Configuration tips |
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Contact Information |
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Automatic Contact Info in the Sidebar: Fill in all the Meta fields on Tab 2 and check the checkbox in the Advanced section: this will generate a nicely formatted Contact Us box in the Sidebar. |
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Mobile browsing |
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Make all pages mobile friendly: If you make sure to always use percentages instead of absolute values when you create tables, FirstMagic will minimize -and usually eliminate - horizontal scrolling on mobile devices. FirstMagic will always detect image sizes and scale them to fit if they are larger than the screen resolution. |
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Custom content for mobile devices: When the mobile UI is active, you can open a dialog in FirstMagic Preferences to insert an URL to a custom folder. Use it to redirect handheld devices to custom content. |
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Printing |
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Printer-friendly Page Header: Fill in all the Meta fields on Tab 2 to add your Contact info and company information on printer-friendly pages. If, for example, you have product pages on the web, the printer-friendly version will then make a nice product sheet printout. |
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Search tweaks |
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Allow Searches only in specific content: In the Search Dialog that opens when you select a Top Menu Search option, you can customize exactly what searches will be allowed to find. Do this by setting a specific container as Search Root, and drop aliases of the allowed containers into that container. |
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Website terminology |
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Setting website labels to a different language: Object labels and navigational terms are coded into the system. You can change language [or edit the terms to your liking] by clicking on the flag in FirstMagic Preferences, Tab 1. • Select the Question mark language in the Language Dropdown • Click the Edit button that appears • Edit the terms in the document that appears ... This document is also accessible here: Ensemble >> Services >> ensembleterms.inc If FirstMagic is not localized to your preferred language yet, you can use this document to translate it yourself. |
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Navigation customization tips |
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Sharing Menus between several FirstMagic websites |
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To syndicate a Top Menu or Sidebar across several FirstMagic sites, simply define one site as the Master and alias its Menu or Sidebar Container to the secondary sites [replacing their own Menu and/or Sidebar containers]. To share a Custom Menu, do the same with the Services Folder you can find in Ensemble. |
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Sidebar customization |
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Make the Sidebar context-sensitive By default, FirstMagic will share the same Sidebar to all pages on your website. Context-sensitive Sidebars means that you can give each page [or group of pages] it´s own, unique Sidebar Menu. Here´s how: • Check the Contextual checkbox in FirstMagic Preferences, Tab 4. • Create a folder for each unique Sidebar you need inside the default Sidebar container. • Fill the sub-sidebars with documents or bookmarks belonging to the contextual group the sub-folder represents. • Give unique filenames to each sub-sidebar folder. Names must be at least 5 characters long. For now, you are left with a completely empty sidebar on the website. You want each of your web pages to pick up and publish one of your sub-sidebar containers. Let´s say you have a sub-sidebar named Downloads, and want it to appear on all web pages that mention downloadables. • Locate the first page you want to connect a sub-sidebar with. • Give it a filename that starts with the first 5 characters of the Downloads Sidebar container´s own filename. • Repeat with all pages you want to link the Downloads Sidebar to. Example: If the sub-sidebar is named Downloads, the web page document you want it to connect with must be named Downl_whatever_you_want. Note: you can have multiple sub-sidebars that links to the same pages. For example, you can have Downloads_1, Downloads_2, etc. They will all connect to the pages that have filenames starting with Downl. Further: you can also have Documents as sub-sidebars in the Sidebar Container. They will work the same way. You can use anything you want as filenames for both containers and documents, since filenames are never visible on the website; it is always the subject field that becomes the sidebar title, page title or clickable link. |
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Add global content to context-sensitive sidebars You might want to have some content shared between all Sidebars, for example to make sure unconnected pages do not have a completely empty Sidebar. This can be accomplished with an Ensemble Include file. • Check the Extras checkbox in FirstMagic Preferences, Tab 4. • Click the Edit button that appears. • Use HTML to add your global content in the document that shows up. The Sidebar Extras Include comes with a working example of how to code Sidebar content that have the same look-and-feel as automatically generated content. SImply copy-paste these tags, and you can build HTML sidebar items easily. |
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Targeted Bookmarks |
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Opens in new window Opens in same window |
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Top Menu customization |
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Replace the Menu Container with a custom menu Instead of using the automatic publishing of the Menu Container, you can turn on the Custom Option in FirstMagic Preferences > Tab 4 > Menu. Then click the Edit button that appears. The document that pops up on the screen contains an example of an Unordered List. This is a simple HTML list. Edit it to create a custom menu with any number of dropdown levels. |
