Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Responsive Design Higher Graphical Standards Logging In o Tips for Login o First Login Chapter 2: Website Overview Adobe Experience Manager Interface: Web Content Manager Interface Parent Child Relationship Creating a Page o Create Page Dialog Box Toolbar Page Properties o More Titles and Descriptions o Advanced Move Pages / Rename the URL Chapter 3: DAM Overview Adding a Folder Uploading Images o Asset Meta-Data Tab o Replace Original Image / Rendition o Change Asset File Name Adding Documents Activating Assets Chapter 4: Editing a Page Content Finder Sidekick
Drop Zones Text Component o Hyperlinks o Format Text o Adding Images o Column Control
Chapter 1: Introduction This guide will be a step-by-step tutorial to the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Web Content Management System (CMS). Adobe recently rebranded the tool from Adobe CQ5 to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and you might notice both terms being used in the system. Responsive Design Responsive Design means that as a window changes size, the content is able to adjust accordingly, scaling down buttons, pictures, and menus in order to make the website more user-friendly for the device it s being rendered on. For example, by visiting the www.bgsu.edu home page, you can experiment by resizing the window; you will notice that the menu will collapse on itself, and the picture will get smaller if needed. Higher Graphical Standards Another advantage of the Adobe Content Management System is the graphical capabilities. In the new CMS, graphics will be presented in a higher resolution. 1
If you compare the image on the right (old website) to the image above (new website), you will notice the newer website has sharper colors and a sleeker design. Freedom to Edit Anywhere With the new CMS, users can edit Web pages no matter where they are by logging in to the Adobe CMS. Whether the user is at home, in the office, or on their laptop in the lobby somewhere, making quick changes is fast and easy. Logging In In order to access the Adobe CMS, you must log in to the designated Web page using your BGSU username and password. Tips for Login: Use Mozilla Firefox when logging in if possible. o Google Chrome and Safari will work, but with bugs. o Internet Explorer and the Adobe CMS do not get along. Use your BGSU username and password when logging in to this page excluding the @bgsu.edu Depending on your computer s settings and software, you may get security warnings when logging in to this site. Always click the option that will allow you to proceed to the website. Link to log in: www.bgsu.edu/aem What you will see 2
First Login The first time you log in to the Adobe CMS, this is the screen you should see in your browser. (If you don t see this screen, make sure you either clicked the link above or typed it in properly. You may have logged in to the wrong location.) This area is a new user interface (UI) that Adobe recently launched. We are still using the classic interface until the new system is completely finished. To get to the classic UI, select SITES and then click the computer icon on the Sites tab. Steps below. 3
Chapter 2: Website Overview Adobe Experience Manager Interface: Web Content Manager Interface Your screen is divided into several sections: The top green area is the console. The tool bar is at the top over the right pane in gray. The left pane, or parent pages, is explained in more depth below. The right pane shows children, or subsets, of what is selected in the left pane. The left pane is how a user finds websites. Under Bowling Green State University -> Bowling Green State University are all of the websites in the system. If you are having trouble finding a website, follow the URL structure. For example, the http://www.bgsu.edu/about/student-life.html website can be found under Bowling Green State University. Then navigate to the About BGSU parent page and you will see the Student Life page in the right pane. To get to child pages, select the Plus sign beside the parent page. 4
Parent Child Relationship Unlike our old Rythmyx content management system, this system builds its websites on parent and child relationships. As you can see in the image above, all of the University websites live under the parent page of Bowling Green State University. Creating a Page When you have selected your website in the left pane, the child pages will appear in the right pane. To create a page, select the carat beside New and select New Page 5
Create Page Dialog Box The Create Page dialog box should then appear. It will require a Title, Name and Template for each page. The Title of the page is what will appear in the content management system and on your live webpage. The Name of the page is what will appear in the URL. If you do not manually type in the Name one will automatically be created for you based on the Title, after the page is created. It is very important to remember not to include special characters or spaces in the Name because they will not work in the URL. The last part of this dialog box is the template of the page. Almost of all the pages in the site use the tertiary template; select Tertiary Template and then click Create. After you have created your page it should appear in the right-hand pane with the other child pages. 6
