CMS introduction
This page contains videos that are excerpted from the introductory training provided on the Virginia Tech Ensemble version of the Adobe Experience Manager content management system.
Contents
- Overview
- Assets
- Pages
- Components
The purpose of the content management system is it provides a primary means of informing and engaging with our audiences. Whether those be on or off-campus, provide consistency of brand and user experience across all Virginia Tech web properties. This is feedback that we got that when the site looks completely different and has navigation and in different places, our users really don't like that because it looks like they've been redirected somewhere, not Virginia Tech. And also to provide an inclusive experience for those using assistive technologies. We put a lot of work into the general theme. And we are currently working on the components to make them more accessibility compliant. And that leads me to my next point.
Accessibility requirements. These are not options. These are requirements and policies not only from the University, but from the state and federal government. Accommodations for people with physical and cognitive challenges have to be taken into account when building web pages and interactive experiences on the web. The requirement that we have is what's called WCAG level AA. I need to link that, sorry folks. I'll do that after the session. For all digital information, this applies to not only webpages but HTML e-mails that we sent out, PDF documents that we link to Microsoft Word Excel, PowerPoint, any other digital files shared electronically have to meet the WCAG requirements.
There are resources for accessibility questions and getting certifications and things like that on campus. The main one being the office for equity and accessibility. Second one being is the assistive technologies group out of TLOS. They run a digital accessibility certification program where you can learn how to make things accessible. And then TLOS also has some professional development network accessibility tutorials online as well. As part of the same ProfDEV, I think is what they named that canvas site.
Log in at author.ensemble.vt.edu. I'll show you how that works. Let me get my phone out for two-factor authentication So you get prompted to login. I have a long password. I was asked, how do you remember it? It's song lyrics with character replacement. Makes it a lot easier.
Okay, so once you're logged in, this is what you will see. This is the main navigation. I'm going to walk through everything we're looking at here. On the top-left next to the Virginia Tech logo. There's the word ensemble. This will take you back to this menu no matter where you are inside the system. Okay?
There's a search feature up here and they would call this the eyebrow. And there's a search feature up here which will allow you to find content. Whether they be assets or pages, anywhere in the system. Meaning all sites. And there's over 800 sites in the system. So careful you're going to see things that aren't your site. Everyone in the system has read access to all assets and all pages, in the system. Modifications anywhere where you have permissions. But you can see which there is an advantage too, meaning that you can see something cool on somebody else's site. You want to know how they did that. You can copy and paste that page into a site that you do have permissions for and open it up and see how all of the components are configured and laid out to achieve that. If it's not there, it means they've put it in something called local assets. And we can talk about that another time. That's an advanced topic. But primarily you can, you can pretty much steal anybody else's stuff. If you want to see how they did it.
There's this services pull-down menu that has the group manager where you add and manage users. And then Adobe Campaign, which is our email system here on campus.
This question mark links to the documentation site where you can get information. the bell up here is for notifications. Primarily, those are for workflow notifications where if you have are called author level users that can make content and upload and do updates to content, but can't publish it. So that's what the author role is for. And then publishers and web admins level roles within a site will get notifications saying, Hey, there's a new change that needs approval, review it, approve it, publish it, or kick it back, whatever it might be. And then there's here where user sign out using the icon here at the top.
The main navigation consists of my sites, which is where page go. Where page content goes. Then there's My Assets where images, PDFs, zip files, Word Docs, whatever type of digital asset that isn't a page in the system goes. My tags. You can create tags to associate content and filter content within lists. List component. Using that we're not going to cover that today. It's a big topic that I could spend three days talking on as well.
And then there's this one for, for certain sites, it's called the CloudFront cache invalidation. This is currently only being used by four sites in the system. If you don't see this, it means your site is not in there. There's only four of them: VT.edu, VTX, this site, the ensemble site, where the documentation is, and then the sandbox where I added you so that you can play around. Talk about that a little bit.
And then, like I said, you have read access to all sites and all assets and the system too. So there's an all sites button and an all assets button.
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I'm in what's called Column view. So this is just telling me where I am. I'm at the sites level in different views. This becomes, and I'll show you that this becomes a step back kind of bread crumb trail that you can use. You can select all within a view. This is the Create button for creating new pages. And then as I said, this is your display options. There are features of each that are different. Typically within my site, I recommend folks use either Column View or List View. Let me show you one of the differences here. In column view, I have the ability to see where I'm going as I go as I navigate.
