section’ option in the ‘Content’ menu (which
will then take you to a list of all items in that section – you can filter down
further by category if you wish), or simply click on the ‘All Content Items’
icon on the home page or in the ‘Content’ menu (which will take you to a list
of all items in all sections – you can then filter down further by section
and/or category if you wish).
Figure
8 – Accessing the Item List
To avoid confusion, it is recommended that you use the ‘Content by
Section’ menu system to access your items most of the time – it will then be
clearer which items you are looking at, especially when you have a lot of
items. The item list appears as shown in figure 9 (note: if you access the
list via the ‘All Content Items’ icon, you will have an additional drop-down
list available to filter down to a particular section).
Figure
9 – The Item List
When creating or editing items, you have a few more options available
to you than for sections and categories. As you can see in figure 10, the item editor contains two HTML editors. This allows you to
break up your content into two parts if you wish: an introduction, and the main
article. Splitting up your content in this way enables you to present all of
the items in a particular category in the style of a ‘Blog’ or journal.
A Blog
(short for ‘weblog’) is an increasingly popular way of presenting information
or articles that are updated on a regular basis – for example news or press
releases. Instead of a simple list of links to the different articles, you
present a title and an opening paragraph or two along with a link to the full
article. This helps your website’s visitors to scan through the articles on offer
and select the one they want to read. The opening paragraph can be the first
paragraph of the article, or a summary of what the article is about – a teaser,
to encourage the user to click on the link to the main article.
If you don’t want to use the blog method, you can just enter all of your
content in the first HTML editor, and leave the second one blank.
Figure
10 – The Item Editor
The tabbed dialog box on the right provides extra options for
controlling this content item. Figures 11 to 14 explain the first four tabs.
The final tab will be explained in the next section (Building a Menu – figure
15).
Figure
11 – Item Editor: Publishing Tab
Figure
12 – Item Editor: Images Tab
When you want to use one of the images in your content, use the special
‘mosimage’ button at the bottom left of the HTML Editor (see figure 6). This
will just insert the text
into your content – is a placeholder which instructs Mambo to insert
the next image in the list of content images at that location. The image won’t
be visible in your content until you preview the website.
You can use as many times as you like: each time the
placeholder is encountered, Mambo will just take the next image on
the list – so make sure the images in the list are in the correct order by
using the ‘up’ and ‘down’ buttons. If you have read appendix B below, or Netshine
Software’s Mambo
Glossary, you might recognise that mosimage is an example of a ‘mambot’.
Note: You can also use the ‘Media Manager’ to
upload and organise images into folders if you wish. The ‘Sub-Folder’ dropdown
box at the top of the images tab allows you to ‘drill-down’ into the folder you
require.
Figure
13 – Item Editor: Parameters Tab
Many of the settings on the parameters tab can be set at a global level
(by selecting the ‘Global Configuration’ icon on the home page), but they are
also presented here so that you can override the global settings for this
particular item if you wish. Version 4.5.2 has added a couple of extra options
to this tab, but they are not very important at this stage.
Figure
14 – Item Editor: Meta Info Tab
You have no rights to post comments
