Content General Users Guide

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Requirements and Recommendations
You will need to have JavaScript enabled and you need to have the Adobe Flash Player installed. We also recommend a screen resolution of 1024x768 or higher and a doctype of XHTML transitional.

Setting Up Your Content General
Once your Content General module is installed and placed on the page, the first thing you need to do is to setup your categories.

Categories Setup
You cannot add an item to the Content General until you have a category to include it in. To create and apply categories, click the "Administration" link in the Action Menu.
When the Administration Panel appears the default screen is the Category Manager. The box on the left shows you all of the categories that are available to you. Content General automatically creates a "General" category that can be use if you do not plan on making any other categories in the future. (Don't worry! If you change your mind later and want to add more, that’s okay too! You can change the name of the "General" category at any time without confusing the module. I'll explain more below.)

Creating a New Category
To add a new category, simply enter the name of the category in the field provided to the right of the list. If you want to assign a "Category Icon" to your new category you can do so below the field. (A Category Icon is an image that you can display on the view site of Content General if you choose. If you don’t care, you can leave it blank and a default icon will be assigned). Click "Save Category” The new Category will populate in the left panel list.

Editing and Removing Categories
On the left panel list, there are two icons, an Edit and a Delete (Del). If you click the edit icon, the information originally input upon creation will populate in the fields to the right. You can change the name and icon and click "Save Category". The second icon is the Delete Button. By pressing this button, you will be prompted to confirm deletion of the category. Deletion a category will not confuse the module if there are items assigned to this category. If the item is assigned to 2 categories and one of them is deleted the item will remain in the other category. If an item is only in one category and that category is deleted the item will be saved in our "Orphanage". The Orphanage is a repository for items that have no parent category. If you visit the Orphanage in the right sidebar menu you can assign them to a new category.

Module Display (D) and Permission (P) Setting
These two columns are very important to the setup of Content General.

Display: The display setting tells Content General to actually show the selected category on the view side. If you do not have a display category (or categories) set, no items will be listed on the view site.

Permission: The Permission setting allows the administrator of the module to include items into the selected category (or categories) through this instance of the module. For example, if you have 10 categories setup in your Content General, but in this specific instance of the module you only want the Administrator to be able to select two of those categories when adding an item, check the Permission checkbox beside both of those categories.

IMPORTANT: MAKE SURE AFTER YOU SELECT DISPLAY AND PERMISSION SETTINGS YOU CLICK SAVE (OR SAVE AND CLOSE) OR YOUR CHANGES WON'T BE REMEMBERED.

Adding Items to Content General
Now that you have your categories set up you can start adding items.

Creating a New Item
In the Actions Menu, select “Add New Item”. This will open the item information forms for adding a new item. The first thing you need to do is add a title to the item (This needs to be done first because Content General keeps track of its items by their title).

Creation Options
Inputting the Item Content (and editing item content, because it uses the same format) is broken up four sections. Each is explained below.

Listing Info: This information is what will be shown by default on the listing page of the view side (there can be more if you activate certain features, but I’ll explain that later). “Title” is the actual title of the item that people will see (example: the headline of a news article). “Summary” is a short blurb that will be displayed under the title on the view side.

Main Content: Main Content is solely the body copy of your item.

Categories: This is the Category that this item will be included in. If this instance of Content General has only one category (see Category Permission setting above) it will be selected by default. If you have more than one category available to you, you will have to select which it is to be included. Content General will not allow you to save the item until you have selected a category.

Other Settings: These optional, but very handy, settings include; “Start Date”, “End Date” and “Author”. By entering a Start Date, the item will not appear on your site until that date has been reached. By entering an End Date, the Item will be removed from the site when the end date has been reached. Content General will not delete the item, it will just be deactivated. You can find deactivated items in the “Item Manager” which is linked from the Action Menu or “View All Items” located near the bottom of the right sidebar menu. Author refers to who posted the item to the website. This option is set to whoever is currently logged into the site but can be changed to whoever you want (in case you are posting blogs for someone else or whatever).

IMPORTANT: MAKE SURE YOU ALWAYS SAVE (OR SAVE AND CLOSE) BEFORE EXITING THE ITEM ADMIN.

