Getting Into the CMS
Signing in, the shape of the admin, and what your role can see
The CMS is where every page, post, event, image and setting on the site is managed. It lives at the site's own address with /admin on the end, in place of the WordPress admin. One sidebar covers all of it, and there's no second login for any part.
Signing in
Open the admin
Go to the site's address with /admin on the end. Bookmark it. The developer will send you the exact address for the site you're working on.
Sign in with your email address
Your account is your work email address and a password you set. There's a forgot-password link on the sign-in screen. Accounts are created by an admin under Users, so if you don't have one, ask an admin or the developer rather than registering.
Check the badge above the sidebar
A Staging badge in orange or a Dev badge in blue means you're not on the live site. The live site shows no badge at all. If you've been editing and nothing changes for visitors, check this first.
The sidebar
Everything lives in the left sidebar, in three groups.
- Content. What visitors read: Pages, Posts, Events, Campaigns, Dining Centers, Affiliations, Volunteer Roles and Media. Most days this is the only group you open.
- Operations. What the site produces and who can get in: Form Submissions and Users.
- Settings. Site-wide configuration: Redirects, Site Settings and Navigation.
Every entry opens a list, and clicking a row opens that record for editing. Pages, Posts and Media do the job their names suggest. The rest feed the site in more than one place, so a dining center's hours or a volunteer role's requirements are edited once and change everywhere they appear.
Permissions
What's in your sidebar depends on your role. Anything your role can't use is hidden rather than shown and locked, with no message explaining the absence. If an entry a colleague has is missing from your sidebar, that's the role rather than a fault with the site.
Roles are changed by an admin, under Users. For what each of the three covers, see Roles and Permissions.
The dashboard
Signing in lands you on the dashboard: a welcome card with shortcuts to Edit Pages, Media and View Site, the go-live status panel, then the standard list of every collection you have access to.
Go-live status
Counted from what's in the CMS at the moment you load the page. Every document named is a link straight to that document, and a check with nothing to report prints no line at all — when everything passes you get a single sentence saying so.
- Readiness. A bar and a count for each stage a page can be at: Scaffold, Content in progress, Internal review, Ready for review, Signed off. Click a stage to see the pages sitting at it. Readiness tracks how finished a page is and is separate from whether it's published. Moving a page to Signed off takes a publisher or admin.
- Pre-flight checks. Across published pages only: missing meta descriptions, placeholder media, broken internal links, images with no alt text, placeholder copy left behind from a scaffold, donation and newsletter forms that can't take a submission, and vendor embeds with nothing wired to them.
- Structured data. Gaps that keep search engines from reading a page properly: unset Organization fields in Site Settings, events with no venue or address, posts with no featured image, dining centers missing from the finder map.
- Redirects and affiliations. Rules pointing at an address that doesn't exist, and affiliation marks that have lapsed or lapse within 30 days.
Going Live covers the launch work the dashboard can't see.
Finding a page
Open the collection from the sidebar and use the search box above the list. It matches on the title, so typing two words of the page name is usually enough.
The Pages list shows each page's title, its full path, its parent page, its readiness stage and when it was last updated. The path is what tells two similarly-named pages apart. Filter and column controls sit above the list.
The Public URL field
On a page's edit screen, in the right-hand sidebar, Public URL is the real address the page is served at: a clickable link with a copy button. It's built from the page's slug and its parent, and it updates as you type rather than waiting for a save, so you can see what a rename does before committing to it.
When the page isn't live the box is highlighted, the label reads Public URL — not live yet, and a View draft link appears beside the copy button. Change a page's parent and it says "Parent page changed — the ancestor part of this path is finalized on save."
Posts, Events and Campaigns carry the same field and the same View draft link. A draft is a 404 for the public at that address until it's published.
Where to go next
The blocks that build a page, drafts and publishing, and each collection in turn all have guides of their own.