Composr Tutorial: Admin Zone overview

Written by Allen Ellis (ocProducts)

As a webmaster, it is important that you are able to monitor and control every facet of your website. This is possible through the Admin Zone: the heart of your website. It can be accessed from anywhere by choosing the 'Admin Zone' zone link which appears at the bottom of every default-themed Composr page. You may be prompted to login again to confirm your current session – this is for added security.

Table of contents

Composr Tutorial: Admin Zone overview

First glance

The Admin Zone is divided into sections, with links across the top-panel to allow easy access to each – most of the tabs will take you to a screen with icons that allows you to navigate throughout the system.

Content Management Zone

The Content Management Zone is the place to manage most of the categories and entries on the system.

A rough definition of what is considered content is anything you might expect to be readily added on-the-fly. Some forms of content are designed to be added from the main website (for example, comments and forum posts), so are not presented here.

Admin Zone

Search

If you are ever wondering where something is in the Admin Zone you can try the search. The search is a very powerful tool that searches many different things, and supports alternative words people commonly use for the same things.

Search results are displayed by section, for example:

Configuration options
Privileges
Templates
Administrative modules
and so on

You can also restrict the search results to only show the results under a particular section by adding the keyword @sectionname to the end of your search item in the search box. For example, if you want to search for footer-related settings under the configuration section only then you can use the text footer @conf as the search keyword in the search box. The sectionname given just has to match a section name partially; which is why we were able to abbreviate to conf in this example.

There is a checkbox next to the search box, which opens the results into a new window/tab. This can be useful if you want to open up a search while also doing something else (such as finishing filling in a form).

The search result page also allows you to easily run a separate search for the same search keywords on your website content, Composr documentation, and the http://raywonderis.me forum.

To-do list

The first section in your content area is your to-do list. This is an automatically generated list of things that need to be done on your website. Some are day-to-day updates, such as changing your image of the day or adding news. Some are less frequent and more critical, such as making backups and sending newsletters.

Composr will attempt to mark whether or not these actions have been completely recently. For example, if it has been more than 24 hours since you updated your image of the day, it will be marked as 'not done'. You can choose how often you would like to do these activities (for example, making backups monthly instead of weekly) by going to the Setup Section then the 'Configuration' icon and then 'Administrative options'.

If there are non-validated options then a link to edit these is included.

Version Information

This section shows information about the current version of Composr that you are using, and whether or not it is the most recent one. If not, you will be given a link to upgrade to the latest version.

Notes

This is an area for you and your staff to make notes. You can write anything you need in this space, and it will be shared between you and all of your other staff.

Tips

You will be provided with a large number of handy tips. They are organised into 4 levels of increasing difficulty with a combined total of about 60 tips.

Watch-list

This section allows you to compare some statistics of your website, to others. The sites included can be changed via the edit button on the block.

Links

This section provides a selection of useful links. The links may be edited via the edit button on the block.

Action log

This section shows recent administrative/content actions on your website.

Miscellaneous other Admin features

This part of the tutorial details some miscellaneous administrative features that are not covered in other tutorials.

Error log

The Error log (located at Admin Zone > Audit > Error log) shows any errors that have occurred within Composr. It does not include errors relating to the normal running of your website (for example, incorrectly filled forms, or issues with non-configured features).

Usually these errors will be automatically e-mailed to the developers (although this is configurable), but if you find anything you are not aware of, you may consider reporting as a possible bug.

Content reviews

If the content_reviews addon is installed, you can set content to be re-reviewed after a particular date. This is useful for keeping your website up-to-date.
You can also set the last review date to be shown visibly to users. This might be very useful from some legal and customer service standpoints – it is essentially an automatic public declaration of content that may be outdated, and thus that you should not necessarily be held to what it says.

The content review settings are shown on content add/edit forms.

Concepts

Admin Zone: The zone used to perform most site maintenance, accessible only by staff

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