Our Content Management System (CMS) grew out of a need to be able to demonstrate code and web site templates online.
It is written for a coder in that it uses Markdown for the main content of a page but also allows for scripts to be included at the bottom of the page.
It also supports the creation of manifests which provide the data for applications.
These pieces work together to make this CMS it very flexible and powerful:
- Pages A page can be a blog post, a lesson plan. a chapter of a book, site policies, or anything else you can think of to publish on the web
- Templates are the available layouts for the pages.
- Categories allow pages to be grouped into a tree hierarchy
- Manifests provide data to applications - They are like a data-set stored with a title, description, and other meta.
- Tags are a way of specifying that a page touches on some topic. Tags are different from categories in that a page can have multiple tags, but only one category.
- Media, usually pictures or video, that can be inserted into pages. The media manager facilitates tracking copyright and provides a way todata give each item a title and description. Note that media is not limited to pictures, but can include any MIME type for which an interface has been written
To get a quick feel for how these features help the developer, consider an educational site. Let's say we write an app where users drag vocabulary words and drop them on a picture. We would write the app in a single page then put each picture with it's vocabulary into a manifest.
The app could present a list of the manifests (i.e. pictures to label) for the user to choose from.
We could also make a template shared by all the courses, and then make a page for each individual course. The lessons, quizzes, and activities would reside in individual manifests.
Why not put the lessons into pages rather than manifests?
You could — these is some overlap in the functionality of pages and manifests. One key difference is that manifests are stored separately from the page hierachy, and are not searchable by the end user: This may or may not be the desired behavior for individual lessons.
This document is primarily directed at the end user, however, there are setup notes in the sidebar.
