How to ebmed a piece of code

If you want to, for example, add a youtube movie clip to a page, or basically paste any piece of embedding code that a website gives you, just follow these few easy steps.

Firstly, the WYSIWYG editor does not allow you to paste the embedding code into it. If you try to "trick" it by adding it to the Source View section, it will appear to work, but the next time you want to edit the page, it probably won't work at all.

For this I have created a section what I call Page Extras - this allows you to add any number of extras to your page, and come in 3 categories: WYSIWYG extra, which is just a WYSIWYG editor like the normal one, HTML extra, allowing you to paste raw HTML coding onto the page, and Form extra, allowing you to link a form you've built with the Form Builder.

So, to add that raw HTML code (like the embedding code given to you by YouTube, or Google Calendar for example), first go the list of pages. In the Actions column, you will find the various available actions. The second to last action is Page Extras, with the icon 

Go ahead and click on it, and you will see a screen that looks like the following (if you don't have any page extras loaded for the page):

It gives you the option to add either a WYSIWYG extra, HTML extra or Form page extra.

Click on the second icon: 

This will allow you to paste the code given to you by YouTube or whichever site you used, and voila, you've just added raw HTML coding to your page.

How to use tables to add captions to images in the WYSIWYG editor

If you used the WYSIWYG editor of the CMS to add an image, and want to give that image a caption (some text about the image), it can be a pain to get the text nicely aligned with the image. And using a bunch of spaces is NOT a good idea!

Anyway, here is a quick tutorial on how to do it nicely, by using tables. In this example, we're going to add two pictures next to each other, with their captions below each image in the center.

So, to achieve this, we must first draw a table that will contain the actual pictures, as well as the captions. Since we want our captions to align up nicely next to each other, we're going to have them in their own ROW. So, the images will have a row, and the captions will have a row. Also, each image and caption will have their own CELL - in HTML we may refer to the Cell as the TD or Table Data...

Anyway, lets get our table in first by clicking the Insert/Edit Table button:

 

 This will bring up the Table Properties screen:

 

 

 It might be intimidating at first, but if you look closely, you'll see that is not! Anyway, for this table we want 2 rows and 2 columns. Also, I'm gonna leave the border size on 1, but feel free to make the value 0 if you don't want your table to display its border. Next, I'm making the width 100 PERCENT (not pixels), and the rest I'm leaving as is. The end result for this screen will look like this:

 

 Go ahead and click the OK button at the bottom, which will draw the table in your body copy:

Now, add the images in the first row, and lets center them as well (see here: http://rgcms.blogspot.com/2009/02/adding-image.html if you don't know how to add images yet...):

 Next, simply click in the cells underneath each image, then type in the caption you want, and remember to center the text as well:

 That is how easy it is! As always, remember to save the page. Till next time!

Creating a Nav link that links to a custom url (like your blog)

If you would like to create a link in your navigation menu that links to an external website, like your blog for example, just follow these simple steps:

Firstly, create a new page as you would normally do, which will bring you to this screen:

Right at the top of the fields, you will see one labeled "Links to url", with a checkbox next to it:

Go ahead and tick this checkbox, which will change the screen to look like this:

As you can see, it now asks for you to Type in the URL, select the parent page (though this is not applicable to all CMS's...), specify whether it is in the menu or not, and Page Name. So, go ahead and type in the FULL url into the "Type in URL" field (be sure to include the http:// part as well - easiest way to ensure you do this right, is to copy and paste the address in the browser open on the website you want to link to...), and remember to give it a Name, otherwise it will not show in the menu.

Next, click on Save, and voila! You now have a navigation link linking to an outside URL.

Making a link to another page in your cms

Here is how to make a link to one of your CMS pages:

It works almost exactly like normal links. Firstly, select the text you want to make the link, and click the Insert/Edit Link button:

 This will open up the Link Dialog box:

Here, we want to change the "Protocol" option to :

 Next, open up your website in a new window or tab, and go to the page you would like to link to. Once the page is open in front of you, select the part in the address bar after your websites url (url would be something like http://www.rgtwebhosting.com/ or http://www.rgcms.co.za/).

You want to select the part AFTER that. Say for example the address is http://www.rgtwebhosting.com/HostingPackages.html , then you ONLY want to select the "HostingPackages.html" part (in other words, the part AFTER the last forward slash "/"), and copy that by pressing Ctrl+C on your keyboard:

Once that is copied, paste it (Ctrl+V) into the Link Dialog, in the URL text box:

Now click the Ok button, and you've just created a link to one of your CMS pages. Once again, remember to save the page once you're done editing the page!

UPDATE

We've been battling for months and months for our WYSIWYG editor creators to make a more detailed help section on how to customize it - well, we've finally got it right to include a new option in the drop down box mentioned above - in the latest version of the RGCMS (contact your web designer about getting the upgraded version), you can now select a "RGCMS Page" option from the Link Type list, and then you'll see a list of all the pages in the CMS, and you can simply select which one you would like to link to.

How to use the Form Builder

I am very excited to announce that I have created a very nice form builder module for the RGCMS, as well as the RGCMS Lite. I have been playing around with the whole idea for more than a year, and about a month ago, I just decided that now is the time!

Anyway, here is how to create a form for your website.

When logged in to the RGCMS, you will see a new option in the menu called "Forms". If you hover on it, you will see 2 options namely View Forms, and Add a new Form.

Lets go ahead and click Add a new Form, which will open up the add new form screen:

Here you can fill in all the relevant details for the form. The most important of these are the Name, To, Subject Line, and Gmail username and password.

