BoltWire

Welcome Tour

Working with Pages

There are at least a couple things you should know about BoltWire page names. First, to keep things simple, page names should only contain letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores, and dots. Actually, BoltWire supports international language characters, so you are not stuck with A-Z, but you do need to avoid using certain punctuation or spaces in your page names.

Second, all page names are automatically converted to lower case, so there is no difference between page Some.Page and some.page. This makes links in BoltWire inherently case insensitive, which cut down on user errors.

You can see the name of your current page by looking at the URL in your browser address bar. Normally (if you are using our default setup), you will see a path to your site, followed by the name of the page, with the dots turned to slashes. That is, "www.mysite.com/some/page" means you are on "some.page". If an action is being performed on a page, BoltWire will add something like this to the end of the URL: "&action=print". Other parameters may be added in other situations, as well.

Page Titles

Because we often would rather have a page titled "Some Page" and not some.page, BoltWire has a special title action which allows you to assign a title to a page. If no title is set, BoltWire will take the last part of the page name, capitalize it, and use that for your title. This page, for example, is docs.tour.pages but its title has been set to "Working With Pages", which is what appears at the top of the page, and wherever the page title is called for.

Note: starting in 7.08, many of the actions that create new pages allow you to set the title at the same time you create the page content. This helps cut down on a step. But you can always update the title using the title action.

Hierarchical Pages

All right, now for the good stuff. BoltWire uses a special feature we call hierarchical pages which means your pages can easily be organized into a hierarchy. So a page like plants.trees.oaks is contained within plants.trees, which is within plants.

This is important because it enables you to control settings for entire groups of pages all at once. Suppose for example you created pages public.one, public.two, and public.three, then private.one, private.two, and private.three. You could very easily set view permissions to the public pages for any visitor, and limit viewing of the private pages to a specific group of logged in members. And that setting would apply to all the pages in that hierarchy.

In addition to view and edit permissions, you can customize their headers, footers, and side menus, create specialized actions, enable various plugins, or skins, and set various configuration options as well, for any group of pages you wish. Learning to use page hierarchies effectively can make web administration much simpler, and accomplish some amazing effects. We'll look at a couple examples in the next guide.

Before getting too far into your site creation, I recommend sketching out a simple hierarchy of how you will want to organize your pages. We usually recommend creating a series of "welcome" pages for non members visiting your site, a series of "members" pages for logged in members, and if you have a restricted partners area, consider creating a group of "partners" pages. Here's a more advanced tutorial on how page hierarchies work with helpful information if you want to read more.

Ok, ready to talk about the layout and design of your site?

Layout & Design