Item Manager
The Item manage (found in the actions menu) is a repository for all items in your Content General database. Each Content General connected by a single database allowing it is view and display any item that has been created by an instance of the module portal wide (and cross portal using the advanced setting, “Show Site Wide Items “ explained below). You can filter the items by using the three filter option provided, “Filter Category”, “Filter Published” and “Filter Current Dates”

Content General has a world of options and a ton of features that you have access to, but not all of them are activated when you initially set up the module. We do this because most people just want the basic features without all the other bells and whistle getting in the way. Here I’ll explain everything that’s included ‘Out of the Box’.

Item Content
As explained above, the Item Content is the meat and potatoes of your Item. It’s Title and body copy of each.

• Title: The headline of your item.
• Summary: Short blurb about the item (This feature can be deactivated).
• Main Content: Main body copy of the item.
• Categories: Which category your item will be assigned.
• Start Date: The date at which your item will appear on the site.
• End Date: The date at which your item will be removed from the site.
• Author: The username of the site admin that that posted the item.

Photo Gallery (This feature can be deactivated)
Content General has a very handy Photo Gallery feature that allows you to attach photos and automatically create thumbnails that expand when you click on them.

• Upload Images: Upload Jpg, gif, png, etc, to a designated folder.
• Editable Caption: Text that will appear below the image when enlarged.
• Draggable Sorting: In the Photo Gallery Panel, site admin can drag to sort image thumbnails.
• ‘Lightbox’ Enlargment: A really cool enlargement feature that’s slicker than your standard popup.

Attach Files (This feature can be deactivated)

• File Upload: Upload pdf, doc, xls, txt, jpg etc, to a designated folder. A distinguishing icon will be auto assigned and appear next to the filename.
• Editable Title: A descriptive name for the file instead of a drab filename.

Listing features

• Display Count: Five items will be displayed on the listing page before it will page. (This number can be changed to anything you want)
• Paging: Once five items are reached the next item will page with a next and previous link and a numeric paging concept (example: Previous 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next ) (You can change the language of these text links and you can opt for alpha paging – or have both if you really want to)
• Item Sorting: items are sorted descending by date created. This means that the newest item will appear at the top of the list. (Sorting can be changed from date created to Title [alphabetical order] or a Sort Item which will add a field in the editor [you can use numbers or letters to sort by])
• Comment Post and Management: This allows anonymous comments by users (they don’t have to log in) and a CAPTCHA requirement before submission. (You can Require Registration before commenting, admin notification of comment and have Admin Comment Approval, if you want)
• RSS Syndication: A link in the action menu to an RSS feed of the articles from this instance of Content General which you can copy and put into your templates.

There are some advanced options for Content General that can really work wonders on your site in numerous different ways. These features are all either activated through the Administration link in the actions menu or are added to the layout temples (using tokens).

FLV Video Player (Feature Activations)
Content General includes a Flash (FLV) video player that can turn a boring old text blog into a vivacious video blog to get your beautiful mug out there for all to see.
o Initial Image: You can add an image that will appear before the video plays. It can be added as a default for all videos played by this instance of Content General or per video (that will overwrite the default image).

• Video Width and Height: You can force the video to a specific size.
• Auto Start: This will force the video to start playing as soon as the page loads.
• Auto Buffer: This will automatically buffer the video to minimize the shuddering of large videos.
• Buffer Length: This is a designated number of seconds that the video with always buffer before it starts playing
• Show Controls: You can have the video player omit the playback controls if you don’t want people using them.
• Canvas Color: The background color of the video player.
• CSS Class: A define class to allow you to add CSS to the video player wrapper.

Categories Panel (Feature Activations)
You can choose to display all the categories that this module can display on the view side of the module. By clicking the category, it will filter the listing view by all the items in that category.

Item Icon (Editor Activations)
Each item can have an icon or representative image that is input separately from the photo gallery. This feature, when activated will add the option to the input form in the Item editor

Comment Settings

• Require Comment Approval: When someone posts a comment it doesn’t automatically appear. It will be thrown into a comment management queue (in the actions menu) where you can read, edit, delete or approve the comments.
• Comment Notifications: This will send an email to the DNN Admin Email when someone posts a comment.

Disable isolated Item (Advanced Settings)
This is a technical one. When this setting is checked the module will ignore reading the Item ID from the querystring. This method is useful when displaying multiple instance of content general on a single page and you want to show a single item in one and a list of items in another. Get it?

Disable Isolated Category (Advanced Settings)
Another brain buster, but similar to the previous one. When checked the module will ignore reading the Category ID from the querystring. This method is useful when displaying a list of items that can be filtered by category and there are other instances of content general on a single page.

