Organize Your Content
Contents
Webvanta provides you with a powerful tool for organizing your content in a database. The database comes preconfigured for managing articles and lists of links and other resources, but you can set it up for nearly any kind of information.
Benefits of Using the Database
By keeping content in the database, rather than in markup directly in your pages, you gain several big benefits:
- The content and presentation are completely separated. Site editors can add content without any concern about markup. Your templates then wrap the content in the proper markup automatically.
- You can reuse content in multiple places. You can assign any database content to any number of categories, and it appears on pages associated with each category.
- Pages are created for you automatically. Every item you add the database gets its own page automatically created for it, with user commenting. It also shows up on category pages and list pages.
Item Types
Before you can add an item to the database, you must identify what type of item it is, since different information is required for different item types. The item type determines what information is stored, and how it is displayed.
Your Webvanta site comes preconfigured with item types designed for typical resource pages and information portals. You can add custom item types that include whatever data fields you require.
Categories
By selecting an item type and filling in the metadata, you’ve answered the question “what is it?”. The next question is, “what’s it about?”
Categories enable you to organize the content of the database by topic. Categories are hierarchical and can be nested to any depth (sub-category, sub-sub-category, and so forth). An item can be assigned to any number of categories. Categories are much like tags, except that they are hierarchical, and they often use a controlled vocabulary (that is, a predefined set of terms, defined by the site administrator).
Learning to Use the Database
The database has tremendous power, and with that comes some complexity. Take some time to learn how to use it, and it will repay you many times over.
Here’s some resources to help you get started:
