Conventions in Editing

The editing experience

Maxwell's Sitefinity CMS has a very minimalistic editing interface.  This example shows what editing a "Research Article" looks like.  It shares many elements with the other full-page content types like people and events. 

Let's break apart what's here to help you get used to the conventions Sitefinity uses and work as efficiently as possible. 

Sections 

The left-side of the page contains a list of links to regions within the page that you're editing.   If you wanted to edit the "Related People" for this research article , clicking that link immediately brings you down to that portion of the page.   

Publishing tools

The top-right of the page contains the "workflow" buttons.  To make edits visible to website visitors, click the green "Publish" button.  To save updates you have made to the page without making them public, click "Save as Draft".  

Title

The first field at the top of  Sitefinity content is the "Title" field.  The type of content you're editing determines what becomes of the information you enter here.  In the full content types (people, news & research articles, events, etc.), this title becomes part of the page's URL (web address). It may also become the main heading displayed near the top of the page.  In the smaller page elements (cards, spotlights, callouts, etc.) the title is not presented the same way.  In these smaller elements this main title is extremely important for making the content more easily found when creating pages.

Expanding & collapsing sections

Using the "Book or Research Article Title" field as an example, you can see the circular icon has a downward pointing arrow next to it.  Each item can be expanded or collapsed to show or hide what's in it.  Collapsing these helps minimize visual distractions.   Collapsed items have a right-facing arrow.

Help boxes

Again using the  "Book or Research Article Title" field in the screenshot above, we have strategically placed help tips on various fields to assist editors in better understanding how to input data or what that field might be used for when the page containing this information is displayed.   Click on the "?" icon to open and close the blue help dialog box.