Website creators: start here
This page is for people who build public websites on Exponential: agencies, freelancers, in-house web teams and ambitious editors. It tells you what this section offers, what to do in your first week, and where every answer is. Exponential is the open source content management system, framework and shop that runs in this administration; it continues the code base of eZ Publish, a product its creator discontinued after almost 18 years, and is led by 7x together with the Exponential Foundation (Who is 7x?, Who is the Exponential Foundation?).
Contents
- Your first week
- Plan
- Design and templates
- Content model
- Sites and languages
- Landing pages
- Media
- Search engines and addresses
- Forms, newsletter, shop and members
- Search
- Accessibility and speed
- Launch and after
- Other help you will use
Your first week
| Day | Do | Page |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Install a demo site on your machine and click through the administration | Your first site, step by step |
| 2 | Write down goals, visitors, content and features | Planning your website |
| 3 | Sketch the content tree and the classes | Site map and content inventory, Designing your content model |
| 4 | Choose a theme or plan your own design | Choosing a design or theme |
| 5 | Build one landing page and one article template | Landing pages with the layouts editor, Template overrides |
The reading path puts every page below in order.
Plan
- What you can build with Exponential
- Planning your website
- Site map and content inventory
- Choosing an install method for a new site
- Hosting requirements for a website
- Your first site, step by step
Design and templates
- Choosing a design or theme
- Site packages and the themes that ship
- Designs, siteaccesses and the design fallback chain
- Template overrides for site builders
- The pagelayout: your site's frame
- Stylesheets and scripts for your site
- Menus and navigation
- Branding: site name, logo, favicon and meta tags
Content model
- Designing your content model
- Content classes for websites
- Choosing datatypes for your fields
- Structuring the content tree
- Sections and object states for site builders
- Relations and content reuse
- Tagging content with eztags
Sites and languages
- Setting up several sites in one installation
- Building a multilingual site
- Language switchers and addresses per language
- Right-to-left sites
Landing pages
- Landing pages with the layouts editor
- Layout types, zones and blocks
- Layout rules: which page gets which layout
- Shared layouts: header, footer and prefooter
- Classic landing pages with ezflow
Media
Search engines and addresses
- SEO basics for Exponential sites
- Page metadata and social sharing
- XML sitemaps
- robots.txt for your site
- RSS feeds for your site
- URL aliases and nice URLs
- Redirects and moved content
- URL wildcards and custom aliases
Forms, newsletter, shop and members
- Forms with the information collector
- Building a contact form, step by step
- Spam protection for forms
- Reading and exporting form submissions
- Newsletters with cjw_newsletter
- Newsletter lists and subscriptions
- Sending newsletters safely
- Running a shop: overview
- Products, prices and VAT
- Basket, checkout and orders
- Payment gateways
- Member registration and members-only areas
- What visitors may see: the Anonymous role
Search
Accessibility and speed
- Accessibility for site builders
- Testing your site's accessibility
- Performance and caching for websites
- View cache and cache blocks
- HTTP caching, proxies and CDNs
- Static cache and the Velocity response cache
Launch and after
- The launch checklist
- Going live: hosts, HTTPS and siteaccesses
- Visitor statistics and analytics
- Maintaining your website
- Backups and restores
- Updates and upgrades for site owners
- Maintenance mode during changes
- Broken links and content checks
- Handing the site over to editors
- Website creators: frequently asked questions
Other help you will use
| For | Read |
|---|---|
| Your editors | Getting started, Editing content, The layouts editor |
| Administration tasks | Guides |
| Installing and serving | Installation book |
| Code beyond templates | Application creators: their own section of this help, next to this one |
| Project planning | Project managers: start here |
| Problems | When something goes wrong |
Tip
The help's search finds every page of this section: filter it by the audience Website creators.
Related pages
- The website creator's reading path
- Who is 7x?
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
See also: Individuals.
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