The CMS interface is comprised of several important elements
- The global menu bar at the top of the screen.
- The contextual menu bar at the top of the screen located below the global navigation bar.
- The page-specific controls below the secondary navigation bar.
- The main content area located in the middle of the screen, which is specific to the menu item chosen.
You may ignore the two following items when you are getting started.
- The expandable file navigation sidebar located on the left-hand side of the screen.
- The expandable gadgets sidebar located on the right-hand side of the screen.
As we go through the items, we will focus only on the things you will need to know to get started.
The global menu bar
The bar at the top with the “OUCampus” logo on the left, contains the global menu options. The grey strip below contains the contextual items – the items related to the website and page you are currently editing. We will start with the blue global bar.
Starting from the left there is
- Dashboard,
- Content,
- Reports,
- Add-Ons,
- Setup
and a bit further down on the bar you will find the
- Search icon,
- The site drop-down
- Your user account,
- And the Help icon on the end.
Let’s walk through the things you’ll use right away.
Dashboard
Under Dashboard, the Overview can be a useful place to check-in files you’ve been working on across your site. The tool puts all of our checked-out files in one place.
Content
This is where you will spend most of your time when editing in the CMS. Pages are the first selection when you hover. Pages will show you the files within your site, and you can navigate around the files, add/delete files, and other file and folder management.
You will also find Assets, which is where your Image Galleries, Forms, and other custom assets can be created and edited.
The last item in the Content menu is the Recycle bin. It works exactly the same as your trash can or recycle bin on MAC and Windows. You can recycle pages, images, documents, or anything else and they will end up in here, except for folders, which the system will try to delete completely from the system. If you attempt this by mistake, the system will ask you to confirm by typing in the word, “delete”. However, if you’re just deleting files, they will all end up in the Recycle bin.
Reports
Under the Reports drop-down, you’ll find a few useful things, including ways to check which files are checked out within your site, pending approvals if your site has an approver, recent saves, and publishes if you’re wondering who’s done what recently, and others. Day to day, you probably won’t use these much.
Add-Ons
The Add-Ons are extra links for other tools and help which are useful while you are using the CMS.
- The “Get Support” link goes to Web & Digital Communications’ website support page.
- The “Site list” displays all of the websites in the CMS and allows you to navigate between them easily.
- “COPE” will take you to our Create Once, Publish Everywhere (that’s what COPE stands for) application. This is where things like the Calendar and Events system live, along with RSVPs, Email Star, News, and others.
- The “KaratEmail” link will take you to that system that contains all of your form submission data.
- And the “MSU Web Communications” link will take you to our homepage.
Search
While there are Filter fields within each folder when viewing in the Pages display, the filters will not dig any deeper than the current folder, while this search icon can.
User Account
Under your user account (probably displayed as your name) the only two things you can really do here are change your display name and logout.
Help
Finally, the last item along the blue bar, the “Help” icon. If you just select this icon and label itself, you’ll be taken to Web & Digital’s CMS Help Center containing Help Center articles to assist you in many simple and complex tasks. Also in the dropdown is OmniUpdate’s Support, they are the makers of this system. I recommend only using their Support if ours fails you and you do not have time to wait for one of our web support tickets. You can ignore the rest under Help.
Page-specific controls
This navigation bar contains page-specific controls. These will change based on the page’s status and what is being displayed in the main content region.
Main content area
The main content area of every screen is specific to the feature or functions corresponding to the menu item that the user has chosen. For example, Dashboard displays links and gadgets and Content shows the Pages list view.
Want to see this in action?
Re-watch this video segment from our Basic Web Editing training video.