The name of the form is just so that you know what form it is, for example: "Contact Form". The "To" field, is the email address where the form will be sent when filled in. The "Subject Line" is what will appear in the subject line. You must specify a Gmail username and password - if you do not have one, I highly recommend getting one (its free!). The form is sent through the Gmail mail server, which also means you have a online backup of all the forms that get submitted through your website, in the sent items part when logged into your gmail account.

(I personally recommend creating a new gmail account specifically for your forms though...)

Anyway, after filling in the details, just click the Add Form button, and VOILA, the form has been created, and is now ready for some fields - to do that, click on the fields button in the row of the form:

Which will bring you here:

Click on the button, and you can now enter the details for the new field, which will look like this:

As you can see, the Field Type is set to Text Box by default, and you can now enter all the properties for the field.

Now, all of the fields have the Name, Description and Title properties, but, depending on the field type, some of them have different properties that needs to get filled in.

There are basically 8 different fields you can select: Text Box, Email Text Box, Drop Down Box, Country Drop Down Box, Date Selector Drop Down Box, Text Area, Radio Button Group and Checkbox.

Just follow the onscreen instructions, fill in the relevant details, then click the Add Field button at the bottom to add the field. In this way, you can add as many fields as you want to your form.

After a few fields, you will have a screen similar to this one:

Now we are ready to add this field to one of the RGCMS pages. That is quite simple to do... Firstly, go to the Pages section of the RGCMS, which will show you the list of the pages you have already created (if any...):

To add the form to one of your pages, just click on the View Extras for this Page button:

which will bring you to this screen:

As you can see, there are three options here, but we want to click on the third option to add the Form to the page:

This will show you this screen:

Now just give the page extra a name, and select the form you'd like to use on the page, then click the Save Form Page Extra button, and you're good to go. The form has now been added to the page. Note: you can still make as many changes to the actual form as you want. A good idea would be to create a thank you page and make sure that it is not in the menu, and link the form to that page - that means that the website will automatically redirect to that page when the form has been submitted!

That's it! This was just a short and sweet article on how to use the RGCMS Form Builder. Best would be to play around and create all the forms you want!

The RGCMS Lite also has the form builder built in, but with a few limitations:

1.  You cannot have more than 3 forms at any one time.

2.  You can only create 4 different field types, not 8 like the standards RGCMS (Text box, Drop Down Box, Text Area and Checkbox)

Other than that, they work exactly the same!

Enjoy!

How to assign a call to action (standard CMS only)

The standard cms has a Calls to Actions section (The Lite CMS does not have this feature...), which was specifically created to link various on page elements, like images, or links that are in the footer for example, to one of your created pages.

For example, on your website, you have a big red button that says something "Current Specials" - now, to allow you the freedom to decide what is on your current specials page, you have the ability to create the page as you would normally create a page with the cms, and make sure to specify that the page is NOT in the menu (so it is then hidden), and then, with the Calls to Actions feature you can link your Current Specials button to that hidden page you created.

Now, Calls to Actions on the cms is a unique thing for each individual cms, so some cms's does not have calls to actions, and some can have several...

Anyway, to link a call to action summary:

1. Create a new page that will have the content of the "call to action".
2. Be sure to specify that this new page is NOT in the menu (otherwise it will appear in the menu, if you, however, would like it to be in the menu as well, feel free to do so).
3. In the menu, click the Calls to Action link, which will bring you to the screen where you can choose which page to assign to which call to action.
4. Be sure to click the save calls to action button.

Thats basically it. The big red button, or whatever your calls to actions are, will now be linked to the page you assigned to it.

Another thing you can do, you can, when you create the page, have it link to an outside website, and if you assign it to the call to action, it will then link to that specific website address! Handy if you have a big button that you want to link to you blog, for example!

Working with Images

With the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, you can insert images as well, giving some colour to your website, BUT if you do not resize the images before you upload them, it can REALLY slow down your site!

If you uploaded an image, and the make it smaller by dragging the small blocks in the corners, this does not actually make the file size of the image smaller - it basically just "tells" the browser to display the image at that size - the original file size is still like it was when you uploaded the image, which can really slow down your website if the images are really big.

The best way to go about this is to make the pictures smaller BEFORE you upload them (remember to make a backup of the image first, and then make it smaller...)

A very nice little utility is actually one by Microsoft, and best of all, its free! There are actually a few of these handy little tools, but the one we can look at is the Image Resizer.

Click here and you will see a whole list of stuff, and on the right side of the page, you will see a link to download the image resizer (about 2 thirds of the way down...) - so download that, and install it.

What this tool does, is it adds an entry to the right click menu when you are browsing through your files. First, select the image/s you want to resize, the rightclick on them. It will look similar to this (in Windows XP that is...):

Note: you can select more than one picture at a time if you want to resize them all to the same size...

Clicking on Resize Pictures will open up a very simple to use dialog box that looks like this:

As you can see, pretty straightforward. Anyway, I always click the Advanced >> button, cause I'm usually not happy with one of the default sizes - this makes the Resize Image dialog look like this:

Go ahead and select the Custom option, and then just manually type in the size for the image. I usually make pictures that go on a website 400 pixels or so wide - width is the first of the two text boxes (height doesn't matter in this case). 

If you made a backup of your original image, you can go ahead and tick the "Resize the original pictures (don't create copies)" checkbox, but it's safer to just leave it unticked...

Click OK, and a copy of the image will be made, and that one will be resized (unless, of course, you ticked the Resize the original... checkbox), quickly and easily! Now it will be ready to go on your website. It will load nice and quick, which is something that your visitors will like!