X3 CMS Documentation

X3 CMS is a project designed to make easy the development and the management of web sites/web applications.

Audience

• Content editors: the project is designed for managers of websites in order to make them independent in the management of their website.
• Webmasters: all the power and the possibilities offered by X3 CMS can be expressed during the configuration and set up a website. Operation performed by a webmaster.
• Web Developers: if the webmaster has some expertise in programming, then the only limit is his imagination.

What it does

Before going into details we see briefly what we can do with X3 CMS.

1. THE AREAS
   In X3 CMS we have at least 3 areas:
   
   • the public area, the public navigable website;
   • the admin area, which allows us to manage the site, the Back End;
   • the private area, an area that we can make available only to authenticated users.
     You can enable it if you need.
   Then you can create additional public and private areas for special needs.
2. THE THEMES
   X3 CMS supports themes. A theme is a set of templates that define the possible layout of the pages of the site area.
   Example: if the home page has a different layout from the internal pages. This site need a theme that require two templates one for the home page and one for the inside pages.
   A theme in X3 CMS can have any number of templates.
3. MENUS
   Each template can include menus.
   X3 CMS can handle any number of menus.
   Typically, for consistency, it is good that the same menus are present on every page but if you wish you can create templates that have only one menu and others have three.
4. PAGES
   With X3 CMS, we can create a virtually unlimited number of pages. Each page can have more than 46000 subpages.
   You can organize the hierarchical structure of pages as you want.
   Attach and remove from the menu, but always respecting the logic of the tree (every page has only one parent node, except the root homepage that has not parent).
   X3 CMS automatically generates BreadCrumb for each page of the site.
   X3 CMS automatically generates a map of each area of the site (if you want you can not view a page in the site map).
5. SEO benefits
   
   • X3 CMS only works with URL rewriting: uses only simplified URL without extension (not www.example.com/index.html but www.example.com/en, not www.example.com/a_page.html but www.example.com/en/a_page);
   • for each area and for every language you can specify the title of the area, a description and the keywords;
   • every page has: an URL (which is for the construction of the URL), a name (which is used into menus), a title (used into the tag title) and a description (used into the meta tag description);
   • for each page you can specify the keywords that you can add or replace to global keywords;
   • automatically generates the file sitemap.xml useful with the search engines.
6. LANGUAGES
   X3 CMS allows you to create multilingual sites.
   NOTE: For each language you have a parallel and totally independent site that have different pages, different menus and different contents.
   Each language requires a dictionary.
7. CONTENTS
   The contents consist of articles in X3 CMS.
   An article consists of 2 optional elements:
   
   • a block of text.
   • a module (explained below).
   Text and module is present only in this order: first the text and after the module.
   X3 CMS has two modes of operation for the management of content:
   
   • SIMPLE MODE: is the default mode, each page have only one section of content that can contain only one article;
   • ADVANCED MODE: a page can have more sections of content each of which can contain more articles.
   NOTE: In a website that works with X3 CMS you can have or SIMPLE MODE or ADVANCED MODE, the two modes can not coexist.
   In Advanced mode the content organization has virtually no limits. Because we can put a lot of articles into a page.
   
   Example: in SIMPLE MODE using a template that includes 3 sections we have only one item (imagine it as a rectangle in the page) consists of a block of text and a module.
   The same template in ADVANCED MODE allows us to have 3 rectangles, each of which can contain any number of articles and then sequences of text blocks and modules.
   
   NOTE: with both modes you can edit the content items directly on the public site after having logged on as administrator.
8. CONTEXTS
   The potential offered by ADVANCED MODE exploits the best thanks to contexts.
   Articles in ADVANCED MODE are grouped by context. There are 3 settings by default:
   
   • drafts (it was thought only to handle an article that has not yet found its place);
   • pages (the articles in this context are related to a single page);
   • multipage (here there are the items you want to add in more pages).
9. CONTENT MANAGEMENT
   X3 CMS uses Tiny MCE, a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) that allows you to insert content easily.
   The contents included are translated automatically into valid XHTML.
   Editing options are set to allow to obtain almost any result even with limited knowledge.
   In particular, are disabled the options that may produce imbalances in the layout of the page that contains them or might alter the graphics of the theme.
   
   NOTE: Operations such as copying and pasting from Word documents or other web pages or, more generally, by documents consisting of code (though not visible as in Word) are managed with appropriate procedures.
10. FILES
    X3 CMS manage files in two ways:
    1. Centralized mode: this is the most cumbersome, but allows complete control of uploaded files,
       handles the upload of each file type.
       
       • Image files (like JPG, JPEG, GIF and PNG) for use in web pages are automatically categorized as images and you can insert it in the block of text.
       • Video files (like MOV, SWF, WMV and RM) are automatically categorized as video and you can insert it in the block of text.
       • HTM and HTML files are automatically categorized as a template and can be used to manage particular provisions of the content.
       All other files are categorized as general files and in a text block of an article you can create links to download it from the site.
       
       NOTE: The size (in pixel) of the images uploaded must be defined before loading.
       X3 CMS defines the maximum dimensions for images (pixels and byte) to prevent accidental site administrators load images that are too large may result in disruption of the layout of the page.
       X3 CMS defines the maximum size (in bytes) to prevent accidental site administrators load large file.
    2. Uncentralized mode: is based on the file manager FLMNGR integrated with TinyMCE, is very intuitive and powerful.
11. ARTICLES
    The blocks of text of the articles handled by the editor may contain:
    
    • Images (previously loaded and invoked through a wizard);
    • video (previously loaded and richiameti through a wizard);
    • link to internal pages and external to the site (created through a wizard);
    • link a file (previously uploaded and retrieved through a wizard).
    The editor contains tools common to all text editors (Word, Wordpad etc.).
    NOTE: Every time an article is edited it creates a new version.
    NOTE: For each version you can define a time window of visibility.
    Example: into a page will displayed the last enabled version of an article compatible with the time windows.
    
12. PLUGINS (or modules)
    Are the way through which X3 CMS can handle everything that has not been said above and allow you to transform a website into a web application.
    The modules can be embedded directly in the template or in the articles.
    Example: the form to switch from one language to another for a site, or the search form on the site is well integrated into the template.
    While the module to view a photo gallery will be included in an article.
    
    NOTE: Some modules are configurable and some have an administration.
13. USERS
    X3 CMS provides that site administrators are organized into groups and users.
    Each user can have the following permissions:
    
    • no permission
    • read only
    • reading and writing
    • management
    • Administration
    • SuperAdmin (is the user created at the install)
    
    For each group you can define in detail the permissions on every aspect of the site.
    Each user has automatically group permissions but you can define different permissions in detail on every aspect of the site.
    
    On each element of the site each user has one of the 5 possible permissions
    Each element of the site can be created, edited, deleted, activated or deactivated and finally locked (so that users not administrators can not change certain elements).