Toolbar The page toolbar is above the right pane. This is where you can copy, paste, activate or deactivate pages. The tools are also available if you right click on a page in the right page pane. Listed below is what each function does to the selected pages in the right panel: Copy: Copy a page and its children. Delete: As long as the page isn t linked to from other websites in the system you can delete the page. There is NOT a way to get back deleted pages. Activate: This is the process of pushing a page live on the website. Deactivate: This will remove the page from being live on the site but keep it in the AEM system. Workflow: This can be set up on request. It gives system authors and administrators options to send information back and forth before publishing changes. 7
Page Properties If you right click on a page and select Page Properties, the dialog box below will appear. Hide in Navigation when selected will remove this page from the left navigation on the site. 8
More Titles and Descriptions If you select the carat beside More Titles you will get the option to use multiple titles. Page Title: If you would like to make the title appearing on the page different from what is shown in the content management system, this is where you would add that title. Navigation Title: Change this if you would like your page to have a different name in the left navigation. Subtitle: Optional area to add a subtitle to your page. This will not show anywhere on the page itself, but it can be utilized in various customized components. Description: This is used by the List component to display a teaser of an article. You can see this on our BGSU.edu/news website. 9
See an example below of how more titles and descriptions will look on your webpage. 10
Advanced If you would like a left navigation link to take you outside of the BGSU website to a document or file, or to another section of the internal website, you will be able to redirect the page in the Advanced tab of Page Properties by using the Redirect field. If you would like to send users outside of the BGSU website, it is as easy as pasting the URL into the Redirect field. If the link will be staying inside the BGSU website you will need to select the magnifying glass and then select the page you would like to redirect to. It is important NOT to copy and paste in URLs that are inside the BGSU website because those links will not respond if someone updates the URL or changes the name, and will break. 11
Move Pages / Rename the URL If you would like to move a page to a different area of the website, use the Move tool. If, for instance, an office has moved under a different department or you would like to restructure your website, this is how you move pages around within the system. If you select the page and then select Move you will get the Move dialog box. If you only need to rename the URL you can simply change the URL in Rename to Field and then select Move. If you would like to move the page to a different area of the website, select the magnifying glass and then select the parent page you would like this page to become a child of. Once that is selected, select Move. An additional dialog box will appear asking you Do you really want to move the page to the selected destination? If you do, select Yes, and your page will reappear in the new section of the website. 12
Chapter 3: DAM Overview The DAM is our Digital Assets Management system, which is where all users can add images and documents. To navigate to the DAM, select the camera icon in the console. Once you have selected the DAM you will see a site layout similar to the websites view. The folder structure will be in the left pane and the children assets/folders will appear in the right pane. Once you select your folder there will typically be three folders inside it, including Images-c, Documents and Images. Documents will include all Word documents, PDFs, etc. Images-c was used in the transition as a placeholder for images that were brought over from the old content management system. All new images should be added to the Images folder. 13
Adding a Folder If you have a lot of images or documents we highly recommend that you create additional folders to help organize your content. To create a folder you will go to New carat at the top again and select New Folder. Once you select New Folder you will get the following dialog box. The order of the Title and Name is reversed from how they appear when creating a page. If you forget, reference the text below the dialog box. The Name will be the URL of the asset and the Title is what will be shown in the content management system. Once again, be sure not to use spaces or special characters in the Name field. 14
Uploading Images It is important to remember before adding a document or image to the system to rename them without any special characters or spaces. These will break across the site if either is included. Once you have re-titled the asset without spaces or special characters and you have selected the folder you would like the assets to be in, it is as simple as dragging and dropping the asset onto the right pane of the page. Once the asset has been added to the DAM you can add additional information and make changes by double clicking on the asset, which will bring up its meta-data information in a new AEM tab. 15
