Using Gestalt 2 CMS

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Unlike most web sites, Gestalt 2 sites function more as a computer program than a collection of documents. When you edit a page in a normal web site, you are opening a file, making changes to that file, and saving it in order to publish that information to the web.

On Gestalt, you are making changes to entries in a large table of information stored in a database. The toolkit pages you access when you want to make changes are built to allow those updates to be stored and tracked in a way that simplifies what would otherwise be a very technical task.

Contents

Getting Around

See the main article Getting around Gestalt 2

Terminology

One of the challenges people have faced in the maintenance of their web sites has been the abstract nature of the editing process. So much about building web sites does not have an end result that is visibly different from doing nothing at all. To cushion this process in Gestalt, we introduce some metaphors that are tied to more traditional publishing processes. By associating the technical processes with something familiar, our goal is to make the toolkit easier to understand and work with.

Article

An article is the basic element in the gestalt database. With it, you can string together any element that the gestalt software is capable of displaying. An article may consist of as little as a headline and a block of text-- or, the article may be as complicated as a customer's profile, or records of a file's download activity. In many cases, the way that article is assembled is a product of automation in the gestalt software. (See Article Group) And, in all situations, you as the user have the ability to override what the Gestalt software is doing and manually control the contents & ordering of elements in any article on the site.

For more information, see the main article description

Page

The page is the canvas upon which articles are placed. Most of the time, the terms 'page' and 'article' are interchangeable. A particular page's composition is defined not by the content of the article, so much as the composition of the page template.

For more information, see the main page description

Page Template

The page template is what defines the appearance of an article or collection of articles to the audience. When a Gestalt site is constructed, the developer is responsible for assembling a collection of page templates that are appropriate to the site's application. Beyond the basic style, the developer creates "containers" which are blank spaces in the template where the Gestalt software inserts content from its database.

For more information, see the main page template description

Container

A container is a blank space defined within a page template. Each container has a name which is associated with a particular area on the page template. In most cases, a page template will have two or three containers, one of which will contain the main article on the page, and the others displaying material concerning navigation or other supplementary material.

For more information, see the main container description

Publish

When an article has been changed, before those changes are visible to the public, it must be published. In technical terms, this means that information in the Gestalt site's database must be combined fresh with the page template it is assigned to be shown through. This new composition can then be saved to the Web server's disks as a cache file that can be served to the audience. In addition to this function, publishing an article also marks it as having been changed; and those changes were definitive enough that if we were to view the history of the article, we would notice something different between it and its predecessors. At each point that article is published, then, the editing tools save a backup copy of the article in that state.

For more information, see the main publishing description

Toolkit

The toolkit is a page in your Gestalt site where you have access to many of the administrative functions of the system. It is a dashboard where you can quickly gain access to all of your regular maintenance functions.

For more information, see the main toolkit description

Edit

On every page of a Gestalt site, when you're logged in to make changes, you have the option of clicking the "edit" link in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This will open the standard editing tools for that article, meaning the main article on the page. Most of the time, this will be the article that you actually want to gain access to. But, there will be some cases where you'll need to display everything on the page that can be edited.

For more information, see the main edit description

Making Edits

Gestalt 2 is a content management system. This is a general class of software; the name implying that users can review, add, and change content stored within the system. This sounds like a simple enough proposition, and at its basic level it is. The challenge comes in finding a balance between the basic needs of people to have quick access and control, and the ability to fine-tune details that are of small concern on a day-to-day basis. These goals are met by Gestalt by dividing editing tasks into two areas:

Editing the "Main Article"

When you're browsing a Gestalt site, your web browser's address bar will generally show you an address ending with a long ID number. This ID number represents the main article that has been shown through the page template. When you click the "edit" button, this is the article that you are making changes to. There may be other articles attached to that page and being displayed in other containers, however the designers of the page template should make it obvious which article being shown is the main article.

Editing other elements on the page

As discussed before, containers are blocks in the page template where information from the Gestalt database can be shown. In order to make changes to material that is not accessible by the main "edit" link at the top of the page, we have to have a way of getting at these other items. This is done by using the orange "Gestalt 2" block at the top of the page. Floating your pointer over this block will expose an additional group of options, including a link entitled "edit specific elements on this page". Clicking on this will give you the option to reveal all containers on the page and the options that you have for editing the article's place within those containers.

