Building websites with Falt4 CMS

• Think! Then build a structure for your websites which fits your needs.
• What content do you want on your site and how can you categorize it ?
• setup categories
• Build templates (site,sitecss,articles,weblog,modules)
• setup navigation & linking
• create articles

Its probably a good idea to get a piece of paper to write down your thougts.

To start building a website with your Falt4 CMS you should know what and how you want it. Lets say you want to build a personal website around you, your hobbies and some news, probably a guestbook and a survey too.

You should start with setting up the basic structure inside of Falt4:

• Create the navigation group which you are going to use (this will give you the #groupXY replacementtag for the sitetemplate)
• Setup the content categories (eg. a category for the "news"(blue), one for different single pages say "default articles"(yellow) and one for your hobbies "climbing"(green) and "nature"(red)) Tip: if you like to display more than one article somewhere it is best practice to setup a categorie for that group.
  

Think about how you want to position all these things. Lets say you want:

• a header at the top with some nifty graphics
• the navigation on the left side
• below the navigation the survey
• content in the middle
• and headlines (the newest articles) on the right

This is how the structure would look like:


Now we are going to create the basic site template with an extra stylesheet.
You build a template the same way as you create a static website. The content, navigation, survey and so on are beeing include trough replacement tags.

You can either complete this task localy or use the integrated template html editor, where you have the possibility to insert the replacement tags. In this example we create the templates locally and upload them later.

The site template html for the above structure would be:

3col_site_template.html

The additional css file for this template would look something like this:

3col_site.css

As you can see in the site template there are only a few replacementtags necessary:

• #group1 (1,2,3....n depends on your navigation group ID) you can find this tag in the navigation administration
• #engine this is used to display the actual content like articles, news or modules
• #position_left1 (1,2,3...n) is used to bind modules on it. You can bind the module in the module administration editing the default settings of the module you wish to be shown there

If you created the template you want or edited the above to fit your needs then its now time to create the content specific templates to show:

• articles (single content pages)
• weblogs (news or bloglike pages, multiple content page shown on one site)
• modules (guestbook,survey)

We are going to build the article template first because the weblog template is just a simpler article template.
For a better understanding you should now login to your Falt4 admnistration and create a new article.
The title you choose for your article will become the replacementtag #title
The introduction part becomes #content1, the main part #content2 and the finishing part will be #content3.
The author will be accessible trough #autor , the creation date is #date.

This example is just a simple table holding all of these tags.
article_template.html




The theory of Falt4's weblog function is basically that it loops trough a content category and shows each article. It is possible to show the full articles however its more common to only show the introduction part and give the user a link to view the full article. To get this working you just remove the main content and the finishing part (#content1,2) and add the #read_more replacementtag below.

weblog_template.html




If you want to use modules like the guestbook or the survey you have to create a module template. There are only two replacementtags for this: #module and #modname

If you need more control over a specific site with a module you can add the module trough an article with the #module(guestbook) replacementtag in the content area.

module_template.html

If you do not have uploaded the templates already, do so now.

You should now create the articles which do not belong to a listing like news, climbing or nature. You do not have to fill them at this point but you could. This has to be done in order to be able to set the linking in the navigation.

We are now going to setup the navigation points.

Set the linking depending on what you wish to accomplish. If you only want to show one article then use the content link. To create a news or weblog like listing use weblog linking on a category.

The example above (see graphic/structure) would be done with:

• create a content link "about me" with linking on the article "about me"
• create a content link "contact" with linking on the article holding the contact information
• create a weblog link "news" with linking on the category "news"
• create a content link "hobbies" with a link on the description what you hobbies are
• create a weblog link "climbing" with linking on the category "climbing" which holds all the related articles
• create a weblog link "nature" with linking on the category "nature" which holds all the related articles

If you wonder why you cant see any of its content by clicking on a link on your website you probably missed the publishing of the articles. This can be done over the article listing by clicking on the two round arrows on the right side of each article (there is a tick if already published).


Now you can start adding content in the various categories. If you want to list three articles eg. ropes,mountains,and technique you just create the articles and save them in the appropriate category and they will show up as soon as they are saved and published.