In List View, you're only getting a single level. So I've expanded this out. And if I go to List View, I will only see that, that last level. But what list view allows you to do is sort content by title, name, last modified date, last published date. All of these column level things like you can sort in any kind of table, It will also indicate what pages are under a workflow. So if you get a notification and you're not exactly sure where it is, easier to hunt for it this way too.
The main feature of List View that isn't available in column or card view is this far-right little set of dots. What that allows you to do is change the order pages within List View, but it also changes the order of pages as they appear navigation because that's how it determines.
That's just too much power. Do not want you to know that fact. All kinds of mean, cruel things. I'm going to change the nav today. I'm gonna change the nav again tomorrow but it is something that people aren't necessarily aware of.
And we get that question a lot is how do I change the navigation things? Well, again, this is in the documentation, so don't feel like you have to memorize this. But List View is where you arrange things for how they appear in navigation, in the main navigation and there is a navigation component and also respects that.
One thing I should note in here before we go anywhere else is that because things are both pages and folders, there's two ways to navigate and select things. The way you navigate through the page structure, like you would through a file system, is by clicking on the name, title area out here. To select something to edit. Either clicking on its icon or you clicking on a checkbox next to it. And it's been in the view and that activates this, which is called the Actions menu. We have a page selection.
You have edit, which opens it in the edit mode.
Properties that you can change about the page itself, its title, tags associated with it. Whether it shows up in navigation or not. We'll go over a lot of these when I walk through creating a page.
You can lock a page so no one else can check it out or edit it while you're editing it. Be careful though, have to manually unlock it. So yeah, if you forget to do that, yeah, you're the only one that can unlock it. So again, be careful. Somebody else can't come up behind you and unlock it. You've gotta do it.
You can copy a page and paste pages. I mentioned that you can go to some other site or even within your own site, copy and paste pages.
There is a move tool. Now, move is also used to rename pages and the name being what appears here in the address bar as opposed to the title which appears actually rendered into the page. When you use the Move, it will also update any links to that page. But you have to be careful. It will only update links that you have permission to change. So if someone in another site in the CMS has linked to your page, it will try to change that link. It won't be able to. This is also the reason why you need to Unpublish a page before you delete it. And yes, I'm going to write the delete documentation too.
You can click publish a selected page or pages, and you can select multiple pages at a time and click Quick Publish to publish them.
Manage publication is where you Unpublish a page from within the My Sites interface. Just do Unpublish Now.
My assets real quick. This makes a little more sense because you can actually create folders here that are folders. And it's okay if these folders match names of pages inside my sites page infrastructure, just so you can keep things organized. So if you've got dub, dub, dub.VT dot edu slash about slash, whatever dot HTML. You can create a folder under assets, called about and put any assets that are made up of about pages in there, just so you can keep things organized for yourself. It also keeps obviously the URLs clean so that somebody could back up and just or what have you. But yes, you can create folders underneath assets. Talk about uploading assets here in a minute.
The navigation works the same way you click on the name, whatever it is, to navigate folders. You click on the icon for the checkbox next to it, depending on which view you're using to bring up the Actions menu.
You can download entire folders or individual assets. It will create ZIP files and dump them down for you.
You can check out just like you can lock a page so that somebody can't. That's what an asset that you're The adding properties to or cropping or what have you.
There are properties and I'll get to that in a moment when we talk about uploading assets, this is where you put. You can associate a title. That's not just the filename with an asset. And this is where alternative text for assistive technologies goes. Again, I'll show that in a minute.
You can edit image assets. There's tools for cropping, rotating, flipping, and then resizing, basically. Launch map. I don't know what launch map is. Don't use that. I don't think that's supported. So you can make modifications to assets, minor modifications to assets in here, like when it's not quite to the right aspect ratio does have locked in 16 by 9 4 by 3 three by two aspect ratios that you can.
You can copy and paste assets just like you can do in folders.
Move same functionality, you can rename things. There are implications for that, so beyond just your own convenience, so I'll talk about that too.
Publish, manage publication, just like in pages. You can relate the content. But if you're tagging things that, that works too, then delete is up here as an option.
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How to upload assets. Again, there's documentation on how to do this. I'm just going to mention a few things here.
Image sizes. The largest image size that's supported by component. It's automated. You know, default configuration is about 3,000 pixels wide. Okay? Honestly, you shouldn't really need to make an image bigger than that and put it in here. Although some of the photography that you get from University Photo Library will be larger than that. It doesn't need to be. In most cases.
