Managing Content Through the Backend; We log in as a manager (Username: xxxxx Password: xxxxx), so we have fewer menu choices. The manager access level is useful if you have many people managing your content in the backend. It gives access to everything they need but not to any other administrative functions that might do something more drastic to the site.

Let's look at the Article Manager (see Figure 1). Go to Content > Article Manager.

Figure 1

Let's quickly look at some important features that the Article Manager offers:

1. Multiple select checkboxes. The column on the far left with all the check boxesallows multiple selections of content items. You can select any one you want and then use the icons in the tool bar: publish, copy, delete, and so on en masse.
2. Column Sorting. You can click any of the column headings and sort the table in ascending or descending order.
3. Icons and links in the Manager. The small icons in the Published, Front Page, and Access columns are clickable toggles. If you click, say, on something that is unpublished, that will publish it. The Title, Section, and Category columns are links. Clicking them will take you to relevant pages where you can edit that item.
4. Filters. In a big site you can easily have thousands of content articles. Using the Menu Manager starts getting difficult unless you use filters. You can filter by section, category, author, or a variable of your choice.
5. Archiving. You can archive any content item. Once archived, it cannot be changed and gets moved to the Archive Manager rather than the Content Manager. This can make for a highly managed work flow for writing content: write > review > publish > archive. However, one problem is that archiving a content item will change its URL and cause it to not show in a particular page. As such, the archive function is most useful as a simple repository for content that you need to keep. In reality, however, there is no real reason why it couldn't stay a regular content item.
6. Ordering. If you remember the menu parameters for a blog, you could have an order of "Ordering" when you present the content items. If you select that option, this is where the menu parameter gets that information. If you look carefully, you will see that the reorder up/down arrows and the order column save function only work within a category. Right now in Figure 7.6 we can't see any of the up/down arrows because we only have one article in each category. As we add more, we will see this function appear.

Let's add a content item and see the content editing interface. This is done with a WYSIWYG editor.