Frequently Asked Questions

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Editing Content with WebGUI
User: kmaclean
Date: 1/1/2010 10:23 am
Views: 9328
Rating: -4

The main thing to remember when editing content, is that WebGUI creates a "version tag" that keeps track of all your edits (its default name is your username and current date).  To publish your changes so that everyone can see them, you need to "commit" your version tag.

To edit content you need to be in "admin" mode (click the "admin" link on top right hand corner of page - your account needs permission for this to show).  The Admin Console appears on the left hand side of your web page. 

To commit content click the "Version Tags" category in the Admin Console, select "commit my version".  When you click this, the content you edited will become visible to everyone.  No content changes are visible until you commit the version tag!


If you log out and log back in without committing the changes you've made, your changes will not be displayed, and the things you edited will be locked (the padlock icon appears).  You need to select the version tag that you created in your previous session to make it active.  To do this, click the "Version Tags" category in the Admin Console, and click your version tag.  

If you don't select your previous version tag, and start editing something, then WebGUI will automatically create a new version tag... this can get confusing, because your previous edits will still be "locked" under your old version tag.

The commit process is useful because you can edit multiple web pages (over a period of days) under a single version tag, and publish them all at once with a single commit. 

Note: when editing the Read page for your language, it is best to disable the VoxForge Speech Submission Java Applet.  Otherwise, your edits slow to a crawl as your browser attempts to refresh the entire page (including the applet) every time you make a change to a web object.


WebGUI has a tutorial (Primer PDFWebGUI-Primer.pdf) and also a sandbox (http://demo.plainblack.com).   Look up Page Layouts, Articles, Forums and Shortcuts.

Some Concepts/Definitions:

A "Page Layout" is container object.  Think of it as a directory or folder that displays its contents as a web page.  If you want to localize the VoxForge menu, change the menu property to your language. You can add text to a Page Layout, but it is best (easier to format) to only have text in Articles.

"Articles" are objects that contain your text.  You can have more than one article (or any other object) on the same Page Layout.  Just click edit on the article menu, and replace the given text with your translations.  Articles also have a menu property, but this is only used for setting secondary menus (which VoxForge does not use), not the main menu (set the menu property in the Page Layout container).

"Forum" is an object... which, if you are reading this you would obviously know, lets users submit posts and post replies.

"Shortcuts" are pointers to other objects that are displayed on the Page Layout they are located in. Usually these point to another article or forum from the English side of the VoxForge website.  You cannot change the object that the Shortcut points to, but you can "overwrite" some of its properties.  Using this feature you can overwrite the title (i.e. translate it to another language) of the object being pointed to.

Putting it all together:

Therefore, if an Article and a Shortcut to a Forum (or any other web object) are contained on a Page Layout, when you click the URL of the Page Layout, the content of the Article and the Shortcut will be displayed, in the same way images are displayed on a web page, even though the Article and the Shortcut are both uniquely addressable through their own URL.

Note: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Web objects like Articles and Shortcuts can have their own css properties.  However, when these web objects are displayed on a Page Layout container object, the css of the Page Layout overrides the css of the contained object.  This is the opposite of how cascading style sheets normally work (where the most specific css entry overrides the general css entry).  The reason for this is that each object on a Page Layout has its own URL and can be displayed independently of the Page Layout.  Therefore such web objects require a style sheet to be displayed by itself.

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