That's all folks! That's all you need to build a powerful and full featured content management system: pages, menus, text properties, and a set of site level configuration settings. Simple huh? Clear, consistent crates.

Although we have only a few document types, each of the documents varies significantly in its internal complexity (i.e., number of fields). The menu item document is fairly simple because you don't need too much information to display a menu item. The site configuration document begins to get significantly more complex with more than a hundred fields. The text properties document isn't that complex structurally because it's mostly dealing with font, size, style, and color, but it has huge quantities of fields because this information must be stored for each page element, such as headline, section heading, footer, etc. Finally, the content document is a monster, with many hundreds of fields of information required to be able to construct a final Web page rich with images, links, text, and other goodies.

So the next challenge is to build a user interface that allows content editors to keep their Web site up to date. This user interface must be dead simple, intuitive, and easy to understand. This is easy enough to do for the more simple documents: the menu item, the site configuration document, and the text properties. The content document, however, presents a special challenge. Despite the fact that it has a huge number of fields, we must somehow present it to the end user broken down into manageable chunks. It's not so hard to do, and there are a number of ways to get there.

However, in this case we simply build a range of editing forms, with each editing form dealing with different areas of the content document. Specifically, we create ten different edit forms. The end users don't know that it's all the same document underneath, and they don't care either. All they know is that for each Web page they can edit the document content (part one and two), document status, document properties, document links, and site indexes. They can also configure images (part one and two) and add and delete images.

Lets have a look at some aspects of the content administration system to give you and idea of how it all boiled down.

The edit site configuration screen is shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Here's the edit site configuration screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Check out the navigate menu items screen in Figure B.

FIGURE B


Here's the navigate menu items screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The edit menu item screen can be seen in Figure C.

FIGURE C


Here's the edit menu item screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Figure D shows the navigate text properties screen.

FIGURE D


Here's the navigate text properties screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Check out the edit text properties screen in Figure E.

FIGURE E


Here's the edit text properties screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The navigate documents screen can be seen in Figure F.

FIGURE F


Here's the navigate documents screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Figure G shows the edit document options screen.

FIGURE G


Here's the edit document options screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.