Creating and Editing Content

The Content Life Cycle

All content in Groupy goes through several phases. First content is created / edited, then it is previewed, and if the content is satisfactory it is published and becomes visible to everyone. If the content is not satisfactory, you may edit again, or discard the draft to return the content to it's original condition. When content is removed, it is first deleted, and finally purged from the system entirely. Purging and discarding a draft are the only content operation that cannot be undone.

Creating Content

To create content you must have a group that you add the content to. If you see a 'Add Content' link in the action bar, then you may create new content in this group. The first thing you must do is select the type of content you want to add. The link and content type icon is on the right, and a short description of the content type is on the left. Some group templates may essentially make this decision for you, but this is what you should see on a generic group.

After clicking on the type of content you would like to add, a form like the following will appear. This is the form for HTML content. HTML content serves as the basis of all other content types. If you select a different content type, additional options will appear specific to that content type.

The first thing on the form you will notice is the Title. A breadcrumb trail of the group hierarchy lets you know where you are placing the new content. The title is the only required field on the form and is used to create the text for links, the title tag in the head of the page.

The next major section is a the rich editor, where the user can write or paste in a section of HTML which represents the body of the article or content description. The interface for the rich editor should be familiar to most users of Microsoft Word or similar software and should be fairly straight forward for most users. Of special note is the page break button (a horizontal line) which allows you to split a piece of content into multiple pages, and the Groupy logo buttons (, , ) which allow you to insert Groupy content and modules into the body of the content. We will cover more about embedding other pieces of content and modules in the next section. For more advanced users, you may edit the HTML source directly by clicking on 'html'.

In the 'Advanced' accordion you will find the following options:

Posts and Expires are used to determine when the content will be visible. Content will only be visible after the content posts, and before the content expires.

The URL Name is used to embed content in the text body, as well as for pretty URLs. If you do not specify a URL Name one will automatically be generated for you from the title. If you change the name all content that embeds the content will automatically be updated to reflect the change. Only English letters, numbers, and the dash (-), underscore (_) are allowed in the URL Name. The URL Name must be unique for all content.

The check box labeled 'Hidden' determines whether the content can be accessed via it's own URL or can only be embedded in other pieces of content.

The save button at the bottom of the form will save the content and redirect you to a preview of the content. You must then publish the content before it becomes visible to the world.

Publishing

There are two places where you can publish content. First in the action bar on the left you will see a publish icon if you like your changes you can click that, or if you do not you can click the discard drafts icon.

Secondly you may go to the drafts page. If there are any drafts in the system you will see the draft icon on the right side of the action bar. In the drafts page it will show you all the drafts on the system, from there you can publish or discard multiple drafts at once.

Versions

If at any time you would like to go back to a previous version of content. You may click “Versions” to see all the versions of the content. Here the currently published version is highlighted in blue. If you click on an old version and decide that it is better that the current version you can revert to that version by clicking “Revert” on the left side of the action bar.