Asset Meta-Data Tab In the Asset Meta-data tab you can add a title, description and any other information you would like to include. The more information you add, the more intuitive our search is in finding that asset. From this Meta-data tab you can also download the asset or update it. After you have made any changes to these areas, save the changes by hitting the Save button in the middle of the very bottom of the page. 16
Replace Original Image/Rendition If you have an asset on the website already in place and need to update it we recommend using this feature. This will not only update it across the website but will save you time by not having to remove the old asset and relinking. This can be done in the far right column, in a tab called Renditions. The original file is always at the bottom of the list. Select the original, then click Upload in the bottom right corner. This will bring up a box titled Add or Overwrite a Rendition. You can then browse your system and select the new file. It is important that you don t change the rendition name. After you have added the new file, save your changes, and re-activate the asset. 17
Change Asset File Name If you do drag and drop your assets with spaces or need to update the name, you can do this by moving the asset like you would move a page. The Move dialog box will give the option to rename the asset s filename, which will also update the URL. Adding Documents Adding documents can be done exactly like adding images. Once documents are renamed they can be dragged and dropped into the folder you have selected. A difference with documents is the system does attempt to parse through a document that has readable text. This increases search capabilities on both our internal AEM search and the BGSU website search. If you are adding multiple documents at a time, this process can cause delays in the creation of documents in the system. Activating Assets Activating an asset can be done several ways. The easiest is selecting the asset and selecting Activate in the toolbar. After you have activated the asset, the square to the right of the name may change to orange. Orange indicates the activation is pending, and if you hover over the orange box it will tell you what number it is in the activation queue. Normally assets activate in a matter of seconds. Click the blue Refresh icon in the toolbar to update the status of an 18
asset that is pending activation. If the asset has been deactivated the box will be red, telling you the asset it not online. If changes have been made to an asset since it was last activated, a blue box will appear indicating those changes have not yet been activated. See examples below: Activated Deactivated Pending Asset is in the activation queue Revisions Changes have been made to the page 19
Chapter 4: Editing a Page To open a page in the Author View you can double-click on the page, or right-click on the page and select Open. The page will open in a new browser tab in the Author View similar to below. You will see assets on the left side in the Content Finder. The Sidekick is the green bar that you can move around but is normally located to the right of the page. The page itself should have a left navigation and multiple drop zones indicated by gray dashed borders. 20
Content Finder The Content Finder allows you to do a variety of things. It holds all the digital assets from the DAM. You will see images from the DAM that automatically populate from most recent modifications. There is a search tool at the top that will search all images of the DAM as well. At the top of the Content Finder you will see tabs. Images The one to the far left that is already open is the Images section of the DAM. Documents The Documents tab is the third from the left. This is where you will see all of the PDFs and Word documents that have been added to the DAM. It works like the Image section where the most recently modified documents appear first, but there is a search available as well. 21
To get to the next section you will need to use the arrow button. Once you do you will see this set of tabs. The two that are highlighted are both very helpful. Pages The Pages tab (which looks like a page with a globe on top) is how you can link to other Web pages. We will go more in depth on this later. Browse The diagram-looking tab is the Browse tab. It allows you to navigate to specific areas of the website or DAM. This is helpful if you are creating links within your site, or adding multiple documents or images from one folder to a Web page. See the example on the right. You use the Browse tab to open up your folder in the DAM and pull in your images or documents. 22
Sidekick The Sidekick is where most of your useful tools reside. The Sidekick is broken into tabs as well. You will see the first tab is Components. These are broken into sections. Components The General component section is what Adobe gave us out of the box. The next section is BGSU. (To expand a section, select the plus sign beside each section). Those components were specifically built for the BGSU website and will continue to grow as we add components. The next is BGSU Columns. BGSU Columns is used to add a row of columns on your page while maintaining the responsiveness of each page. Use BGSU Forms to manipulate and add form fields. Page The next tab in your Sidekick is Page. This allows you perform actions on the page that is open currently, as well as bring up the Page Properties dialog box directly from the Author View. Also, you can activate changes while you are working on your page instead of going back to the other view to activate. 23
