How To Create a Content Guide

Intro

• The  content guide component displays a list of all children of a particular item (e.g. a list of all news articles contained under a "News & Events" parent item.)
• The content guide listing can be placed on any subpage, or on the home page.
• The guide displays its own header, and for the list items, it displays a title, a short text blurb, and an optional button image. The title, blurb and image may be drawn from several choices of fields within the child items.

Basic Procedure

• Create individual child items under a single parent. These will become the content guide list items.
• Create the guide component.
• Add the quide component to a page.
• Note - see an example guide on this page: http://webedit.drexel.edu/test/daveTest/Dolor/first/contentGuide

Items in Detail

1. Create Individual Child Items

• Go to whatever parent item will hold the child items. For this example let's have the "PressReleases" item be the parent (later called the Target), and the individual articles will be the children.
• Right click on PressReleases and add another article. For this example, the new articles are of type "PressRelease" but they could also be of type "BasicPage."
• When child items display in the ContentGuide list, you will have a choice of which field to display as the item title, the item description, and the optional item button image.
  • The most useful Item Header Field choices include:
    • BreadcrumbTitle
    • MenuTitle
    • PageTitle
    • SeeAlsoTitle
  • The most useful Item Description Field choices include:
    • Abstract
    • Marketing Description
  • The choices for optional Item Image Field include any of the eight image fields in the Identity Extended group. (Examples include MicroButton, StandardButton, LargeThumbnail, etc...)
• Whichever header field you intend to display in the content guide (say for example, "SeeAlsoTitle") be sure that every article has something in the SeeAlsoTitle field.
• Similarly, whichever description field you intend to show in the content guide (say for example, the "MarketingDescription") be sure that every article has something written for the MarketingDescription.
• In the same way, if you will have an image for each item in the content guide, make sure that every article has an image picked. Say for example, you will show the image labeled "MicroButton_88x25," then every article should have an image inserted into the MicroButton field.
• Save and publish all child items.

2. Create the ContentGuide Component

• Go to your site's Extras/ContentGuides folder.
• Right click on the folder and choose Insert ? ContentGuide.
• Give the guide an item name; no one will see this name - it's for your benefit only.
• The Guide Header field is optional. If text is entered, it will display in h1 tags.
• Choose the Target item, which is the parent of the list items (in our example, the parent is the PressReleases item.)
• After choosing the Target, click the "Save" button in the upper left corner.
• After you click "Save" in the very next field you will be able to select one or more types of items where it says "Guide Item Type filter." In our example, we want to display items which are of type "PressRelease" so we will check the box next to PressRelease.
• After choosing one or more item types to display in the list, click the "Save" button again.
• After saving, we can proceed to make the choices of Image, Header, and Description. You must make a choice for each of these three. If you do not wish to display an image in the ContentGuide, simply choose an Image field that is unused for each article.
• Save and publish the ContentGuide component.

3. Adding the Content Guide Component to a Page

• Click on a page you want to add the guide to, then click on the Presentation tab in the top menu bar
• From the Layout group, choose Details:
  
• Under the default layout grouping, click Edit:
   
• On the next popup screen, choose Controls, then Add:
   
• On the next page, next to "Rendering" click the "Browse" button. On the next screen, expand "Renderings". Then click on "ContentGuide", then "Select" at the bottom and the browsing popup box will close.
• Where it says Placeholder, type the words: Content Area
• Where it says Data Source, click the "Browse" button. On the next screen, navigate to your site's Extras folder, then the ContentGuides folder, then click the guide item you wish to add, then click the "Open" button at the bottom, and the browsing popup box will close.
• Your "Add a Control" page should now look like this:
   
• Click "OK" until all boxes have closed.
• Save and publish your page.

Last Modified: 7/30/09 dmt34