Creating and Managing Pages

To create and modify your site's pages, click Structure > Pages on the control panel menu bar. You'll then see the Page Index. The list shows all of the site's pages and their structural hierarchy (which determines how URLs are generated).

Getting Started

When you create a new Webvanta site, we populate it with a few standard pages, depending on the SmartTheme that you chose.

There's also a number system pages included with most SmartThemes, including:

• Not Found (your 404 error page)
• Login
• Forgot Password
• Change Password
• User Welcome
• Search Results

In addition, there's several pages in the knowledgebase folder that are the standard category, list, and item pages for the Webvanta knowledgebase (information portal) system. Depending on your site, you may not need any of these pages.

You're free to delete any of the pages (except a few that are required), but you don't need to delete pages to remove them from the menu. Just delete the alias for the page that is in the Menu section. It doesn't hurt to keep around pages that you aren't using (though someone can access a page if they know or can guess it's URL), and you may want them later.

Adding Pages

To create a new page at the main level, click the "Add Page" button at the top of the screen.

To create a sub-page of an existing page, click the green plus sign at the right side of the row for that page. A sub-page's URL will automatically include that of the parent page; for example, if you create a sub-page of the About page and specify the slug to be staff, the URL would be sitename.webvanta.com/about/staff.

Page Templates

Every page has an associated template that determines its overall HTML structure. We provide templates you can start from, or you can create your own; there are no constraints on the HTML you can use to structure your pages.

New sub-pages use the same template as the parent page (or the home page, for top-level pages), by default. You can override this by setting the template for the sub-page on the Edit Page screen.

Each template typically defines one or more editable regions, which could be a banner area and two or more columns. The template provides all of the content that doesn't vary from one page to another of a type: in general, this is the header, navigation, and footer.

The editable regions defined by the template are where the content that is unique to a given page appears.

See Using Templates to Define Page Structure for details.

Creating and Editing Pages

When you create a new page, you'll see the Page screen. You can edit an existing page by clicking on it's slug in the page index, and the same screen is displayed.

On the Page screen, you can enter or modify all of the settings for the page. In addition, you can enter the content for the page's editable regions here; there is one tab for each region. This information can also be edited using the in-place editor while viewing the actual page.

See Using Regions for Page-Specific Content for details on working with page-specific content.

Editing Page Settings

Each page's settings include:

• Page Title: the HTML title, which appears in the browser's title bar.
• Slug: the page's address, which is appended to the base URL of the site (after the parent page(s) slug, if any).
• Label: sets the default navigation label when the page is added to the menu.
• Keywords are used in the page's metatags and are not generally visible to site visitors. Keywords can be ignored, as search engines no longer pay attention to them.
• Description is also used in the page's metatags and is generally not visible to site visitors, but it often is displayed by a search engine as the body of the listing for a search result, following the page title. So it is important to have a good, unique description for each page. Search engines typically use only the first 150 characters or so.
• Template: choose from any of the templates present in your site. If set to "inherit", then the template used by the parent page is used. For top-level pages, "inherit" uses the same template as the home page.
• Status: set to Published for pages that should be visible on the site. "Hidden" and "Draft" are unpublished states; these pages are visible only through the admin interface. The difference between these two states is only in how you use them; you might use Draft for a new page that is not ready to review, and Hidden for a page that will probably not be used again, but you want to keep it around just in case.
• Access: Determines who can view the page. If you do not have the membership system enabled, the values are Public and Protected. Public pages can, of course, be seen by anyone. Protected pages can be viewed only by someone logged in as a site admin or content editor. Membership sites can, in addition, have pages viewable only by members, or only by members of a certain type.

Adding Pages to the Menu

The menu is managed via the Menu admin page (Structure > Menu). On this page you'll see the page list on the left and a the menu list on the right. When you create a new page, it is not automatically added to the menu. To add a page to the menu you just drag it into the Menu list.

Dragging a page into the Menu area does not move it; it simply creates an alias to that page. You can add the same page at multiple places in the menu, with different labels if you'd like; and the order and hierarchy of the menu can be different from that of the pages themselves.

You can arrange the menu in a hierarchy if you want drop-down or fly-out menus. You can also use the second level of the menu hierarchy to create local navigation that only appears on sub-pages.

For details about working with menus, see Creating Navigation.