Video loops are okay. Videos of conference proceedings. Anything with audio that's long form. Don't put it in assets and don't have the space for it and it's not set up to handle that kind of content. Typically what we use it for is little ambiance loops. See at the top of the page of the giving site here. They're just little background videos that loop keep them under 200 mb at most. Because the system admins get a little angry with things that are huge in there.
That applies to any asset like zip files. If you've got a zip file, this gigantic and you need to distribute it. You don't necessarily want to put it in here. There are other resources available like Google Drive or hosting, hosting service here on campus where you can put stuff like that without a problem.
Like I mentioned, assets allows you to create folders, to organize your content. And it's a really good idea to do that. Like I said, those folder names can match the names in your page structure to keep things organized for you. The interface is drag-and-drop, which is really nice.
But I'm going to caution you. Try not to drag and drop more than ten or 15 at a time. Again, there are 800 sites sharing this one authoring server. So we have to be a little kind and courteous and aware that what we're doing will affect everyone else on campus that's using the content management system. If you have large numbers of assets that need to get uploaded or pages that need to get made or published. I should say and assets that need to get published, plan on doing it in stages or do it after 05:00 P.M. weekdays or on a weekend time if there's a lot of things need to get up there and published. It will slow everything down. It's quite painful sometimes.
So if you're dragging and dropping, any way, I usually try to tell people work on one page at a time worth of assets because they bubble up. We'll see how they bubble up in the authoring environment so that you can access them, drag and drop them into place a little easier. That's a pro tip.
Titles and alternative text. I mentioned that alternative text is a requirement. It should be descriptive and brief. Unless you've got an image or a diagram that has text in it. And then you need to include any texts that's in the image. in the alternative text or in a long description or in caption for the image. Or it needs to be somewhere on the page to provide context for that. Again, this is an accessibility requirement. So if there is a large-scale diagram. It's often better to maybe describe that narratively, in the text, or put it up there as some other format.
How to upload assets. I've got a test folder in here. Let me scroll down. List View. Some domain assets in here. I'm just going to throw this asset up here, As I said, it's a drag-and-drop. Browse to the folder location. You want to put it in. Drag it from your file system into the window to see. a highlight appeared around the window and you'll see a little plus sign show up next to your cursor saying, okay, you can release it, and when you release it loads it for you.
The next thing you need to do is just select it here. in the assets interface, and then open up its properties. That's where the title and alternative text information goes. So this is now nobody sees this but us, any authoring environment. So you don't have to worry. You know, obviously you don't want to put nasty words in there, but other people in the authoring environment can see this.
But the alternative text for this, I would do a Virginia Tech Magazine Cover from Summer 2020 It just needs to be descriptive. People images kinda get murky. If it's just a picture of Tim Sands. Lot of people just like to put Virginia Tech President Tim Sands. Yea, that's a kind of a gray area when it comes to accessibility is technically you're supposed to describe them, but, you know, that can be mean. You don't want to say President Tim Sands, 50-year-old man with gray hair and glasses. But technically you should be a little more descriptive than just the person's name and title. Well, it's what it is in the image, not what the image is about to describe the content of the image. So you would just, like I said, if it's a graduate student in a lab somewhere and there's beakers and stuff on the counter, you would say graduate students in. You want to find out what type of lab, obviously biochemistry or something like that. So the alt text is trying to describe the image itself, the content of the image itself. And that's also relative if there is context on the page that explains what's in the image. Or if there's a caption, then you don't need the alternative texts there because the image is being decorative. And that's a checkbox option within the image component is to declare it decorative. And that means there's enough context around it, or it's not conveying any additional contextual information to the person viewing the page. So it's considered decorative. So once that information is in there, you save and close. Now, you could go and use this asset on a page.
If you're gonna link to an asset or to a page, the best way to do that. And I mentioned this in the last one. Usually when I'm building out pages, I have a tab open with my sites and I have a tab open with my assets simply because I know I'm going to be linking stuff. And what that having both of those open allows you to do is you can use the Navigate option by clicking on the names of things, including pages and the URL that you need to link to an internal page or asset is actually right here now, the address bar, it's this. You need the forward slash, starting with slash content, all the way to the end. For pages, you don't need dot HTML. But for assets you do need their file extension. These types of links will automatically get updated. with move / rename.
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But here's how you copy and paste pages folks. You navigate to where they are. Select them. Copy What you don't ever want to do is go here, Don't ever click on that because then it will lose... It's an internal clipboard. You'll lose what pages were on it. Again, this is why column view comes in real handy. If you're copying and pasting pages between places within this file system. Use column view. It makes life a lot easier. Select the destination where you want it to go. and then just click paste.