For a more detailed explanation of how this works, you can view a screencast on How to edit elements on the page.

Publishing

The convenience of being able to sign into the live site and make changes directly to it must be balanced with the ability to review and revise those changes before they are seen by the audience. And, since these changes are being made directly to the live site, there must be some artificial division between that material which is out in that material which is not yet out. The metaphor that Gestalt uses to make this differentiation is that of "publishing".

That which is "published" can be seen by the audience. That which is "pending publish" has been published before, but has been changed and requires re-publishing before the audience can see the most recent version. Articles can also be designated as "draft", which indicates the article is not visible in the public site or in any of the site's search facilities.

Your list of active articles

As you make changes to articles in the Gestalt database, you may or may not be publishing them immediately after you've made changes. You may want to wait and review the changes that you made with a colleague, or you may want to reveal all of your changes to your audience at one time. Whatever the case, the Gestalt site will keep track of all of the changes that you have made but not yet published. This will be done using a list on the right side of your editing cools pages entitled "my active articles". Next to each item on this list, there will be a checkbox that you may select when you are ready to publish these articles as a group. This makes it easy for you to deploy a whole collection of changes simultaneously.

Watching what other people are doing

If you are at administrator with the proper privileges, you will have access to the "pending updates" module in your toolkit. This will allow you to view all active articles for all users on the website that are currently pending publish. With your Gestalt site set up in a certain way (specifically, so that only certain users can confirm the publishing of articles) you can exercise a great deal of editorial control over what material is shown. This is, of course, purely optional, but is there if you need it.

Controlling Site Structure

As you edit different articles in the gestalt website you're likely to encounter the "search group" element. The name of this element is cryptic, but is very important to defining how different articles are related to each other. When you see a search group element, what you're seeing is a reference to that articles parent article. That is to say, if we were to her range all of the pages of the site hierarchical way, the page where you see the search group element would be beneath him the article referenced by the ID within the search group element. The Gestalt site has several different tools to define these references:

Auto-linking in the text editor

When working with any text elements, you may easily add links to any articles you wish to create but do not yet exist. If, for instance, you're creating a collection of articles from the ground up, instead of manually creating each article and then linking them to each other after the fact, you can simply define a new article by the link users would take to get there. This is done by wrapping the text you would like to be a link with a carat(^) at the beginning and end of the link text, ^like this^. Then, when you update the text element, you will see anything you had wrapped with carats have turned into links. Initially, these links will take you to the "auto link builder" tool. This tool will ask you what you would like this link to do when clicked on. You may say, for instance, you would like a new article to be created based on the article that the user is coming from. You can also specify the link go to an outside web address, an existing article, or to forget about the link entirely. This will allow you to build a hierarchy of pages very quickly without the need for advance planning.

Using the tree structure editor

Another way to define structure within a collection of articles in the Gestalt site is with tree structure editor. This allows you to define a hierarchy of articles much in the same way you might define a hierarchy of folders on your computer's hard drive. By defining a starting point (such as the website's home page) you can create child pages very quickly by simply entering in the name of the page that you wish to be underneath the currently selected item in the editor. This will create a page much in the same way that the Auto Link builder would create a child page. However, you don't need to know more in this case than what child pages should go underneath what other pages.

Main article: Tree Structure Editor

Using an article group form

While the standard article editor is available for you at all times, in certain cases parts of your website will be set up to allow simple editing of material in a predetermined format. For instance, a weblog entry generally contains a headline, dates, some text, and some keywords. So, instead of requiring you to add each of these elements individually using the standard editor, you can instead use what is called an "article group". There are various flavors of article group editors available, but all of them are set up to let you work with specific kinds of information in a specific format. This allows you to conveniently manage sections of the site with similar structure. When creating new entries and a part of the site like this, each of these entries will be keyed as children of the article where the article group originates. So, if you create a weblog entry, when you edit at that entry you can see there is a search group element. This element's value will refer back to the ID of the main page of the weblog.

Using special elements to invoke specific site behavior

While the architecture of the Gestalt 2 system is relentlessly open, it is also comes with certain pre-conditioned responses when particular values are attached to an article. Not all Gestalt sites will adhere to these, but all Gestalt sites can be made to. By attaching particular watchwords to an article, a Gestalt site can be made to react in a specific way. Below are possible functions that can be triggered:

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