Getting started
First steps in the administration: signing in, finding your way and the everyday tasks.
51 pages
- Your first static site in 15 minutes: the club site on GitHub Pages The last chapter - the finished club site published as a free static copy on GitHub Pages, with the setup wizard, a build, a check and a publish, and what changes for the guestbook and the members page.
- What is content management? What a content management system does (collect, manage, publish), what that means in Exponential, and the design step that comes before any click: planning the structure.
- The node tree and sections Content objects versus the nodes that place them in the tree, how a branch inherits its section, and what sections are used for (permissions and presentation).
- Classes, attributes and objects How a content class defines a kind of content through its attributes, how objects are created from it, and how versions, translations and the version limit work.
- Content and presentation Why content, logic and presentation are kept apart, and the two places a page is made: the page layout and the content view.
- Roles and policies, step by step How the role system decides who may do what: a role is a set of policies (module, function, limitation), assigned to users and groups, with the functions of the content module and what changed since the book.
- Creating a content class The steps and the choices in creating a class: groups, name, identifier, the object name pattern, attributes, and what happens to existing objects when you change it.
- The datatypes tour The datatypes of the Learning book, one by one, with what each stores, what to watch for, and what changed: dates, the deprecated enum, images, the keyword and matrix types, relations.
- Rich text tags The XML tags of the rich text datatype (headings, lists, emphasis, literal, links, anchors, tables, embedded objects, custom tags), the class parameter, and how the online editor and templates relate to them.
- Creating and editing objects Creating an object from a class, the locations bar (main location, move, add, remove), what extra locations do and do not do, and information collectors.
- Versions, translations and related content Going back to an older version, adding a translation, and the two ways to relate objects (the generic related-objects list and the relation datatypes), with the settings that control where browsing starts.
- Workflows and triggers What a workflow, an event, a trigger and the multiplexer are, which event types ship today, and where to build a first approval workflow.
- More functions of the administration The administrator functions the Learning book lists after content (trash, URL addresses, link management, RSS, caches, search statistics, system information, sections, PDF export, extensions, packages, notifications)…
- Planning an example site: the club portal The book's worked planning example, a portal for a nature photography and astronomy club, turned into a recipe for planning any site: requirements, classes, the tree, with the classes written out as attribute lists.
- Users, groups and roles in the example Sections, user groups and role definitions for the club portal, done step by step, with the settings (default user group, policies that skip the check) and what to check today.
- Template principles: page layout, content views, attributes How a page is assembled from templates, from pagelayout.tpl down to a single attribute; view modes, your own view, a print layout, and where styles and images go.
- Template syntax basics: comments, delimiters, variables, flow The basics of the template language as the book teaches them (comments, braces in JavaScript, variables and their scope, section and if) with what to write today (foreach, def and set, no inline script).
- Fetching content in templates The functions of the content module that templates use to get data (a node, an object, lists, trees, counts, versions, the current user) written as today's fetch calls.
- Caching in templates: overall caches and cache blocks The settings that switch template compiling and the view cache on or off while you develop, how {cache-block} keys and expiry work, and the PHP operator list that adds simple operators.
- Overriding templates How the template system finds a template (override rules first, then the designs in order), the syntax of override.ini.append.php, and the match keys.
Documentation license
This documentation is free documentation, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or later.
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