So when you want to create a page, navigate to the parent folder and highlight it and say Create page. You get to display the number of page templates. I'll say it again. These are all documented on the ensemble documentation site with additional information. Each one has its own special features to it, if you will.
General page has an embedded image component in it, mostly just a body and page information.
Article page includes properties for who wrote the article, who to contact about it and will automatically display any tags associated with that page at the bottom of it.
Bio page has properties for inputting the PID of a person, the title. Additional information like that.
Redirect page is what you would create if you've moved or changed the name of a page for instance. And you want to support that old URL because people may have it bookmarked or it may still be showing up in search results. You also use those for creating shorter links to pages. So you could do a blah blah blah dot VT dot edu slash dot HTML, even though it's a page that may be buried deep down inside of your site somewhere. That's another use for the redirect page.
Resource page is primarily used by the extension office. Others have used it. Again, it's documented. Most people won't really have a use for it within your site architecture.
Search page is basically just a landing page like the generic homepage, but it includes an embedded search component in it. So you can have search results display on your site rather than how the main navigation search works, where it redirects you to search dot vt dot edu for the results.
The access page doesn't work? I'm sorry. I don't know why we still have that still in there because it's never worked. That's for... It was supposed to be for setting up restricted access to certain areas of your website. If you need to do that, basically create a general page for it to work, act as the folder, if you will, and then submit a support ticket. I don't know why that was hard to say with the page path and the group that you want to have access to that area of the site. Now, I say that it will only allow people with VT.edu accounts to be allowed access to that. If you have external people, they would need a sponsored PID. So keep that in mind as you're doing stuff in here, need to share it potentially with external stakeholders. The best way to do that is going to be screen captures. If they need to get at live content that's locked. It's something that's not really going to be easy to do.
And then again, the generic homepage, it can be used for more than just homepages. It can be used for any landing page. Basically, it has wider margins and more open area for putting content into. We you use it primarily to make those nice big stripes of stuff that you see on the VTX page and things like that.
So today we're just gonna do a general one. So you select the page type you want to create. Next. And this is where we get the basic properties full-page. Like I said, some of these pages have additional tabs with information in them. Most of the time you'd have to create the page first, then go back and add that information. Again, it won't necessarily all the options when you do the Create page step. So just keep that in mind. Bio page being the prime example of that. There's things in there that you can't put in until after you've actually created the page.
Name and title. What's the difference? The difference is, I said before my name is what appears in the URL. It is case-sensitive. Keep that in mind. We suggest that you use lowercase letters, numbers, dashes, and underscores only in the name field because URLs are case-sensitive. If you use a capital letter, then somebody needs to type a capital letter into the URL. So if you like, did The Inn at Virginia Tech and you capitalized all the words and put hyphens between them you have to then every time, type all those capital letters. Otherwise, the inn at virginia tech in lowercase with just hyphens will not work for you. So keep that in mind. So keep it simple. If you're creating people pages, we get this one a lot. Cover this one. Last name first, first name last. So it would be if it's James O'Keefe. And you would wanna do OKeefe dash James. No apostrophe. Because apostrophes are special characters. Very bad. Yes. Avoid special characters. No at (@) signs, no pound (#) signs, no dollar ($) signs, no question marks (?), things like that. In the name field. You can put whatever you want in that title field. As far as special characters go, but the name field, those, those characters do different things on web servers than you might think and will cause bad things to happen.
In the title field, put the name and it has apostrophe it is a test page and that's where the title of the page goes. That becomes the first highest heading on the page. The call an H1. In HTML, speak. That again is an accessibility thing. I'll talk about headings when we dive in here to the text component.
This is where you put tags on the page, again to associate content and to create filters for list components.
You can choose whether or not the page has the right column. Careful using the right column because users are, your audience has conditioned themselves to appear, to have ads appear in the right column. So they have been conditioned to ignore stuff in the right column. So be careful using that, especially for important information. Not only that on mobile devices that right column wraps to the bottom of the body. So if it is important, it's going to be one of the last things that appears on the page. And we know again from data and analytics that people don't get to the bottom of pages very often. So be aware of that.
This hide in navigation option is exactly what it sounds like. It will hide an item in navigate in the navigation menu. If I had it turned on for pages that's at the main navigation. Thank you, Leslie. The author role information, if I didn't want that to show up in the navigation, but I did want it's still at the main area. You just do hide in navigation. and it won't show up there. Items that are hidden in navigation will also not necessarily show up in lists. So keep that in mind. But it will not hide a page from a search engine. In order to do that, you have to use a robots.txt file. And again, that's another class.
