EdWeb editorial experience

This video introduces the editing experience, in comparison with previous content management systems, to display the features that make editing easier in the new system.

Video transcript

This video seeks to introduce the editing experience of EdWeb, displaying the features of the new system that make editing easier.

To create a new draft of a page, click the “New Draft” button in the grey bar. If there is an existing draft, this button will become “Edit draft”. You can alternatively add a new page by clicking the “Add content” button in the menu at the top.

As soon as you enter a draft version of a page, the system confirms that it is auto-saving what you are doing. This means that if there is a crash, or an error occurs, you can recover the work you did.

The primary fields in the editing interface show on the content tab. These include the “title”, as it appears on the page, along with the URL path (that will show in the address).

The main content of your page is shown in the main page content box. This is a text editor field that allows you to simply type in the content you want on the page. You can also copy and paste directly into this box: formatting is retained (so bulleted lists continue to be bulleted lists); but styling is not – so you cannot introduce new fonts or colours into this box.

You can make changes to the content also using the controls above. For example, you can change the heading style (to break up your page); introduce types of lists; introduce tables; to create links; adding quotes and feature boxes; and all the main things you’d expect to see on a web page.

You can also insert images, documents and reusable text using the asset store on the right-hand side. This allows you to find reusable content and simply drag and drop it onto your pages.

Further down in the content tab, you can find the summary box. This is mandatory on all EdWeb pages, and should be a one or two sentence summary of what the page contains. This is shown on the page, on the levels above, and also is used to generate search rankings. You can also associate an image to this page so that the levels above show automatically an image to advertise pages on the level below.

There are advanced options also on the left-hand side, including the Metadata (which allows you to set search engine information); you can also look at the published state of the page (and set a review date to come back to the page later); you can also change the location of the page in the “location and navigation” tab.

Once you have completed the work to your page, you have options at the bottom to commit your changes. You can either Save (and continue editing); you can save a version of the page and ‘preview’ it as you as it would show on the University site; ‘cancel’ your changes and discard anything you did while editing; and you can also “publish” which would put it directly to the University’s main site.