Information The third tab is the Information section of the Sidekick. This area will give users an audit log of the page. Each time an edit has been made it will be cataloged here. If for some reason you need to identify who is making edits to the page you can find these usernames and dates in the Audit Log under the Information tab. Versioning Versioning is the fourth tab, that looks like a clock. This has been somewhat unreliable. Each time you activate the page it is supposed to create a version of the page. Each version can be found in the Restore Version section. You can also create versions of the page if you want information on the page to change. For instance, if you have seasonal information and want the link to remain the same you can create a Fall, Spring and Summer version you can edit and activate later. The issues we have found with this tool are that there is not an identified time limit to when versions of the page will go away. Once we determine how long each version will remain we will update this area. 24
Workflow Workflow is the final tab in your sidekick. This area is available if approvers want to moderate authors making changes. An author can make changes and submit in the Workflow those changes to be reviewed by an approver. This is helpful but we have found that most users are opting to allow students and all users to be approvers, enabling them to activate these changes themselves because this system is so easy to use. If you would like to set up a workflow for your office, please email cmsproject@bgsu.edu and we will set this up for you. Icons There are four icons on the bottom of your Sidekick. Preview The icon that looks like a magnifying glass will let you preview the page close to the way it will look live. It removes the drop zones and most of the editing features and placeholders. There are a few components that do not preview or function as they will in the live version, but this is a fairly accurate preview. Websites This will open up another tab with the Web Content Manager. Refresh The circling arrows icon is Refresh, which will refresh the page. 25
Drop Zones There are several ways to add components to a page. The first is to select a component from the Sidekick and drag and drop it onto the drop zone where you would like it to be placed. Drop zones that allow that component will be highlighted in purple. If the component you would like to add is highlighting with a red X, then the component was not built for that area. 26
The second way is to double click the drop zone to which you would like to add a component. This will open a list of components that are available for that drop zone. As you can see below, there are only a few components that are built for the very top drop zone. As shown in examples below, after adding a component to a drop zone, some type of placeholder will always show, indicating that you ve added the component successfully. These will usually disappear after configuring the component. The above image is showing what a text box looks like before any text has been added to it. And the second item is what a majority of the components will look like until they have been configured properly. If a component has some areas filled out but is still asking to be configured, that usually means not every item that needs to be filled out has been. For example, the Call Out Box and Staff Profile Widgets both require an image, and will appear as shown above until the image and text have been added. 27
Text Component The Text Component is one that you will likely use on every webpage. It has robust features built into it that will offer a variety of styling to a page. The Text Component is set up similarly to a Word document with styling including bold, italicize, and underline along with left, right and center alignment options. 28
Text Component Editing Views There are two different editing views of the text component. The one above will appear when a user fast double clicks on the component to edit it. If a user were to select and then slowly second click the editor will look orange like below. The orange editor will expand as text is added and helpful for editing pages that have a lot of text. The major difference between the two is that the tools will be at the very top of your browser if you are in the orange view. 29
Copy/Paste The Text Component copy and paste is very easy to use. You can use your keyboard commands to copy (Mac Command+C, PC Ctrl+C), paste (Mac Command+V, PC Ctrl+V), and cut (Mac Command+X, PC Ctrl+X). The icons at the top let you paste text into the page in a variety of options. Cut, Copy, Paste, Paste as Text, and Paste from Word are the icons located at the top left of your Text Component. The Paste as Text will remove all styling from your text, and the Paste from Word will try to maintain the styling from Word without adding extra styles. We have seen some very weird things happen from pasting in from Word without using this tool. We highly recommend using the Paste from Word when applicable. Undo/Redo The blue arrows beside the paste icons are Undo and Redo. You can also use your keyboard commands for this as well: Undo (Mac Command+Z, Pc Ctrl+Z), Redo (Mac Command+Y, PC Ctrl+Y). 30
