SpyreCMS
SpyreCMS User Guide
Getting Started
To log in to SpyreCMS, go to /admin, then type your username and password into the relevant boxes, then click "Sign In". You will be redirected to the "Home" page - this gives you an overview of recent changes to your site, as well as some statistics (number of pages, number of users, etc).
To add a page to your site, click the "Add a Page" button (at the right of the light blue bar, below "Page Manager"). This will take you to the page creation form. To create a page, there are four pieces of information you need to provide.
Firstly, you must specify a title for your page. The title will appear at the top of the page and will be the text of the link to the page in the main menu.
The second piece of information you must provide is the "slug". This is the part of the URL that uniquely represents this page. Depending on which version of SpyreCMS you are running, this may be generated for you from the title, its is generally a good idea to leave the generated slug unless you have a specific reason for changing it.
Next you will need to select the page's parent page. If you think of a site as family-tree style hierarchy, the parent is the page that appears directly above the newly created page in the tree. When a full menu of all the pages in the site is shown, the new page will appear below its parent page. Also, the new page's slug will be added on to the parent page's slug when the URL is being generated. For example if you have an existing page called "Shop", whose slug is "shop" and you create a new page called "T-Shirts", with a slug "tshirts", the URL for the new page will be /shop/tshirts.
Finally, you need to select the template to use. A template defines the structure of a page - how many columns it has, whether the title is shown, etc. Often there will only be one template for a site, but more complex sites may have different templates for different types of page.
Once you have filled in all the information, click "Create" to create the page.
Modifying a page is a simple as clicking on the "Edit" button of a specific page from the Pages tab.
Placeholders
Each page on your site may be composed of muliple sections of content; for example a simple page may be composed of a main content area and a sidebar. We refer to these sections as "placeholders". In the "Modify a Page" section (which is found by clicking the "Edit" button next to a page) the large light grey section on the left contains the named placeholders. Using the example from before, you would see two headings in the large grey area - "Content" and "Sidebar".
Widgets
Each section, or "placeholder" may contain multiple "widgets". A widget is a block of content - this may be regular textual content, a Google map, an enquiries form, or anything else you may see on a web page. You can drag widgets from the dark grey sidebar into each of your placeholders to insert content into your page. The widgets are grouped by "plugin" for convenience. If you have accidentally dragged a widget into the wrong placeholder, just grab the top of the widget and drag it to your desired placeholder. If you would like to re order the widgets then you can drag them into the correct positions in the same manner. Deleting a widget is a simple as clicking the "Delete" icon in the top right.
Note: unlike editing the content of a widget, adding, deleting and moving widget boxes cannot be undone. Once the action has been performed, there is no need to click "Save All" as it is saved automatically.
The "Content Editor" Widget
This widget is the one you will likely be using the most. It allows you to insert almost any type of content such as images, headings, tables etc. in much the same manner as using a Word Processor.
To get started with this widget, drag it from the widgets sidebar (it is under the Content plugin). You will see a large editable box with some icons below. The icons should be familiar to users of popular Word Processors such as Microsoft Word. Lets say we want to add an announcement to our web page, We can insert a heading by typing something like "Welcome to our new website!" into the text box. To make this a heading, first select the text, them select the middle dropdown menu in the icon bar and choose "Heading 1". If we insert a new line then write the rest of our announcement message then click "Save all and quit" at the top of the page.The annoucement should now appear on your webpage.
Adding a user
A SpyreCMS website can have any number of users who can log in and modify the content, each with their own permissions. Only a user with full privelages (Level 5) can add or modify users.
To add a new user, first navigate to the "Users" tab then click on the "Add User" button in the top right.
SpyreCMS has a level-based permissions system which allows the administrators to restrict what users can and cannot edit on the website. Here is a breakdown of the permissions that each level grants a user, note that each level inherits all permissions granted by all lower levels:
Level 1: Log in and view the site tree, reorder pages in the site tree.
Level 2: Add and modify pages.
Level 3: Delete pages.
Level 4: Use plugins and the Document Manager.
Level 5: Manage user accounts.
Documents and Files
SpyreCMS allows you to upload and store files from your computer to use within your site. To upload a file, click on the 'Documents' tab, then click the 'Add a file' button. You will be prompted to select a file from your computer, then name it and tag it. To select a file, click on the 'Browse ...' button. A name will be generated from the filename but you can change this to make it more memorable. You may also add tags, which will allow you to more easily locate your document in future. Once you are done, click the 'Upload' button. Your document should appear in the list of all documents and is now ready to be included in your pages.
Insert a Document Into a Page
Inserting images and other files from the Documents tab into your pages is easy. First we select the page we want to modify by clicking on the 'Pages' tab then the relevant 'Edit' button. We can insert documents into any 'Content Editor' widget. To insert an image, click on the tree icon (
). Use the 'Image List' dropdown menu to select any of the images you have uploaded. You can ignore the other fields for now, go ahead and click 'Insert'. You should now see your image in the widget and will be able to position and resize it.
If we want to insert a document such as a Microsoft Word file, we must create a link to it. Links are bits of text that can be clicked on and will take you to a different page. We first select the text that we want to make a link, then click on the link icon (
). Just like inserting an image, we can select a document using the 'Link List' dropdown menu. Hit 'Insert' and your text will now be linked.
Logging
Recent actions are displayed on the Home tab. This will include page updates, document uploads and changes to users etc. To view the whole list of updates, click on the 'View Full Log' button at the top.
Actions logged can also be displayed on your website using the Site Log widget from the Content plugin. If this is in use, then you might want to use the 'Add Announcement' - also on the Home tab - to notify your users of any specific changes that are not automatically recorded such as the sort of information that was updated.
