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Tricks and Tips

Shortcuts and Secrets about the CMS

After becoming comfortable with the CMS, the first thought that comes to mind is "There's got to be a quicker way to do this!". Most of the time, there is. Listed below you will find some of the more useful CMS tricks.

The CMS is smart enough to recognize email addresses and full URLs and when it does, it automatically hyperlinks them. All you need to do is type in or paste the email address or URL and type a space or line return immediately after the last letter (it looks as though punctuation works now as well). The address or URL will change color and become a link.

Oops! The automatic linker linked something you wanted left as plain text -- now what? Click on the Unlink button (broken chain) and your text will be unlinked.

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Another quick trick can be used to link to pages that have a human-readable name (Note that the "name" of a page is what appears in the Content Store -- it's not the same as the "header" which appears at the top of a live page).

Simply click and drag the page you wish to link to from the Content Store into the Body Box where you want the link to appear. A new link is created, the text of which is the "name" of the page you dragged.

If you don't like the page's name, try typing your own text into your page, selecting it, then dragging the page you want to link on to your selection. Bingo: new link, your text.

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You can check in and out pages from the keyboard as well.

Shift-Control-O checks out a page, and Shift-Control-I checks one in.

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The CMS likes to force you to double-space all of your paragraph breaks -- which on the web is a good thing! Unlike in print, we don't have indentation markup to indicate the start of a new paragraph and that whitespace also keeps our pages from looking too crowded.

But sometimes you need something to be single-spaced and it can be done in the CMS. Just hit Shift-Enter when you wish to single-space a line return, rather than the usual Enter. A line break will be added in the source and you're ready to go.

DO NOT use single-spaced line breaks for formatting a column width! Not everyone uses the same browser or has the same fonts on their machine and that oh-so-perfectly lined up column that you forced with single-spacing might fall apart on someone else's screen.

Also DO NOT use single-spaced line breaks to double space.

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Ever wonder what you had left checked out? You can see a list of checked out files by choosing the Assignment tab from the tab list at the top of your screen. Double-clicking on any of the pages listed will take you to that page in the tree.

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If you spend any time at all on the Kenyon site and you're familiar with the CMS, you'll notice that a page's children normally appear in the left column, along with its siblings, and possibly its direct ancestor, depending on what sort of page you're on.

It's possible to put a page's children in the main content well of a Content-type page. To do so, you may need to contact mazurr@kenyon.edu to have the "ShowKids" checkbox added to your page. Checking this box will put the links into the main content well, immediately below anything you might have in the BodyCopy box.

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