Welcome. This video serves as a quick introduction to the core features of Modern Signal's Lighthouse Content Management System.
The Lighthouse CMS is a set of interrelated tools designed to help you easily add, edit, delete, and search your website content. Let’s start off by logging in to the Administrator Site.
The Admin Dashboard displays links to SiteEditor and to additional tools to help you manage the various aspects of your website. Let's first look at SiteEditor then we'll come back and look more closely at some of the other admin tools. Select the “Edit Site” link to go to SiteEditor.
SiteEditor serves as the content editing tool for the majority of the information on your site. It provides a view of your site in the main content panel. SiteEditor adds an additional admin panel to the left of the screen and a WYSIWYG editing toolbar to the top of the screen. You will notice that the site looks almost identical to the public, live site, with the exception of gray dotted lines surrounding blocks of editable content. The beauty of this is you don't have to imagine what your content edits will look like on the front-end. You can click into any editable area to manage its content.
This demo site’s homepage template has many editable areas. Sub pages on the site use different templates with different editable areas. Your site can be set up with as many distinct templates as necessary. Let’s review a few more templates. I’ll click the Services page in the main navigation. You can also use the “Navigate Site” tab in the left panel to maneuver around the site.
As you can see, the template used on the Services page has a very different look than the site’s homepage. A different template is used on “Services Subpage 1”. This page has editable areas for title, subtitle, and main body copy.
Let’s quickly use some of the features in the WYSIWYG toolbar to update this page. I’ll add an image to main content and link it to another page on the site. First, I’ll place my cursor where I’d like the image to be added and click the “Insert Image” button. This pulls up the File Browser, allowing me to select from existing images on the site. I can also upload an image, which would become part of the site’s image library. I’ll click into the Social folder and select the Twitter icon. The image is larger than I’d like to display, so I’ll choose to display it at 25%.
Next, let’s link the image to our Products page. I’ll select the image and click the Link icon. From here, you can also link to an external site, an email address, or a document. To link to the Products page, select Choose a page on this site. Lighthouse automatically determines the correct URL for the page and fills in the URL field.
There are many more features in the WYSIWYG toolbar, such as adding, deleting, and moving pages, working with tables and lists, and applying styles and other formatting to content. These features are described in other videos in this series.
The admin panel on the left of the screen contains several tabs. The Properties, Topics, and Permissions tabs allow you to set a variety of properties that apply to the page currently being viewed. On the Properties tab, you can edit Page Title, Navigation Title, and Meta description. The Topics tab allows you to tag pages to topics which can be used for searching and categorization on the front-end. Use the Permissions tab to flag a page as Members Only and identify which user groups are able to access the page.
Now, let’s move out of SiteEditor and go back to the Administrator Dashboard. Click the Admin Home icon to do this. Here you’ll see a number of different admin tools that help you easily manage the site, from administrator tools for managing things like Links, Users, and Permissions, to custom tools that help you manage content specific to your site, like Image Carousels, Photo Galleries, Products and Orders, and Team Members. Let’s take a closer look at how these tools work.
I’ll click into the Manage Team Members tool. This tool allows you to manage the content that displays on the Our Team page of the site, but whatever their purpose, all data management tools on the Admin Site utilize the same powerful easy-to-use interface. When you first enter a tool, the View screen displays. From here, I can edit or delete existing records. I can search for a team member or add a new team member. I can modify how this data displays by selecting Choose Columns…… I can sort by any column in the tool and export this data into Excel. I can also set the order the records will display on the front end…… From simple tools with a few fields to complex systems with lots of fields and a series of interrelated tools, every admin tool uses this robust but easy to use interface, making site management a breeze.
Take a look at more videos in this series to see how Lighthouse Content Management System can make managing your site a breeze, too.
