View Website - Uploading Code - Very Confused

2 posts by 2 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: November 13, 2009   (RSS)

By dalfort - November 12, 2009

When you create a page - such as a home page - where does that file reside?

I created what I believe is the home page but when I click the View Website link I get the hosting default "Coming Soon" page.

What exactly is a Section Editor? Does "Section" mean page?

In the "Add Editor" area there are four choices. I'm building a simple 7-page website so would I select "Single Record?"

What is a "viewer" and corresponding "viewer URL?" Where are viewer URLs placed on the website? How do you "view" a viewer URL?

Seems to me that your system should say something like, "Create new page" and then offer options for that page that are described more intuitively - such as "add page header" - "add page navigation" - "add page content" etc.

Also, I want to create a navigation menu down the left side but there doesn't seem to ba an option for this.

Re: [dalfort] View Website - Uploading Code - Very Confused

By Luke - November 13, 2009

Hi Dalfort,

CMS Builder doesn't create the pages for you, instead it generates the PHP code for you. You then copy and paste this code into a an HTML editor and save it as the page you want it to update. You can then use CMS Builder to update the content on this page.

For example, if you wanted to create an "About Us" page you would start things off by creating an About Us section editor, generate the code and then paste it into your HTML editor and save it as aboutus.php. You would then customize aboutus.php to match the web design of your choice, and use CMS Builder to update the title and content on your newly created About Us page.

Because you're creating a simple 7 page website, I've prepared a small tutorial below to help you get started. In this example, we'll create a section editor for updating your about us page, and a viewer for aboutus.php so you can view the page through your web browser.

1. Log into CMS Builder and go Admin -> Section Editors and click Add New Editor. For Menu Type we're going to select a preset called "About". Once done, click Create New Menu. You'll see the "About" Section Editor is now available in your CMS Builder's navigation. (You've just created a Section Editor)

2. Go to Admin -> Code Generator. For "Select Section" choose About and for "Viewer Type" choose Detail Page. Click "Show Code"

3. You're going to now want to copy and paste the code you generated into your HTML editor (e.g. dreamweaver) and save the page as aboutus.php. Upload the page to your website's web root. (You've now created a Viewer)

4. Visit the page by going to http://www.yourwebsite.com/aboutus.php. You'll see that you have a newly created aboutus.php page. Go to CMS Builder and click on "About Us" and update the title and content field and then revisit the aboutus.php page. You'll see the content you input (using the About Us section editor) is now output on your aboutus.php page (About Us viewer).

5. The last step is to format the aboutus.php page. Using your HTML editor you can customize the page to include your own design. You can use HTML and CSS to modify this page to match the look and feel of your website.


To go over terminology, here's what they generally mean -

Section Editor: These are areas in CMS Builder that you use for updating sections of your website. You can create sections for updating your news/articles, about us pages, etc. About Us pages, Contact Us pages, etc are "Single Records", you don't have multiple about us pages. Things like News and Articles are Multi-Records, this is because you have several news items in a news section.

Viewers: This is how the content is output on your website. Viewers are HTML pages with some extra PHP tags that load content from the CMS Builder database. You can create viewers using the "Code Generator".

So in the example above, in steps 1 you created a Section Editor for your about us page, in steps 2-3 you created a viewer for viewing the aboutus.php page.

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any questions. :)
Luke Holzken
Product Development