Syrinx CS Administrator Guide

Overview

In a Syrinx CS web site, all written words and images that are not a part of the theme itself come from the Content Management System (CMS). Rather than putting your writings and images directly into an html page, you write your content as articles that can be shown on the website's pages in a wide variety of formats. This gives you the flexibility to change the arrangement of your content or the theme of your website without having to modify the content itself.

This is particularly important when a website will support more than one language. The real web pages in the site dont get translated to different languages, the articles themselves do.

Another good reason for separating your content from the actual web pages in the site is that you can easily reuse the content in a separate site, such as a mobile version of the website. A mobile website typically has a completely different theme and page structure from the standard PC version of the website. You can actually have both versions of the website use the articles, images and media which will make overall management of the two website versions much easier to deal with.

Articles are used for the content portion of everything in the website, including photos, videos, photo albums, products in the ecommerce system, blogs, forum posts, etc. Therefore, understanding how to edit your content properly is a critical part of managing your site.
Organizing your Content

Articles in the CMS are much like the directory structure of the hard drive on your computer. There is a parent/child relationship between articles, much like directories and files from the hard drive. You can write an article that is a child to another article, which forms a relationship between them. A good example of why you would have these relationships is a "photo album". The photo album would have an article to represent the main set of photos, with a title such as "Our Trip to the Beach" and would have its primary picture set to the image you want to use to represent the photo album. Each picture that you wanted to be a part of the photo album would be a child article to the main "Our Trip to the Beach" photo album article.

Another example would be a "book" type content. In a larger site, there may be a collection of articles that relate together into a common topic. You would have an article that represented the book itself, where the title of that article would be the title of the book. Individual articles that are a part of that book would be child articles to the book article. When users view the book on the website, they would see a "table of contents" list of the child articles for the book that they could click on to navigate to the topics written within the book. They could also use the next/previous buttons to page through the content within the book.

Even with articles that are not directly related to each other like the book or photo album types, it makes sense to organize similar articles together under a common parent. You can create an article that will never be directly shown to users on the site just so that you can organize articles as its children to help provide structure when you have more than a few articles in your site. In that case, the parent article is acting mostly like a directory on your hard drive; its just there for organizational purposes only and its title is named to help relate the organization like the name of a directory.

In the above image shows the article grid from the article management administration page. The first article in the grid, named "Base Site Content" is a root article and is not indented. The 2nd article has no title (which is allowed). The 3rd article is a child of the "Base Site Content" article and is indented one level. Notice the "Default Overlay" article is indented under the "Alternative Splash 1" article and is indented two levels. This shows the parent/child relationships between the given articles.

How Article Relationships Help Drive Page Displays

The organization you use for you content can help make it easier to display the site content in a variety of ways on your site. In the following image, the services of Syrinx are shown as child articles to a "Syrinx Services" parent article.

On a real page within the application, the Syrinx services can easily be shown as a list that users can use to learn more about the services that Syrinx offers. The image below shows the same set of articles in a read only view, showing the Articles title, primary image and summary.

Controlling the Order of Articles

In Syrinx CS, the articles in the tree are organized alphabetically relative to their parent. If you want to control the order of a set of child articles, you can do that by starting the title with a specially formatted ordering number, such as "01~!The Title". The 01 is what controls the order, while the special characters ~! tell SCS that the number before it is not really a part of the title displayed to users on the site, but is there only to control the ordering of an articles children. You will only see the ordering format number when the edit mode is on. When you are in read only mode, the ordering numbers are stripped away so that "01~!The Title" becomes simply "The Title". This is used and supported only on the Title field of an article.

The following two images show a set of articles with edit mode on and off. Notice how when the edit mode is on (left image), you see the ordering numbers, but when it is off you just see the normal title without the ordering numbers yet the articles are still in the desired order.

Securing Access to the Sites Content

The overall organization within the CMS also helps to control who can view or edit content within the site. Each of the root articles within the CMS also has its own security access (a root article is an article that has no parent article, like a root directory on your hard drive). You could create a root Article called "Public Content" that all site users could view, and create another root Article called "Gold Members Content" that only users that are in the "Gold Members" user group can view.

The above image is a snippet from the User Group security configuration in the Company Security administration page, which shows the root level articles as security access options. Each root level article defined in the CMS will be shown here. Each User group can be setup to have specific security access for each of the root articles. [URL]Link to the company security admin page here[URL].

Even if you do not intend to have content for specific types of users of your site, you should still organize all your standard public content under one root article. Having lots of root articles for the content in your site will create lots of security settings that will be shown in the security settings administration page.

The ecommerce system in Syrinx CS is a combination of many different features that together make up for a powerful product, though still a bit rough around the edges. It has some interesting abilities like calculating the boxes needed to ship a given order and the ability to attach product options forms amongst others.

Products

The core element of the ecommerce features is the Product. A product is based on an Article from the CMS of Syrinx CS. There are sites in production with over 25 thousand products using Syrinx CS, but you can also easily use it to sell only one product.

As with Articles, Products are managed in a tree structure. You could just have a flat list of products without the tree, which is fine when you only have a few products. If you start to have over a handful of products, you can create “store departments”, which let you organize products within them. Store departments can contain store departments such that the depth of the tree can get deep.

The organization you use should be what feels most natural for how you would like to see them organized for administration. This organization can be used for shopping pages for site users, but you can also have custom category names that you apply to products which can also be used for public displays.
For example, if you sell technology equipment, you might prefer to organize departments for vendors, then have departments for product type such as hard drives, laptops, etc. However, you can also have a category called hard drive, which you apply to products that are hard drives. Then you can easily have a display of all hard drives from all vendors.

Product Types

You can sell Physical products that have to be shipping in boxes and delivered, or have in store pickup options. These types of products should have dimensions if you want to use shipping providers like Fedex which offer live shipping quotes. If you mail your product and different orders can use different amounts and types of boxes based on what they order and quantity, then you need to get that quote from the delivery provider like Fedex so you can quote the shipping costs in the check out process.

You can also sell products that are not physical, like site memberships or downloads. Site memberships can be setup as products so that the user picks their membership and goes through the checkout process. After they have paid, the site will create an account with the site access and privileges specified by the product definition.

Product Pricing

Each product should have a price from zero to whatever the price needs to be. Prices with zero for the price will allow the user to checkout without having to provide a payment provider.

If all your products are priced at zero, and you use displays that don’t show a price, you can use the ecommerce system for an online quote system where the users doesn’t have to pay anything during checkout.

You can also set a list price versus a sell price so that a product can show a display that indicates there is a sale price or discounted price.

Product Categories

Building custom categories specifically for products allows not only for lists of products to be organized by category, but also allows for custom fields. As an example, if you were selling computer hard drives, you could define a category called hard drive, then add custom properties to the category such has the drive’s RPM, interface type, size, etc. Then you can show these properties in grouping displays such that products with the same RPM are shown grouped together.