Using the onCourse CMS

onCourse is a Content Management System

Many of the pages in your onCourse web site are generated entirely from the information in your desktop onCourse system. Pages about classes, courses and tutors are like that. But some pages are purely Web pages, with no corresponding entry in you local onCourse system.

To edit the Web pages, all you need is a browser and a web administrator’s account login. A web admin login is completely separate from your onCourse student, tutor or administrator account. One web admin login is usually created with your onCourse web account, but we can add more— just ask.

Once you have a web administrator account, go to your site’s home page, and add /portal/admin to the end of the URL. Log in and you will see a site map and a green bar at the top of the page, which shows you that you are logged in as a web administrator.

Edit an existing page

Use the site map or the usual site navigation to go to the page you want to edit. If this is a web page (not a course page etc), a button “edit page” will appear near the top left. When you click this button, the content of the page will be replaced with a content editing form. At any time while editing, you can click the tabs at the top of the content area to view the original page, to preview the new content, or to edit the content.

You can change the following details for each web page:

• Page Type Different page types have different layouts.
• Title This text may appear at the top of the page, depending on the layout.
• Short Name This will appear in the navigation bar. Leave blank to use the title.
• Body The main content for the page. You can use rich text formatting.
• Add image tags… Your onCourse desktop application allows you to define attachments, including images and PDF files. These attachments will be transferred to your web site, and can be used inline as images or listed at the end of the content. If you click the “Add image tags…” button, you will see a list of those attachments that can be displayed inline. That includes all the image types as well as PDF (only the first page of a PDF will display inline). Use the popup menu to select the attachment you want, and it will be displayed below. If you click “insert image tag,” a tag for that image will be inserted at the current cursor position in the body content, or at the start of the content if there is no selection. Note that if any text is selected, it will be deleted and replaced with the image tag.
• Visible to Public If this is not set, this page will not appear in the navigation menus. However, you can still view the page at a URL like /page/123.
• Weight You can change the order of the pages in the navigation by changing their weight. Heavier (bigger) numbers will sink to the bottom.
• Location Click on “change parent…” to move the page to a different place in the navigation hierarchy.
• Menu Link Although the usual way to navigate to a page use a URL like /page/123, you can change the URL on the navigation here. For example, if you entered /promotions/special for a page called “Special Offer,” then clicking “Special Offer” in the navigation would display /promotions/special in the browser’s URL when the page is displayed.
• URL Aliases The default URL for a page, such as /page/123, will never change and should be used for long-lived links. However, you can add as many ways of accessing your pages as you like. Click the “+” button to add aliases, and enter the URL you want. Note that they must start with “/” and reserved locations such as /course/… and /class/… will be ignored.
• Attachments To display a list of attached documents, selected from your predefined attachments, click the “add attachment…” button.

Add a new page

Use the site map or the usual site navigation to go to the page you want to be the parent of the new page. If you want the new page to appear in the top-level list in the navigation, go to the home page. If you are logged in as a web admin, you can click on the “New Page” button near the top left. After that, follow the “Edit an existing page” link above.

Regions and Blocks

If you want some content to appear on every page of your web site, you can create blocks. If you click on the “Show blocks” button at the top, a number of regions will appear on your page, with names such as “content” and “left.” If you click on the “add block” button in one of these regions, a new form will appear that allows you to edit the new block:

• Block name Only for your use, and only displays when blocks are displayed for the admin.
• Region Your body layout has a number of predefined regions, each of which contains blocks. You can move a block to a different region.
• Weighting You can change the order of the blocks in the region by changing their weight. Heavier (bigger) numbers will sink to the bottom.
• Content This content will be displayed in the block in all pages in your site. You can use all the usual rich text content, including image tags (you can use the image tag tool below the content box).
• Attachments Just like a web page, you can add attachments such as PDFs here, and they will shows as a list at the bottom of the block.