Baby steps with your new ez.no site and eZ flow extension
Posted September 10th, 2008 by admin1. Change the logo
a. login to the admin interface (../ezflow_site_admin/)
b. Design tab.
i. ”Look and feel”, click that text
ii. Click the “Edit” button for the ez-flow site
iii. Edit <eZ Flow> [Template look], change the settings to suit, upload your logo. “Send for publishing” when finished.
2. Change the background graphic.
../extension/ezflow/design/ezflow/images/page-bg.jpg
Notice that ezflow - the layout, is an extension to ezpublish. From there go into the design folder which has layouts for “standard”, “admin”, “iphone” and “ezflow”. The ezflow folder holds most of the layout info for the standard ezflow view. Including the page-bg.jpg. Overwrite this file, with a file of the same name, to get the background you want. Be sure to check your file size! Try to keep it at or below the original, unless you are designing for fat pipes only.
3. Change the site icon.
../design/standard/images/favicon.ico
upload your own favicon.ico file overwriting the existing file.
The change may not be immediately apparent due to caching. Give it some time, or clear all your caches.
That will do it for now in the admin interface. Log out, and go back to your site. This time login as admin, but do not check the box to go the admin interface. That allows edits in place on the site content.
1. Change the front page news article. Note that in the toolbar, you can download the entire article (open document format with open office, sweet), edit it, then replace, or you can edit in place. Edit in place works better for me on my mac.
2. Still editing direct on the site, change the movie using an .flv file from your local machine. Load the movie screen, but do not start it running. You will notice an edit icon in the top bar. click, edit description, content, etc, note that a large flv file may exceed your max upload file size or execution time in php.ini. Send for publishing when you like it.
Next question, what is the origin of the top menu items, and how to change them?
Jump back into the admin gui (../ezflow_site_admin/) by checking the box when prompted.
On the very first screen that loads, you see “Home” in the content structure on the left pane, then scroll down and notice that the “Sub items” of this Home content correspond to the top level menu items. Also notice that they are of certain “Types” Like Frontpage, Forum and Blog. And finally note the edit icon to the far right.
1. Edit “Conference” by clicking on the edit icon. You will likely be prompted to choose a language, just continue on thru and be greeted with a complete layout and structure of the “Conference” content.
2. The content of the “Conference” sub-item/menu-item is laid out in detail. Leave this admin gui window open and size it to fit the right half of your screen if you can. Open another browser window on to the same site, ordinary user view, click on the “Conference” menu item, size this new browser window to fit on the left half of your screen.
eZ user and admin side by side
Examine generated content on the left, how it was generated on the right. There are lots of templates and blocks and sections and tweaking going on behind the scenes, but this gives you the high level overview of what it happening on your site. Study this until you get it, because this is key to understanding the methodology.
3. Try to always remember to “Discard draft” when you are just viewing, it saves you from dealing with a nasty little reminder that you are already editing the next time you come back to edit this page. Or Send for Publishing if you like what you’ve done.
4. Just for fun, create a new Sub item of Home, called New Gallery, make it of type Gallery, and Send this for publishing. Reload the user version of the site, and notice a new main menu item called New Gallery. Login as admin to edit content (don’t check the admin box). Drop down the type selector, select “Image” then click the + icon. **Important** You need to tell ez.no what type of object you are creating, before you click to add an object. Every object is of a certain pre-defined type. You can define new types, but you can’t create an object without a type. Get in the habit of noticing the type you are creating, before you click the plus sign! Fill out the details and upload your image, respecting the size and execution time limits of your web hosting service if so restricted.
5. Now when you click on this “New Gallery” menu item, your newly created image object pops in at the top. Repeat for a couple more new image objects and voila, you’ve created a slideshow.
Probably the next thing you will want to do is plan the layout of your actual working site, and test how folder, subfolder, and objects within them can be made to interact.
A closing tip that can help you rapidly adjust the site and content. From the admin gui (../ezflow_site_admin/) go to the “setup” tab. Then sections->Standard and at the bottom will be a complete listing of all the objects that make up your site. These can all be pulled up for editing from here.
Stay tuned for more as I get into banners, roles, time based publishing and archiving, and products.
MORE INFO..
Configuration settings, much more complete instructions.
ezpublish demo login is “editor” and “1234″ without the quotes.
ezpublish admin demo for same site login as “admin” and “1234″
This demo does not include the ez Flow extension with the fancy multimedia, and is based upon a slightly older version of ezPublish, but it gives a good idea of how the developers layout a complete site in the admin interface.
ez.no latest developments article, from July 2008, Peter Keung