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Kenyon College

Introduction to the Publisher

Help is always available at http://www.kenyon.edu/usergroup.xml

The CMS now works in all modern browsers and across Windows and Mac OS. Windows users should open the CMS in FIREFOX and avoid using Internet Explorer for any sort of browsing. Mac users may use Safari or Firefox.

  1. Open Firefox.

  2. Go to http://cms.kenyon.edu/publisher

  3. Enter your username in the format kenyon\your_kenyon_usernameNote: There is some evidence that you may not need the "kenyon\" portion any more, and may be able to get in on just your username. I haven't been able to confirm if this is true for all locations and all browsers, so all I can say is try it; if it doesn't work, go back to using the prefix.

  4. Enter your regular Kenyon email password

Troubleshooting Login Problems

  • Is your username correct? Make sure it is of the format kenyon\your_kenyon_username

  • Is your password correct? It should be your most recent email password.

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Each page in the CMS exists within the Site Tree under the Content Store.

When you first log in to the CMS, you'll be shown your Assignment List in the left-hand column. To see the Site Tree click on the tab marked Site above this tab.

The Site Tree is organized much like a family tree: each page or folder may have many "child" pages. If a page has many children, it is called the "parent" or "ancestor" of those children -- and all the children of one parent are called "siblings". To see the children of a page, click on the "+" next to that page.

Every page has a unique number x-number which can be found near the end of the page's URL .

For example, the unique number for the Academic Calendar ( http://www.kenyon.edu/x31096.xml ) is x31096.

To find a page:

  • Visit the page in a browser and find its x-number.
  • In the CMS, enter the x-number in the Go to Page box (located in the tool bar ), and hit enter.
  • The page will appear in your edit panel .

Example: To find the Academic Calendar page from above, enter x31096 in the Go to Page box.

You may also browse down through the Site Tree by clicking the "+" symbols.

Tip: To find the x-number of a page with a friendly URL ( http://www.kenyon.edu/usergroup.xml ), browse to the page in Firefox and hit Ctrl-U on your keyboard. You will see HTML code. You can ignore most of it, but look for something like this: THE X NUMBER FOR THIS PAGE IS: x19867. It will be near the top of the page.

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If no one is working on an existing page, it should be checked in (grayed out) and marked for publish (bold).

  1. Click the page in the tree. Its name will become highlighted, and you should see the page itself come up in the edit panel.

  2. Click the Check Out button in the toolbar (it will change to say Check In) or Right-click on the page in the tree and choose Check Out from the menu that appears. From the right-click menu you may choose to check out only the page, or the page and children.

  3. Edit the checked out page just as you would a word processor document.

  4. Save your changes (Save button in the toolbar, or Ctrl-S).

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Before previewing, no matter which editor you use, be sure to click on File->Save

Be sure you are previewing a main content page. To preview an anchor file or right-hand column, you must click on the parent of that page chunk. This is because anchors and the right hand columns (link set headers, link set entries, and links) are not a page in themselves, but rather a part of a whole.

In general, you can preview pages with this icon:

Pages with the following icons cannot be previewed: .

To Preview a page, click the Preview tab in the tab list. You may also preview the page in a bigger new window by clicking the Preview button in the toolbar.

Note that if you immediately jump to another page while the Preview tab is selected, that page will also be in preview mode. To edit it, you will have to click the Edit tab.

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  1. Click on the name of the page that you wish to be the parent of the new page. The name will be highlighted.

  2. Click the New button in the toolbar

  3. Choose Page from the dropdown that appears.

  4. A dialog box will appear, containing two fields.

    • In the first field, name your new page. Do not use special characters in this box.

    • The field Type is a drop-down menu. Choose your page type (generally Content, but there are other page types).

  5. Click Create

New pages are initially Unmarked for Publish, which means that they will be held back from the public site until you indicate that they should be live. To do so, right click on the page's name in the tree, and select Mark for Publish. This will make the page's name appear in bold, and the page will go live at the next publish.

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