There's another area of tags that you can do for related content where you can target things a little more granularly.
You can give pages with long titles, navigation titles or an alternate title that will appear in navigation.
Some pages support Subtitles.
And then description is what gets rendered into a page as a Meta tag for social media crawlers to use. It also gets displayed in lists, list components, along with the title, date, time of publication, and other options. Again, they're documented for you.
Internal notes is just that. It's where you can put notes about a page that only people who have access to the authoring environment see. This does not get rendered into any page.
At the bottom here, on and off time, what that allows you to do is make changes to a page or create a new page that they have embargoed content on it. You want it to go live at 11 midnight tonight. You can make all the changes, get your approvals, and then set the on-time, publish the page and it won't go live until that time.
Off time is the exact opposite of that. If you set it off time, the page will be unpublished, meaning it will go away. That doesn't mean it just doesn't appear anywhere else in the system. It means it's unpublished and no longer available. The only use we have for that right now is for notices in VTX because they have an expiration date. So that's what those do. On time allows you to publish things in the future, which is really nice.
Once you've got all that information filled out, you click Create. And then you have an option of done or open. If you're quickly generating a site infrastructure and you want to just go back later and fill in content. Because you're creating the folders, because everything is a page in a folder you can say done and then continue fleshing the rest of that out. If you're ready to open the page, you click on open. It opens in the edit.
When you first open it, this is what the edit interface looks like. I'm going to go again across the top. This one has a gray eyebrow.
On the left, there's a side panel that you'll want to open. Inside here are all the components, assets for your site. This is new and bubbles to the top. As I said, as you build out pages, it's a good idea to not dump everything up there that at once because then you've gotta go hunting and fishing for it. Whereas if you do it one page at a time, not only is it more courteous to the other users in the system, it makes it easier to find images that you'll be working with immediately. That's where that is.
The next thing over is what's called the page information menu. It's three little sliders icon. Underneath this, once I move my zoom bar, sorry, folks, you can reopen the properties. You can't change the name, but you can adjust any other property associated with the page. If it was a bio page, this is where you go once you opened it to then put all that additional bio information under the bio tab.
For people with the author user-level role, meaning they need to get approval for content. This is where they go to start a workflow. If they're going to be editing an existing page, they can select it, edit it, but they can't do anything until they start a workflow. Again, those notifications then gets sent to publishers and web admins once those pages submitted for publication.
You can lock the page from it here and unlock the page.
You can publish the page from right in here.
You can unpublish the page from right in here, which is a lot easier than going through the manage publication menu sometimes.
Then there's view as published. I'll talk about that in just a second.
View as admin which nobody uses. I documented it. It’s goofy.
And then help, which is internal, I think internal only to AEM help. Again, you can access help through the main menu by just going to the ensemble site itself.
I'll talk about this view as published, but this is the preferred way to preview page to see what it's gonna look like in published format.
There is a preview button over here. The problem with the preview button is it remains in the edit mode within the interface. And there are things within the theme that will not show up when it's in edit mode. Or won't render properly when it's in edit mode, it has to be viewed as it's if it's published. If you notice when you were here in edit mode, we don't see the icons for the menu and search. And that's one of the things is disabled. And it's in edit mode is Font Awesome process processing of icons in here. So keep that in mind. View as published is the way you see a page in its published form. The other thing about Preview Is it won't allow you to follow external links, links outside the CMS.
Up here in the, we call this the page information area. This varies depending on the page template, but there's a breadcrumb trail to every page it's in here.
This Explore menu is for sibling and child pages of the page you're on.
Then you get, like I said, the page title. If you have a subtitle that will appear up here.
Embedded image component for the general and article page has the same embedded image component in it.
Then you have the drop zones here. This is the main body drop zone.
There are two over here in the right column. And be aware that this top one, the content, will inherit to pages that are children to this page, whereas the bottom one will only appear on this page. That's, that's a caveat to that.
The footer, the end footer inherits by default. So again, be careful what you put in a footer of a page, knowing that will inherit two other pages underneath. You can turn that off either from a child page or from here. Underneath the inherited paragraph system. A wrench icon there. So you would click on that.
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So I'm just kinda put that image in here. I'm going to click on the image component up to the wrench. Come over here to the sidebar where the assets are. Drag this into the box. where you're supposed to drop the image. See that the title we put on it will show up in the title area. Put a caption on the image from here. [inaudible] You can expand any one of these configuration menus and dialogues. on your own time.
