What is a CMS?

A CMS (Content Management System) allows you to edit all the content displayed on your website. This includes editing text and uploading images, PDFs, and other files. Using a CMS, you can easily make content changes without having to code HTML from scratch.

Accessing your Beehively CMS

As an admin or content author of your school, you have the ability to make changes to your public website through the Beehively internal portal. To begin, click on the Public Website Pages link from the Administration tab dropdown.

Note: Content Authors must be a Staff type user and have a role assigned that grants access to the "Manage Public Website Pages" or "Edit Public Website Pages" permission to have access to the CMS.

Navigating the CMS

Most of the edits you’ll want to make can be accomplished through the Pages view, but you will notice there are 6 other tabs.

Left to Right, those are:

• Types: Types is where you will find custom data models that can be used to set up modular content on your site.

• Pages: This menu is where you manage the content of individual pages.

• Content: if your site has pages that are set up to use Types, their content will be managed through this menu. This can be used to update sections like staff pages, newsletters, photo galleries, events, board agendas, meeting minutes, job openings, and much more.
  
  

  
  

  On this screen, your site's Types are listed in the left-hand sidebar. In the upper right, you will see a "Create New" dropdown allowing you to quickly create any type of content. Under this, you will see a filter bar that allows you to quickly filter by any Categories that have been added to any content of the Type you're currently viewing. Below that, you'll see a listing of all the Content of that Type on the site. You also will see options to sort that Content, and you can also click and drag the handles on any Content to rearrange them. Be aware that that, like Pages, sorting Content will apply to the public view of the Content as well!
  If your site does not have content types defined and if you are interested in creating these, feel free to contact support@beehively.com for more information.
  
  
  

• Files: Here you can manage all the files that you use on your site. Images, PDFs, and other documents can all be stored here and referenced in page content.

• Snippets: Snippets are modular units of code that allow certain pieces of data to be reproduced across the site easily. For example, your header and footer are the same on each page, and their contents are stored in code snippets.

• People: This tab allows you to add other people you would like to manage the website and control their level of access.

• Blog: If your site is set up to contain a Blog, this tab allows you to add individual posts to a blog page. This can be used for school updates, news stories, etc.

Selecting the Desired Page

As soon as you move to the Pages tab you can see Pages Overview. The pages of your website are organized in a tree structure, similar to folders on your computer. For secondary navigation (If your site has one), your secondary navigation pages will be listed as subpages.

Click the arrow on the left to expand any navigation tree. Pages can be rearranged by clicking and dragging the handle on the far left. To edit a page, click the Edit button on the right side of the page listing. Pages can also be added and deleted through this interface. To make more detailed changes, click on the page’s title to open the detail view.

Making Page Edits

The page detail view allows you to make changes to individual pages. The fields are as follows:

• Label: This is the page’s title, displayed at the top of the page and in navigation menus.

• Slug: This is the page’s URL. Greyed out to the left, you will see the URL structure of any parent pages the page has followed by its individual URL. While this is editable, you might want to refrain from changing it on existing pages as it may cause links and bookmarks to that page to no longer work.

• Layout: This determines how the page is put together. You normally have a homepage layout and an inner page layout which determine how those pages are formatted. It’s not recommended that you change this setting.

• Parent: This determines how this page is nested in the navigation menu. To change a page’s order within a submenu, drag it up or down in the Pages Overview.

• Redirect to Page: This allows you to redirect a page to a different page in your site. 

• Banner: This is the banner image for the page. When uploading new banner images, try to use the highest resolution of an image you have available for optimal results.

• Categories: For Pages, Categories are sometimes used to manage sites with multiple levels of navigation menus. You may see "topmenu" "mainmenu", etc. categories referring to these different areas. In Files, you can create categories for different files like PDFs, Forms, Newsletters etc. You can add different types of files in different categories.

• Content: This is where you can put any content you want the page to contain. With this editor, you can add text, images, embedded video, tables, links to PDFs or other websites, anything you can dream up. You can even use the < > brackets icon on the far left to edit the HTML code of the page to make even more detailed edits.

Making More Complex Content Edits

At the bottom of the Page Detail page, we have some more options:

• Page code: This area contains extra HTML, Javascript, or CSS code if a page has more complex features. Certain pages, like the Home page, are entirely written in HTML code and don’t have a Content field.

• Published: If this box is checked, the page will be visible to the public.

• Show In Navigation: If this box is checked, the page will be accessible via the navigation menu.

Finally, at the very bottom, you have the options to Preview your edits, or Update the page. You can cancel without saving your changes by clicking on the X at the top right side of the page.

Adding People to CMS

The People tab allows you to add other people you would like to manage the website. On the People page, there are two ways to add a person, either as an Admin or as a Content Author. The table below shows what sort of access these types of users have:

In each list, there is a “+” button that allows you to add additional users of each type. On clicking one of these a popup will appear, and from the dropdown, you can select any Staff user you would like to add. You can also follow the link to add a new person if the person is not part of your Beehively portal.

Note: For a person to appear in this dropdown list, they must be a Staff type user and have a role assigned that grants access to the "Manage Public Website Pages" or "Edit Public Website Pages" permission.

Admin: Admins have access to all pages on a website.
Content Author: For content authors, access can be controlled per page and per content type. Admins can assign or revoke access to a page or content type by checking or unchecking the pages for Content Authors. Content Authors can only access the pages or content for types that are checked.

Switching Between Multiple Sites

If you manage multiple websites with Beehively, you can switch between them with this menu. You can select the site you would like to edit by clicking on the Sites button at the top right and selecting from the dropdown. As an admin you will be able to see all the sites managed by your organization. Admins and Content Authors can be defined per site.