Taming Content Management Systems

Change to CMS they said, it's easier than writing HTML they said. Any one can do it they said. Yeah right!

I've been tasked with writing the Help and Support pages. There's one thing you learn very fast when you start writing documentation and that is you are going to have to exercise all the features on all the modules. Which is where the fun starts. This blog (how I hate that word) is my attempt to write down some of the interesting things I've found. And provide a forum where you can add your comments and discussions.

We'd love to hear from you if you are using OctEportal to drive your website. If you come across anything you think can help others, be my guest! Add it to the discussion. However be polite. It's only 'obvious' when you've been using it for ages, others may not have your intelligence, wit and perspicacity. Be patient! And we reserve the right to remove obscene, irrelevant and otherwise obnxious comments.

Miraculix

Use Feedback

Most restaurants go out of business because their customers desert them? Why - negative feedback by customers to their friends, rarely to the restaurant and they vote with their feet.

WE can get feedback. Use the feedback module to ask your customers how you can improve, etc. Sometimes you need the response to be anonymous, but mostly you'd like to know who said what. Then you can reward them with at least an acknowledgement. And you need to make it easy to do so.
If they've just made a purchase, you'll have their email

TIP

In your feedback module add a 'From EMail' question. This picks up the customer's email from their login. You can also add a 'From Name' which will fill in the user's name for you as well

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Use the Editor

Use the Editor not HTML

Use the Editor not HTML. Let the Editor do the heavy lifting. HTML is not what you are at.

When you come from an HTML environment, having built all your pages by hand, crafting them in DreamWeaver etc. You get very attached to HTML. DON'T DO IT! Use the Design panel. You can do 99% of what you need with the editor. And it works! If you are having trouble with alignment, etc. and you've had to do it more than a few times, your Skin is probably at fault. Don't adjust because 'it just needs tweaking'. WRONG! Give us a call and we can discuss mdofiying the skin.

Where I've had trouble with my content and the format it is usually when importing from applications such as Dreamweaver. I've used a couple of strategies:

Copy the original page content (from the original website) and paste it into a TEXT editor. This strips out all formatting. Select all the cleaned text and paste into OctEportal editor. Then rebuild the formatting using the Editor.
Sometimes it's just odd colours, or strange formatting in OctEportal that I can't get right. In this case I switch to the HTML panel, select all and copy, then paste into an external TEXT Editor where I clean up the formatting (global search and replace is a marvellous tool). Then I paste the cleaned HTML back into the HTML Editor (NOT the design panel!)

Only once have I actually used the HTML panel. And that was to replace some <p> tags with <br />. And I'm sure I could have done that if I'd really looked.

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