Using Groups

Groups technically are a type of content, but there are several aspects of groups that make them unique enough to warrant their own section. Groups contain other content, similar to how a directory or folder holds files. Every time you are adding content you are adding it to a group.

Group Templates

Group templates are essentially a tool to make it easier to create specialized groups. For instance you can only add HTML Content to a Blog, and it comes with a chronological list of your blog entries. An Image Gallery only lets you upload images, and has some navigational tools to help people see the images within. A calendar only lets you add events and displays a calender or list of upcoming events. Which group template you have selected can change what the edit form looks like, and can give shortcuts in the process of adding content. You select which template your group uses when you create the group, but you can change it by going to the “Advanced” edit on the action bar and opening the “Advanced” accordion.

Manage Content

If you want to see all the content inside of the current group, move content to other groups, or arrange content within a group then click on “Manage Content” on the left side of the action bar.

You can click and drag content to rearrange content and groups within a group as well as moving them to other groups. The order within the group is called the “Default Sort” and is often used by modules that list content. The triangles on the left allow you to expand and collapse the groups. Holding down control (or option on the mac) will allow you to make multiple selections. Holding down shift will copy instead of move content. If you drag a duplicated piece of content into the same group with another copy the content you moved will be removed from the group you dragged it from.

Next to each piece of content you will notice several links, which allow you to view, edit or delete the content. Please note that these will navigate you away from this page briefly and therefore unsaved drag and drop operations will be lost.

On the right side you will notice a key, this simply lets you know the status of the content. Drafts are green, deleted content have a strike-through, and hidden content are grayed out. Below the key there is box labeled show. This lets you show only certain types of content. If you are managing a very large site, expanding this tree will result in an overwhelming number of items. Selecting “Image” for instance will hide everything that is not an image.

Appearance

To manage the appearance of your group and items in your group you can open the “Advanced” edit page. This section has several important functions, but the most prominent is the ability to change the layout and appearance of everything within the group or site you have selected. The first thing you will notice is that several dotted green boxes. Moving your mouse over these boxes will reveal controls for adding and modifying items in that area.

 

At the bottom of each section, clicking the “Add” link will bring up a menu that allows you to insert content and modules into the section. These bring up the same new content, search, view, and module dialogs that were covered in Embedding Content and Modules. Above each module or piece of content, there are controls to edit the item, move it up and down in relation to the other items.

There are a few different types of sections. First, the skin or theme of the group will have certain sections that are editable these are generally on the outside of the main portion of your site. These sections have a single check box labeled “Inherit”. Checking this means that section will contain exactly what that section contains on the parent group or site. If inherit is checked then nothing will be saved for that section and the contents of the parent group will be used. Each group also has a header, footer, and body. The header and footer appear within the main section of each group. There are two check boxes on these sections, “Show Header/Footer” and “Show Parent”. By default the header and footer only shows on the children, but checking this box makes it appear when viewing the group as well. The “Show Parent” option will cause the header of the parent group to show as well as the header for this group.

In the “Advanced” accordion the following options are available:

The URL Name field and Hide check box are covered in Creating Content.

Template: This lets you change the template for a group.

Skin: Change the theme that this group and items in this group have. Using this you can have completely different looks for different parts of you site.

Additional CSS: Add additional CSS to further refine the styles in the group. This CSS will overwrite styles defined in the skin.

Meta Keywords and Description: These fields are used by search engines.

Sites

Sites are a specific type of Group that have no parent. Sites make it possible to manage more than one website from the same instance of Groupy. Just point any domain or subdomain to the directory where Groupy is installed and create a separate Site by clicking link on the “Manage Content” page. Only Administrators have the ability to create a new Site. A site has a domain field to determine which domains it handles. You can use an asterisk to let a site handle groups of domains. For example “*mydomain*” will serve www.mydomain.com, www.mydomain.org, and subdomain.mydomain.com. At least one Site in the Groupy installation must have the domain set to “*” so that visitors will always see something. You cannot delete your default site. By using the content manager with multiple sites, and holding the control key you can share content (and even whole groups of content) on multiple websites!