This short video walks you through how to add content to your Tendenci Open Source CMS website using the basic content types Pages, Articles, and News.

*Changes for t7 version of tendenci

Please note that if you are on T6 or T7 versions of Tendenci your "Pages" "News" and "Articles" will now be available to you in the "apps" menu.

Click on the app name to navigate to that application

Once inside the application utilize your app drop down to add new content

Adding Pages, News and Articles to Your Site

In this help video I want to talk a little bit about how you add content to your website, via articles, news, and pages.

Articles, News and Pages can all be found inside your content menu from the admin bar and to add a new one you simply click the green button to add a new page, news or article item. The way those pages, articles and news are used in your site is a little bit different, but adding content to them is very similar.

• News items would be stories that are about your community or organization or written by your marketing and PR team that talk about what's going on.
• Articles can be a lot like blog posts or they can be updates or announcements for members. They are very good for an number of different general content items that you guys are going to be posting frequently.
• Pages are the core of the content on your site. As you know, there's the homepage and then there's internal pages. Those pages, when you add a new page, automatically go up in the main navigation menu options so that you can then add it to the main menu and other navigations if you like.

To come over and see the inside of each of these... here's adding a page. The body and the style for adding them is very similar. Each of them will have a title bar and you can type the title of the page and the URL path will automatically be generated for you. If you want to change it, you simply go in and you can make the URL whatever custom URL you would like to use.

Then you can add the body of the content. You are able to do a lot inside this WYSIWYG editor, which is very much like going in to a Word Document or if you've been on a WordPress website before and done any content updates, this is starting to become more universal for adding and editing text and images on he web.

WYSIWYG Features

• Formatting - So you'll have seen some of these where you can bold, italicize, underline your text. You've got your options for formatting based on the size of the header or paragraph. There's bullets, tables, centering things. You can paste from Word if you're pasting from a Word Document and it will remove some of that formatting that Word likes to add in. You can even change the color of your text here.
• Upload and Insert Media - One of the cool things you are able to do is upload and insert media so you can come in and upload spreadsheet templates and PDFs. And we'll open up a couple and insert them. So here's a PDF and a spreadsheet and when I insert those you see they put the little graphic next to it that shows this is a CSV spreadsheet file and here's a PDF so that members, when you save this, can go in and download and use the documents, fill them out, submit them, read what information's on them, however you've been trying to using them.
• <Edit HTML - You can also go into the WYSIWYG editor andedit the source code and you see we've got some of the HTML in there and if you wanted to edit or add anything there you could do that.

Tags allow people to search by them, so we could have one called "documentdownloads" and anytime I added a page or document with this tag it would be searchable.

And then here's your permissions. Each page, article and news content item has these content specific permissions based on groups, members, or individual users being able to view or change them or you can have the public view them. And this allows you to really customize what you're putting up there. You can have internal documents that only your staff should be seeing. You could have a volunteer group with volunteer updates for an event for what the different roles should be that only those volunteers are able to view and see. It gives you a lot of flexibility and protection in controlling the content that you have online so you can access the information from any internet capable device anywhere for your organization and know that only the people that should have access to it do.

We also have the ability here to add different categories and adding a new category is very easy. You simply type (the Category name you want to use) in, and it shows up in the drop box and this is a new site we're setting up so that is the first category and sub category that we've added. You can add a second one, the same way and now they both will show up and this will now be saved on your site across all pages. When you come down to categories those options will be there.

And then you have the ability to add SEO Meta. If you've got somebody helping you or if you are familiar with using Search Engine Optimization keywords then you would basically want to have those keywords come in for the page based on what is going on with the page, the canonical URL, the description and that helps make sure you get found in the search engines.

So you can add the page, you'll see this is what it looks like with these hyperlinks to download these files and we can also come up here to the main navigation. And you'll see that now the new page is available if we want to add it to our main navigation items.

So adding content via articles and news is very similar and the only difference between articles and news and pages is how content can be displayed on your site. Articles and news do not get added to the navigation menu page so you would not be able to just link them over there. There are tricks to do that and that is in a help file and we can always help you if you have questions about that.

Adding an Article

Articles also have this summary item so that you can summarize what it's going to be about. It will use that to display a short intro to what it is inside the search box. The same WYSIWYG body and you have the tags and with articles and news it has a source and a website for that source in case it's from some other place or someone's contributing to your site with their own content. It has a release date and time including a drop down for the time zone. Then you can determine whether it's featured content, official content. You can add a contact name for who wrote the article. This is really great for promoting your members and your sponsors if they are going to be guests and contribute to your website with content about them, here's the information that would be displayed publicly or to anyone who has permissions to view this site. So for example, here if you set this to be members only, the contact information in the entire article would only be available for your members to view. So that would be adding an article.

Adding a News Story

Adding a news story is very much the same as adding an article. You see the body title, it has the source, it also has the release date and the contact information. The way that the news is a little bit different is that when you set up your site out of the box it already has the news in here and it will allow you pull it to the homepage into the content, a little bit different from the articles.

As I've shown in a previous video with this you have featured news and featured articles, this lets you customize these two different types of content specifically to pull in how you want to in your site. So inside these spaces one of them can be articles and the other can be news and those can have different topics and themes. For examples, your news could be your press releases and what's going around what your organization is accomplishing, where as the articles could be things that are what your members are writing about and contributing to and what information would help with your cause, for example and how people could get involved.

So that's adding content to a Tendenci website. And there's a lot more to come in future videos so keep watching!