The administrator classifies web pages into two distinct types - static and dynamic. Static pages are those where the content is displayed on screen as it is entered. Dynamic pages are those which are built from further queries to other data, and whilst they may have editable sections contain largely lists, forms or displays of data from other sections of the administrator which are themselves editable instead. Examples of static pages are often pages such as 'About Us', 'General Information' etc, whilst dynamic pages may contain lists of news items from a news database, or products from a shopping cart.
Static pages are the ones that you will find editable in the 'Web Pages' section. Dynamic pages are not edited in this way as they only contain code to hook in content from other areas. It is however possible that the dynamic pages are based on templated data views, and in this case these views may be found in the Templates section if that has been made available to you.
Static pages are those which you can edit directly as opposed to those made up of dynamic databased content, and you will find them listed under 'Web Pages', 'Edit Pages' or 'Edit content' in the administrator.
As well as the content being editable, you can also edit the page title and file name (which normally ends with a .html file extension for the web), edit meta data about the page which search engines will read, and assign the page content to a particular template.
By and large, content is the only thing you will need to edit, however all the important options are provided below:
New pages can be created in the way that any other data is added, however are slightly more advanced in that the page also has to correspond to a particular address on the web itself. This is a very simple extra process, only requiring that the page is also given a file name in the html_page_name field when it is created, followed by one extra step to activate these names.
First go into the web pages section. You will see the introductory screen, with the search and filter boxes and the beginning of the page list below. You can add a new page in the same way that you would add to any page of content - see adding data in the core concepts section for how to do this.
The 'html page name' field is found on the 'display' tab. Here you should give the page a file name, according to the following rules: Only use a-z in upper or lower case, the numbers 1-9, hyphens and underscore characters. Spaces are not permitted in web addresses, so hyphens or underscores should take their place. Finally the file needs to end in the .html extension.
Some good names are: my-subject.html, news-archive-2009.html etc. You should keep the names as short, clear and concise, yet descriptive as possible. Remember that this name will form part of the URL and as such people may need to remember it easily.
Finally, there is an extra step - the file name you have entered needs to be written to a further file on the server, which the server reads in order to know where to go to display the page. This needs to be manually done when you have completed your page. On the main Admin Menu go to Tools, and select Activate URLs. It is that simple, however please note that this writes out the entire set of page names from the web pages section into the file, plus those from any other pages where this functionality has been set up, so any other names you have altered will go live too, replacing previous names.
Once you have set the page live - you can test this by entering the page name in the URL bar after your main web site address (eg. http://www.mysite.com/my-page-name.html - you can then link to the page from other pages on the site, include it as a menu item, submit it to search engines etc.
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further help and support, please contact Paragon Digital on 0775 646 0555.