Hyperlinks Using the globe icons you can link and unlink text and images to and from other Web pages or assets. Once you have highlighted the text, the globe will turn full color and you will get the following dialog box. The most important thing to remember for all internal links is to link using the magnifying glass. An additional dialog box will open and you can dive into the website structure or assets to find what you would like it to hyperlink to. If you would like to link to an email address add a mailto: before the users email address. For example add to the link to dialog box mailto:falcon@bgsu.edu. 31
Once you have selected the page you want to link to, select OK and it will fill in the Hyperlink dialog box with the correct link. Select OK and the text will be hyperlinked. Hyperlink to a website outside of BGSU website If the link you need to link to is outside the BGSU website you can simply copy and paste the link into the Hyperlink dialog box. It is important to only do this for external links because otherwise the AEM system will not know the link is internal and won t relink properly if items are moved or changed. 32
Hyperlink using Pages or Browse in Content Finder You can also find pages you would like to be linking to by using the content finder Pages or Browse tabs. You need only to highlight the text/image you want to become a link and then drag the page you would like linked on top of the Text Component (it will highlight in purple). Alternatively, you can drag the asset into the hyperlink dialog box as seen below - when using Browse to link documents from the DAM this is the way that MUST be used. The Pages tab will also allow you to search for your page. 33
Format Text In the Style and Format drop downs of the Text Component you will find some options to stylize your text. The Format drop down provides heading options 1-6. Heading 1 is the biggest and Heading 6 is the smallest size text. The Blockquote will add a grey vertical line with your text and adjust the left margin. To switch between these formats, highlight the text and select the format you d like In the Style drop down you will see additional style options. Only one option can be applied to highlighted text. In order to remove the applied style, you must place your cursor within the styled text, and click the Remove Style button to the right of the style dropdown. Highlighting the entire text and clicking this will not work. Intro Text Intro text will make the selected text bigger and provide a different font to make the text stand out. Button Gray/Orange These buttons are available to make your links stand out. After adding a hyperlink to your text you can also highlight the text and select a button. 34
Gray for H1-H6 Once you highlight your text and make it Heading 1-6 you can change the color of the text to Gray by highlighting and selecting this style. Pull Quote Right/Left We use these frequently in news articles. This will pull out text from your page and align it to one side of the page and change the style to orange and italicized. 35
Adding Images Although there are separate components you can use for adding text and images, such as Image and Text and Image, one of the benefits of the Text Component is that when you add images directly into the Text Component you get many more options for the image, including the ability to add multiple images in one text component, resizing the image, etc. To add an image to the Text Component you can select an image from the Content Finder on left side and drag it onto your open Text Component. You will see the component highlight purple and then appear in your component. Resize Image To resize the image that is in your Text Component you need to select the image. You should see small white boxes appear in all corners of the image. If you drag those smaller or bigger the image should respond. 36
Wrap Text/Align Image In the Text component you can also have your text wrap around your image. If you right click the image you should see four options. If you select right you will see how the image and text will respond below. 37
Column Control Column Control was built to offer some additional design layouts for your Web page. To put it simply, Column Control is simply adding drop zones to your page. There are five options including: 4 column, 3 column, 2 column, ¾ left column ¼ right column, ¼ left column ¾ right column. These will produce evenly distributed column drops zones. Below is the ¾ left column ¼ right column option. You can now use that smaller column to highlight a calendar, events or newsfeed. If you wish to switch one Column Control to another you will lose the information inside. We recommend copying and pasting the elements into another area of the page or adding an additional Column Control. Column Control responds to mobile devices by eventually stacking all the columns on top of one another. This is important to remember in case the information you have in this component is in a specific order. The Column Component will stack the leftmost column on top and the rightmost column underneath. The diagram gives you a better idea of what to expect. 38
If the information you have in these columns is numerical or alphabetical, remember to add a new Column Control for each row you are building. Although it will build a new drop zone for each component you add to the column, those in the column will remain together. See below example. 39
If you add an additional Column Control below the original, acting as an additional row, it will resolve the issue. 40