BoltWire

Welcome Tour

Using Actions

The first concept you need to understand in BoltWire is what we call actions. Actions are processes you perform on a page to accomplish certain goals. For example, to create a page is one action. So is editing, renaming, copying, and deleting a page. Like most content management systems, BoltWire makes it easy to do these kinds of things.

Other actions aren't linked to a specific page, but perform other functions. To login or logout are two more actions. Other actions are to do a search, or print a page. BoltWire makes all of these easy as well.

When you first view a newly created site, you will see a link to register your admin account. That's the first thing you are going to want to do with your new site. Logging in as the admin give you full access to all the actions on your site. And registering that account ensures someone else doesn't create that account first and start putting their own pages on your site!

Once you are logged in with your admin account, you should see a long list of small links near the top of the page. Those are some of your available actions.

Common Actions

Here are some of the most basic actions in BoltWire, with a brief explanation of what each one does. To perform an action, just click the appropriate link from the list at the top of the page.

Create	This action is used to create a new page. You will get a warning message if you try to create a page that already exists.
Edit	This loads the current page into an edit window, so you can change it. Backups are made so you can undo things.
Copy	This allows you to copy a page and save it with a new name. You can modify the contents of the new page first, if you wish.
Rename	This action allows you to rename a page. A backup is made of the page at the old location.
Undo	This command checks for backups of a page and allows you to revert the content to any backup that is available.
Print	This action produces a simplified page display focused on the content of the page, specially formatted for printing.
Delete	This allows you to delete a page. A backup is made first, which you can restore at a later time.

Why not give these actions a try. Click CREATE and enter a page name like "test.one", then type "Hello World" in the page content box, and click save. You just created your first page.

Now click EDIT and make some change to the page content. Try using COPY to copy the contents of your updated page to "test.two" with more changes to the content if you want. Then use RENAME, to rename it to "test.three". Make another change using the EDIT link and then click UNDO to change it back. Then click PRINT to print your page. And then when you are tired of it all, click DELETE.

These are all super basic functions, but you need the basics to get anything done. So go ahead, and play around a bit.

Advanced Information

Once you get more familiar with BoltWire, there are some additional things you are going to want to explore about actions.

First, you are going to want to check out all the rest of our default actions. BoltWire comes loaded with 20 or so actions pre-installed, enough to keep you busy for awhile. You can get a complete list of the default actions that come with BoltWire, and what they do, in our Handbook.

And second, you should know that most of our actions are simple pages you can create and edit in BoltWire just like any other page. That's actually the secret sauce in our software. Try going to page action.create, and then without creating a new page, click the source action. This will bring you to a url that looks something like this: http://mydomain.com/action/create&action=source. Basically, you should find yourself looking at the actual contents (source) of the form used in BoltWire to create new pages.

Don't worry if you don't understand all the code on that "action.create" page right now, just know it's like any other page in your site. And if you had clicked EDIT instead of SOURCE, you could completely modify how the create action looks and works by changing that form.   

In other words, BoltWire doesn't just give you actions you can perform--it allows you to completely customize those actions any way you want. You can also make new actions, perhaps copying some existing action, and tweaking it to accomplish some specific purpose. Or so it works differently on some specific section of your site. Or you can create something entirely new, that acts wildly different.

It doesn't really matter. BoltWire's actions let you reshape the core engine however you want, right through your browser.

These are topics for future guides, but once you grasp the power of this approach, you'll realize actions give BoltWire a flexibility and power not possible in other systems. And it makes all kinds of interesting things strikingly easy to do.

Now before you go and start creating pages, you'll want to understand the power of page names. Another critical concept...

Working with Pages