The Basics of Content Management
Content Management
The Brick River platform is highly adaptive and works well for many types of organizations from agencies, companies, and non-profits, to churches and fraternal groups. It easily handles multiple website hosting, and merges the functionality of a flexible and powerful content management system, with a contact manager. Not only that, Brick River includes an email blaster and registration forms module accessed with an intuitive and clean user interface. All under one roof.
You provide the ideas, Brick River provides the tools for creating, editing, approving, and publishing them to the wide world. Our enterprise CMS makes it easy for you to work in a document editor, a full page WYSIWYG page editor, or a combination of the two.
Static and Dynamic Page Content
Brick River provides easy tools for the creation and management of web page content - both static and dynamic content. Virtually all websites are a mixture of static pages, dynamic pages, and both.
- Static content is relatively permanent and does not require routine maintenance. A simple homepage may require no more than a photo, a phone number, and headline to 'Call anytime for an appointment'. This content rarely needs to be edited - but when it does - it's nice when users can easily make changes without assistance from a designer or developer.
- Dynamic, or data-driven content is relatively impermanent and changes by the month, day, and hour - sometimes by the minute for a busy news site. A blog post or news page should show an up to date index of current posts or most recent articles with older articles receding to secondary pages and eventually to an archive.
Brick River site developers control the appearance of static and dynamic content using layouts. Each page is linked to layout - and each layout contains code to present either static or dynamic content or both.
Only administrators can create and edit layouts - a process requiring at least a few lines of code - which is documented thoroughly in another tutorial.
Static Page Content in Brick River
Brick River provides a full Page WYSIWYG editor that allows users to easily maintain static content directly on the page. To use this feature, developers create layouts with one or more editable sections. Using the page window in the web console, each editable section can be populated with text, images, links etc. Any changes are immediately reflected on the web when the page is published.
Dynamic Content in Brick River
Virtually all dynamic content in Brick River is managed by using views to create, edit, and approve content and contacts records. To use this feature, developers create layouts with code which retrieves the desired content from a view and adds it to the page automatically.
For example, a site that regularly features new news articles may have a news index page designed to display thumbnails for the three most recent news articles. Content creators never need to touch the news index page. By using the news view to create and publish a news article - Brick River automatically updates the news index page to include the new article.
Mixed Content in Brick River
A developer may create layouts which include both editable sections and code to present dynamic content. For example, A news index page may use an editable section at the top of the page to allow users to easily change the page title. Below the editable section, the page may include code to display the three most recent News articles.
Example
The following is an example of a page using a layout with mixed content. The layout includes two razor helpers and a variable which drive dynamic content to the page:
- @BRT.Sitemenu("in-nav"): It renders a list of links to pages related to the current page.
- @BRT.BreadCrumb("breadcrumb"): It renders breadcrumb links to parent pages.
- @Title: It renders the title of the page, and two razor functions which create editable areas on pages using the layout:
- @RenderBody(): This renders the editable area in the center column.
- @RenderSection("sidebar"): It renders the editable area in the right sidebar.
The Page Opened in Page Editor Window
Users who have permission to edit this page can use WYSIWYG tools in the page editor window to edit content in areas 4 and 5. Areas 1, 2, and 3 are rendered by the layout code and can not be edited here.
