Tutorials > 5 minutes overview

This overview will gently introduce you to Cloudia CMS in just 5 minutes.

We believe that understanding basic principles of the system will allow you to quickly adopt Cloudia CMS and use it more effectivelly than most currently available content management systems for wide variety of tasks.

General approach

In Cloudia CMS, administration interface is strictly separated from resulting presentation. This is the first difference from some other CMSs you will notice. The reason for this is simple: administration interface is optimized for tasks such as

  • managing large data sets,
  • sharing data, content and forms of presentation across multiple sites,
  • consistent handling of different content types (which will be explained shortly).

On the other hand, such approach is not convenient for quick setup of simple web presentation which doesn't need advanced features offered by Cloudia CMS. If you prefer simple click-and-edit system without advanced features, Cloudia will probably not make you more effective and we would recommend some opensource solution.

Administration interface with open text editor on the left, resulting site on the right.

Fundamentals

Now, before we take a first peek on Cloudia administration interface, let's explain some basic terms, describing how Cloudia builds the result:

  • Site is the the result of all your effort, set of pages under some URL. It can be web presentation, e-shop, or some sort of web application. Site can be hosted on Cloudia Hosting or run on your installation of Cloudia CMS. Several sites can be managed in administration interface under one installation.
  • Site template is a base HTML skeleton of a page in the site. Apart from HTML code, template contains custom Cloudia tags, which insert different contents to the resulting web page. A site can have different templates for different sections and content types. Templates are covered in more detail in Administration guide.
  • Node is some part of a site. For example, node can be a section of the web (like News, Products, ...), or even an abstract repository not directly visible to the site visitors (comments, store supplies, ...). Node can contain another nodes or records.
  • Record (content) is a unit of content of the site. Based on its type, it can be virtually anything from news story, to e-shop product, comment, order sheet, ... Records are always assigned to some node. Page of a site is, in most cases, a node view which lists records in the node, or a detail view of the record.
  • Content type (record type) is a template for record. It defines HTML template similar to previously mentioned site template and particles from which the record is composed of (ie. what data it will collect when created, and how the data will be presented at the website).
  • Particle is an atomic part of record, such as title, price, image, ...

Basic terms described in administration interface Basic terms described in resulting presentation

Anything you can see in resulting generated site is records rendered in templates. As mentioned above, record can represent very different data. In one section it can be an article, in the next section it can be user, or product.

Still, administration interface will handle and present all the content types consistently and intuitively. Based on the type of the content in selected node, it will show the list of records (tied to this node) as table columns. Displayed columns are highly relevant to the node's content, so displayed information matches the node's purpose. If content type of the node is too complicated to show all relevant information at once, you can customize the view and select what columns should be visible in the list.

One of major advantages of Cloudia CMS is the user experience when working with the list of records in the node: The table is interactive, you can

  • use drag&drop to reorder items in node or copy/move them to other nodes,
  • show more details about any record by simply hovering mouse cursour over the record data cell,
  • use inline editation of simpler particles (spreadsheet style)

Content administration

By now, you probably have an idea how seamless is the content administration, once the site structure is set up.

Anyone responsible for the content of your site will just log in, select the node and edit the table as she would in desktop spreadsheet application.

Use of the application from this point of view is covered in much more detail in our User guide.

Content type administration

But there is much more to Cloudia than editing content. This might be where other CMS needs installing plugins, extensions or applying some programming skills, but with Cloudia CMS, creating custom content type is natural and easy for any web administrator with basic knowledge of markup systems.

As mentioned before, content type is defined by its template and particles.

Template is a HTML snipplet enriched by custom <% %> tags, which provides access to Cloudia content, most commonly content of particles.

Particle is a piece of information defined for the record of given type, for example title of an article, or price of an e-shop item.

Administration guide provides detailed description of the system from this more advanced perspective, including description of default content types and particles, templates reference, and more.

Developing custom content types

If you need some features which cannot be achieved by default content types and particles, you can define new particles.

This requies more detailed knowledge of Cloudia CMS inner workings and some programming skills.

Find more information on advanced Cloudia CMS usage in Web developer guide, Advanced topics and elsewhere in CPDN.

Multisite

You have probably encountered "multisite" term several times while reading about Cloudia.

As the user of Cloudia CMS with multisite license, you'll find that managing multiple sites in Cloudia is just the same as managing one sites with multiple different sections.

That's because site is just a special type of node, and most tasks you can do across nodes in one site, can be accomplished across multiple sites — sharing, moving or copying records, content types, particles, crosslinking, etc.

You can find it usefull for many use cases, such as sharing user base, planning ad campaigns, or simply sharing web content.

Statistics

If you are interested in visitor and/or e-commerce statistics of your sites, Cloudia provides convenient, consistent way to access Google Analytics data, compare or aggregate data from all your managed sites so you can analyze it and make your business more effective.

Once you have configured Google Analytics ID of your site, just click the "Statistics" button in administration interface and analyze.