FirstMagic Pro extends FirstMagic with two different methods for publishing large numbers of independent sub-websites: FirstClass Personal Web Publishing within FirstMagic, and Sub-Sites that are stand-alone FirstMagics inside the Main FirstMagic site.
The two methods can be combined - you can have a Personal Web Publishing Site as part of, or as the Homepage of, a stand-alone FirstMagic sub-site.
FIRSTCLASS PERSONAL WEB PUBLISHING IN FIRSTMAGIC
If the site is Pro licensed, you can use the Project Layout template to include FirstClass Personal sites in your FirstMagic Website. Here´s how:
- Make a Project from the Portal picker. Do not move it out of the Portal container - it will not work outside it.
- Write the name of the Personal Site you want this page to represent as the object name - the filename - for the container. If the real URL to the Personal Site is mydomain.com~firstname.lastname, what you want to write here is simply "~firstname.lastname".
You can add a Header Document, and it will become the Index Page - the Homepage - of the personal site. If you leave it blank, the *real* first page of the Personal Site will be the Index Page instead.
This is all that is necessary; the Project will now act as an alias for the entire Personal Site: it automatically creates navigation for itself in the FirstMagic Sidebar, and makes it use the active FirstMagic Skin - so it will fit seamlessly into the rest of your FirstMagic Site.
The original Personal Site will continue to work as before - the difference being that it also has an URL on the FirstMagic Website, and there, it looks and feels like any other FirstMagic content. There are three huge advantages to this:
- FirstClass Users can publish into FirstMagic without having access to it.
- You can deploy any FirstMagic Skin as a design for FirstClass Personal Sites - and, since FirstMagic Skins are plain stylesheets, you can design for FirstClass Personal Sites without going through the complex process of replacing a FirstClass Personal Plugin theme. If you combine the Personal Site feature with the Sub-Site feature, you can actually give each Personal Site it´s own, unique design in this way.
- You can use FirstMagic as a browsable directory of FirstClass Personal Websites - promoting all of them in a list, or graphically with Tile Avatars, or perhaps as drop-down Menu Items. By attaching a FirstMagic Search Widget to a specific container, even make a searchable index of all Personal Sites...
Note:
- if a FirstClass Personal Site has a Home Page document, the FirstMagic version will respect it, and will simply display the Home Page document and nothing else: it will not generate Sidebar navigation. To avoid this, tell your users to rename "Home Page" to something else.
- If a FirstClass Personal Site has an index.html document, it´s content will be rendered as a sidebar item instead of a Personal Menu; no other content will be retrieved.
FIRSTMAGIC PRO SUB-SITES
If Pro licensed, you can use the Pro Layout to publish any number of sub-websites inside the FirstMagic site. Each can have its own unique logo, navigation scheme, Skin, Top Menu, Sidebar, and so on. Here´s how:
From the Portal picker, make a Project Layout. Do not move it out of the Portal container - it will not work outside it [use aliases for that]: Sub-Websites must reside in the Portal. If you want to publish it somewhere else, simply keep it there [you can hide it by moving it to the upper pane], and use a FirstClass Bookmark pointing to it, wherever you want it displayed.
If the FirstMagic Website is in Tile Mode, open the new Project container and replace Avatar.png with a custom graphic. Else, the Avatar can be deleted.
The sub-site can have its own Menu, Sidebar and Footer: just make them as needed, either as Listing Layouts or as regular FirstClass containers. If a container by one of these names exists in the Project Layout, it will suppress the corresponding one of the Main Site (a container named "Menu", for example, will be used instead of the main FirstMagic Top Menu).
The Sub-Site Layout will sort all its content into tabs, with Documents, Containers, Bookmarks and Uploaded Files listed in separate tabs; the Menu, Sidebar and Footer works the same way the Main Site root containers do.
To get a custom logo, just upload a file named "logo.png" into the Project container. Drag it into the upper pane to prohibit it from being listed in a Tab - it will still work, and will suppress the Main Site logo.
To get a custom design for the Sub-Site, copy the FMskin.css example from /Library/HTML/ into the Project Layout. With a little CSS you can write a custom Skin for your site. Alternately, the FirstClass Admininstrator may provide a selection of plug-and-play FirstMagic Skins to choose from. Make sure to drag FMskin.css into the upper pane, to hide it from the container listing.
How to combine the Pro website with the Pro Personal feature:
- Set up a Sub-Site, and write a ~FirstClass.Username into it´s Name field.
- Populate the Project container with your content as normal - it will work seamlessly with the FC Personal Content.
The result is a stand-alone FirstMagic where a FirstClass Personal Site becomes the Homepage and top directory. The owner can now mix FirstClass Personal features and FirstMagic web publishing features in the same website.
