Content Management

This guide explains basic concepts of the ECF Content Management System (CMS) such as pages, folders and menus.  If you are a Commerce Manager user with CMS permissions, you can edit content directly from the front-end site.  Content can either be published immediately or saved as a draft and moved through a Workflow Process.  

The main components of the CMS include:

• Folders - containers of other folders and pages. Each site has exactly one root folder and can have unlimited number of sub folders (well, everything has a limit). They can be secured by assigning roles. Only those assigned will be able to access any page in that folder.  Otherwise, the user will be redirected to a login page.
• Pages - containers for different controls. It behaves very similarly to .NET aspx pages or html pages. The page has the following components associated with it:
  • File name - the name of the file is included in the URL of the site
    • You cannot have spaces in the file name
    • For example, if your file name is "test1," then the URL would be http://yoursite.com/test1.aspx
  • Header - this is the title that gets displayed on the top of your browser window
  • Language - each page is associated with a language (i.e. English)
  • Page version - every time you save a Draft of a page, a page version is created
  • Page state - you can save a page in progress in a Draft state (not viewable on the front-end site) or you can save the page in a Publish state if you ready to have it appear on the front-end site
  • Display template - defines the overall look for the page as well as the areas on the page where the CMS Controls can be added dynamically
• Menus - tree-like structures that can be defined for a site. Each site can have multiple menus, each of which should be translated into all available languages for a site.Each menu contains menu items, which are individual elements of the menu and can have different commands associated with them.  It is typical for commerce sites to use its catalog structure to drive the menu options and this is still possible with the ECF. However, the ECF provides a more flexible model where the user can define the menu items and its data source.  For example, you can configure menus to use links at the bottom of the page, or you can configure various layouts (i.e. top navigation menus and side menus), or customer-specific menus such as footer menus.