Edit Existing Content

Editing content is very easy, simply move the mouse over the page, and then you will see that each item that makes up the page is bordered in black when the mouse moves over it.

To select an item, just left-click on it, and now the item is now bordered in red.

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Select one of the news items in the central column, then double-click on it or do a right-click and choose Edit in the contextual menu that appears. In both cases the result will be the same - a new interface will be displayed above the work plan. This UI is called an “Engine” in the Jahia lingo.

The Engine is composed of several tabs, each tab allow you to edit all the targeted content properties, controlling its layout, behavior, rights, and much more.

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Whoa! There are too many things here. My colleagues will be lost if they see so many tabs and fields.

As mentioned previously, using the “root” user account, you see all possible tabs, meaning you can control everything from actual data to older versions. By default, a standard content writer will see 5 tabs only and less than that if you modify the “Editor” role definition, a Translator will see less tabs than an “Editor”, and so on. The fact is UIs in Jahia are adaptive depending on the roles is true for the Edit Mode, the Contribute Mode, the Engines, the Managers, the Administration, etc.

We’ve opened a News item, and the first tab gives us access to the fields that compose this item, the true data of this content. To modify this content, just change the values you want in those fields.

In Jahia, each content item has a name. The hierarchy of the content items (pages, lists, or other content types) is defined at the end the address of the content, it’s URL. In order to have nice names in our URLs (which is important for the SEO ranking) Jahia includes a mechanism to automatically create a readable name based on the title field, if there is one. To do that, click on the “Automatically synchronize name with title” checkbox.

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When creating new content, this box is checked by default, so most of the time users don’t have to activate it by themselves.

Before saving our changes, let’s have a quick look at some other tabs just to understand what their purpose is. Don’t be scared, all the changes you’ve made in the first tab won’t be lost as you switch to other Tabs.

The second Tab named Layout allows the control of some display options predefined by the developers. With this UI, the editors will be able to change layouts without breaking all the design. As a result, this tab differs depending on the type of content of the various options pre-defined. On our News item you can switch from a Standard View, to a small or a medium one. On lists, it is possible to manage multi-column layouts, sliders and much more.

The third tab displays the metadata of the content.

Jahia follows the Dublin Core metadata norm. This metadata schema is extensible and can be combined with other schemas.

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The fourth and fifth tabs allow editors to add taxonomy information upon the content item: non controlled taxonomy like tags, or organized, centralized and controlled taxonomy with hierarchical categories

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Categories

Our exploration of the Engine Tabs will stop here for the moment. Click on the “Save” button, at the bottom of the Engine to save them. If you click on the “Cancel” button, the engine will be closed and your modifications will not be saved.

Ok, I understood that this UI can be adapted using the roles and become much lighter, but what if my company has a special need and wanzt to have different options in those tabs than the one Jahia provides by default, or create our own tabs with our own controls?

The most common controls and settings options are already provided by default by Jahia. Most of those options can be customized or extended to respond to the needs of the users or the needs of your company’s project. Jahia partners, or your in-house developers, can implement those custom needs. For instance, Jahia provides some default metadata fields in the second tab (creation date, creator, keywords, etc.). If your project needs more metadata, the developers can expand them, and the news metadata fields will be displayed here. It is also possible to expand the engine and create new tabs to regroup your own options and then define which role(s) may view this new tab.