You can add custom CSS classes to it.
This is where you would put the link to small imaging was pretty dense. I just tell people make to the original. It's just so nice.
The accessibility information may or may not automatically fill, I think because this one is embedded, it does. Don't worry when you go to try and close this window, it'll alert you that you didn't put that in there. If it is on the asset itself, you can just hit this button and then we'll pull it in for you.
I said there's formatting options. This is the default. If you wanted to use the original image size and not have it get stepped on, you basically just change the image size to large original size and it will not create a source set. It will just use that big one for all sizes. Change it back. Yea, this is a tiny image that was a bad one to choose to throw up.
That's how you put an image into an image component.
So on this page, I'm just going to drag one of the more most common components that's the TEXT component. So you just come over here, scroll down. Click on it. Drag it over. Roll over the drag components here, drop zone until you get that little blue arrow, blue and white arrow. And that'll tell you that's where it's going to go. Another one. Same thing. I want to put something in between them like another image. Roll over another component. The same thing will happen. There's the blue arrow. That's where it's going to go. These work the same way. These right components here.
Some components, like the multi columns component, will have their own drop zones in them. Another one that does is the multitab accordion. Lets you create headers for your tabs or folds. It will create here in the interface and a drop zone for each one.
Be careful with the accordion multitab component. You can rearrange the headings, what the content doesn't rearranged with. So I suggest creating an individual one for each fold. The tabs, you've got to do it all in one, but at least the accordion version of this, creating one for each is going to be a little easier for you if you know that list that might change at some point. It's a known bug. We're going to try and do the best we can. Open up that example. One of the things I'm going to demonstrate right now is how to copy and paste components. And then we'll look at the text component. I'm going to open up my example page here. Now you can do this within the page.
Is there a way to add components without dragging? Yes, there is a way that add components without dragging. Let me show you that real quick. On a component there's plus sign. Part of the toolbar is this plus sign. And that'll allow you to add a component without dragging. Same thing down here with the main body or any of those others, plus sign.
But, you know, if you're reusing the same type of component on a page and clicking on it. There's Copy, need to move it. There's cut, there's, there's paste. These work across pages as I'm going to demonstrate here We have this multi column component out here, some of the components. It's a little difficult to tell where you are because that's just the text component in it. That's the other texts component. Multi column one. We got to wait for that box to show up out around everything.
Okay. Copy. and paste.
The text component has a pencil for edit. When you first click on it. This is basically for quick editing purposes of text. You really don't want to copy paste in this mode necessarily. Again, like I said, all of these components and dialogues having an expand or full screen option. And the text component in particular has different functions in this larger one.
In here, obviously it breaks down the bold, italic underline, but you also get subscript superscript abilities. You get the ability to create text anchors within a page, meaning you can create in page navigation to have it scroll and jumped to certain places. Or even using pound at the end of a URL and the name of the anchor to link directly to a portion of a page. You've got your justifications, bulleted or numbered lists, outdent, indent for lists and text. There's a spellchecker in here. This is how you change the different headings.
Do not use heading tags to format text. These are semantic headings that people with assistive technologies use to navigate a site. And don't skip heading levels when you're doing this. The main one that's on there is the title and that's the H1. So everything that's first a heading will be an H2, anything that's a subheading that would be an h3. And then if you've got something else that's not a subheading, you kick it back to an H2, etc, etc, etc, down the line. Do not use those to format text. That's the number one thing we have to get across to people. That's not what that's for. The theme handles that. If you've got customizations you wanna do to text, you need to do that with CSS. That's a more advanced topic. We're going to run over just a couple of minutes, so I hope everybody's okay. This is being recorded. So you can come back to this later. There's also block quote options in here that are built-in.
And then there's this table constructor. So you can do tables up in here. You to set up the main bits. Then once you highlight inside the table, used to give you additional options, yeah, then after you do that, you've got merged cells, split cells, all that kinda stuff in here as well.
One thing to keep in mind, especially if you're copying and pasting content from Word or a Google document, is that you'll get some weird formatting that'll sometimes happen. The most common one is you end up with a lot of additional line breaks that will appear between items. So things will be spaced out vertically very, very poorly. The way to address those unfortunately, is a little bit of an advanced feature. And that is this HTML view of the stuff. And what usually happens is there's additional p tags that might be around like list items, you'll want to remove those and removed and closing tag. Or there may be a line break and BR tag and extra BR tag in there. So, you want to use those, this view to clean that up a little bit.