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Two Top Menus You can easily have two separate Top Menus by combining the automatic and custom menu option: • Activate the Top HTML include in FirstMagic Preferences > Tab 4. • Copy the Unordered List example from customtopmenu.inc and insert it in the Top Include instead. • Edit the copy in the Top Include to build the second menu. NOTE: you might have to use CustomCSS to position and style the second Top Menu nicely to fit your layout. |
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Object Properties tricks |
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Hide a FirstClass Document or Folder: Give it Icon ID 13100, and it will disappear from the Top Menu, the Sidebar and from Search Hitlists. It is the icon you see on the left. |
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Make any document into a modal popup: Give it Icon ID 23011. It is the icon you see on the left. |
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Make a Document or Folder unclickable: Give it Icon ID 7005, and it will become a named anchor instead of a link, in both Top Menus and in Sidebars. It is the icon you see on the left. |
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Make a document into it´s own Top Menu Item If you create a document on Notepaper [or give it Icon ID 24016], it will not become a link in Top Menu drop-downs, but will drop down in it´s entirety. That means you could use this document as it´s own menu, filling it with FirstClass links and other content. |
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Expire pages automatically: Pages can delete themselves after X number of days. If you don´t define X, they will live forever. You can set this for each page in it´s Properties window. This is an easy way to make sure the Newslist is always current, for example. |
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Disallow social sharing functions on one page only: Open the Document Properties Window, check the "Read Only" checkbox, and no social Widgets will work on that page. |
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Publishing tips |
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Authentication |
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Password-protect specific areas of the website: Use FirstClass Conference Privileges to require login when an item in a particular conference is requested. Tip: If the conference is in the Top Menu or Sidebar, allow All Users the Summary privilege to keep sub-menus working. Visitors will then be prompted for their User ID and Password when they click on a link. |
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Password-protect the entire website: You cannot protect the root folder, since that would deny the browser access to the rendering templates that makes the website work. But protecting the Content Container will do the job. If you want to protect the entire website, you should set the Homepage Mode to "Homepage" - [#1] on Tab 1 in FirstMagic Preferences. This will give you an openly accessible splash page where you can post information about login requirements. Else, the browser will simply not load the website at all. |
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Creating slideshows and photo albums |
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Create a Slideshow: All web pages made with FirstClass Documents can have a rotating slideshow, and they are drag-and-drop easy to make. Here´s how: • Collect your images [png, jpg and gif files], and give each one the prefix slide_ • Open the FirstClass Document, and drag down the top divider so the envelope area becomes visible • Grab all the images, and drop them into the envelope That´s it. Any image attachment with the prefix slide_ becomes part of the slideshow. Set your preferred rotating speed in FirstMagic Preferences, Tab 4. Such slideshows will always appear in the header area of the web page. If an image is too large for the viewer, it will be cropped towards the middle, and the user can click it to open it in full size. It will open in a lighbox with back/forward buttons. |
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Create a Photo Album: Paste or drag-and drop Images into your FirstClass Documents. Pictures without line breaks between them [i.e, in the same paragraph], will be linked together in a group. Each such group can be clicked on the web page, and will open in a lightbox with back/forward buttons. • Paste images into a Document, and scale them to miniatures [right-click to open the image formatting dialog]. • Give each picture a title in the Image Formatting dialog. It becomes the ALT tag, and also the title of the lighbox window on the web. Example:
The pictures above was pasted into a table with one row and three cells. Create such tables directly in FirstClass, or copy them in from somewhere else - like an Office Dcument. |
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Newslist tweaks |
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Scrolling Newslist [Ticker]: Go to FirstMagic Preferences, Tab 1, and insert an asterisk * ahead of the List Articles number value. The Newslist will now scroll continuously through the items in the Content container. |
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Remove the "Read More"-link from objects in the Newslist Add an asterisk * to the end of the filename of each of the News Items you want to remove it from. |
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Change the publishing order [sort order] of the Newslist To change the sort order, open the Content container and click on the column titles. If you want a more customized sort order, you can add your own columns and sort by these: you insert custom columns by creating a rule for it in the Content container´s Rules folder. |
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More than one Newslist You can have as many newslists / blogs / alternate Homepages you want. Each one will share the website Top Menu, but the Sidebar can be configured to be context-sensitive [and thus unique for each Newslist]. • Create an extra container in the website root, and give it a name and a subject. • Fill the new conainer with FirstClass Documents. • The URL to the second Newslist will be www.yourdomain.xx/contanername. • The title will be the container subject. |
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Make the Newslist a Blog: Check the Blog option in FirstMagic Preferences, Tab 1, and the Newslist will expand to full article view. This will also enable a checkbox on Tab 4 where you can activate BlogTools - a Find postings by age link group for the Sidebar. |
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