Disable SEO redirection (Advanced Settings)
If you are using a third party way of rewriting your URL to make them more friendly this might be useful to you. This is a system to help keep the page URL’s unique for the same content. This system invokes a specific 301 redirect that will override requested URL. This setting will be rarely used but there’s always someone out there who’ll need it at some point.

Exclude from Search Results (Advanced Settings)
This will exclude the content of THIS item from THIS instance of Content General. This is used when you have the same article appearing is a few different places on the site. DNN search will think they are the different pages and will return both pages in the search results. If you want to stop that from happening, activate this feature.

Archive Option - Ignore Item Dates (Advanced Settings)
This feature is used to ignore the “End Date” setting on each item. This is used if you want to have a specific instance of Content General as an Item Archive. The end date will remove the item from Instance A while Instance B (this one) ignores that date and displays it anyway.

Show Site Wide Items (Advanced Settings)
This setting is used to allow Content General to read and display items from other portals within one installation of DNN. Basically multiple sites can share the same items.

Content General is fully template driven and that is what makes it such a useful tool for your DNN website. You can change the layout of everything; omit any of the data fields and so on. By using templates, your content can be laid out to function as a news listing, a blog, a video blog, testimonials, case studies, and even a product catalog. The possibilities are only limited by your content and your creativity.

The templates use standard HTML and each piece of data used by Content General is displayed using a token (all the tokens are shown and explained below). You can add anything you want in there to wrap your tokens in – from tables to divs. You can set up the layout via CSS (using your skin.css, portal.css or the Content General module.css)

• Master Layout
  The Master Layout is the overall layout of most of the other templates. This is where you would find all your Items List/Full Body Copy area, your categories menu and your pagination tokens.
• Listing Content
  This is the Template were you layout your Item Listing. Typically this would include the Title, Summary and a bunch of other utility tokens. Usually you would link to the “Read More” template from here
• Read More
  Read more is the standard template for the full copy of the article. This is linked to from the “Listing Content” template. This is usually where the Title, Content, Images, Video, Files, and Comments could appear.
• Categories
  This is the area where you layout and style your categories menu if you choose to use it. By default it is structured with a table wrapper and an unordered list (<ul>). There are three parts to this template, the “Header”, “Main Layout” and Footer”. The only required part is the Main Layout. This template will be repeated for each category that will be displayed. The “Header” will appear once before rendering the each copy of the “Main Layout” and the “Footer” will be appended after. You can leave the Header and Footer blank if you want to.
• Image Gallery
  Similar to the Categories Template, the Image gallery template is broken into multiple separate templates, four to be exact. The Most important template here is, again, the “Main Layout”. This layout includes in the image that will be repeated throughout the gallery.
• File Attachments
  The File Attachments Template is the layout of the files list that accompanies each item. The entire File Attachments template is repeated for each file.
• Comments
  Differing from the method used for the Image Gallery and the Categories, Comments does use 2 templates, but each is used for very different purposes. “Comment” is used when a comment is posted on the site. It is the display of each comment attached to the item. This Template is repeated for each comment. “Post Comments” is the actual form that asks a user to post a comment. You can arrange or omit the given fields within the layout.

XLM Configuration
This XML document that can be found in the Administration second of Content General contains all the settings, templates and options you set for his instance of Content General except for one (the Category Display and Permission settings). If you copy and paste the XML config from one instance of Content General to another instance, it will import all of your settings and templates to the new instance. All you have to do then is select Category Display and Permission settings and you have a finished Content General. This is extremely useful when using Content General numerous times across your site but wanting to retain and similar look and feel. If you change any settings outside the XML config after importing, it will not affect any other instance. Each XML config is stand alone; they are not linked in any way.

This is a list of extra features that do not really fall into these other categories but you might want to know about.

Comment Manager
If you have admin approval of comments activated, whenever someone posts a comment on an item, it will show up in the Comment Manger and wait for approval. If you approve something and later decide to remove or edit it, you can always use the moderate link that (by default) appears below the comment on the view side. This will only show up when an administrator is logged in.

Syndication
This link in the Actions Menu will give you a link to the RSS feed of this instance of Content General. This link can be used in the templates to give your users a link to the feed.

The Orphanage
The Orphanage is a repository for items that have no parent category. If you visit the Orphanage in the right sidebar menu you can assign them to a new category. Deletion a category will not confuse the module if there are items assigned to this category. If an item is only in one category and that category is deleted the item will be saved in our "Orphanage".