1 Introduction

1.1 About Site Studio

Site Studio is a powerful, flexible web development application suite that offers a comprehensive approach to designing, building, and maintaining enterprise-scale Web sites. It goes beyond conventional Web site development solutions by offering site creation and content management all in one. Everything associated with a Web site, including all site assets (such as templates, graphics, CSS files, and the like) and all site content, is stored and managed in the content server, which means that all security, revision control, workflow, and search functionality of the content server is automatically available.

Site Studio dramatically improves productivity and enables organizations to maintain accurate, timely, and current web content with consistent branding and presentation across all corporate sites. With Site Studio, you can centralize control of site architecture and presentation, while distributing content development and ongoing maintenance to business units or other teams.

Site Studio comprises three applications, which reflect three distinct users of Site Studio: designers, managers, and contributors.

The Site Studio Designer application provides the development environment in which individuals (the site designers) can create, design, and distribute the site. The designer controls the look and feel of the web pages, and images, fonts, colors, and layout of the web pages. The designer is typically a webmaster, a web developer, a site administrator, or someone in a similar position. Typically, one designer works with multiple managers and contributors. See the User's Guide for Site Studio Designer for more information.

The Site Studio Manager application provides a web-based site management console that can be used by one or more site managers to control the navigation structure of the Web site, including which templates to use and which content to display. The manager is often the head of a division or department. See the Administrator and Manager's Guide for Site Studio for more information.

The Site Studio Contributor application enables assigned individuals within an organization (the contributors) to add and update content on the Web site whenever they want using an inline editing environment that can be called directly from the Web site. Contributors are usually non-technical users and might be members of a marketing team or sales team.

The separation of Site Studio users into site designers, managers, and contributors yields numerous benefits. First, site designers do not have to be bothered if content or navigation on the site must be updated. They use Site Studio Designer to create reusable site assets (templates, fragments, and the like) and combine these assets to build a site, and then they are done.

Second, site managers can add entirely new sections to the Web site without needing the design team. They can simply reuse the assets that the designer created and then add new sections to the Web site or rearrange existing ones.

Finally, contributors do not have to know HTML at all to create highly complex and attractive web pages. They can add content with native applications such as Microsoft Word or with Site Studio Contributor. The latter is a web-based HTML editor that gives contributors an advanced editing environment for creating and updating content. The site designer can still enforce a consistent look and feel by limiting what editing options are available; for example, allowing site contributors to select only from a list of approved fonts, colors, and styles.

In addition to these three Site Studio roles, there may also be separate site administrators, who could take on responsibility for assigning web addresses to the site, backing up the site, replicating the site, and so on. All these administrative tasks are performed on the content server.

1.2 The Contributor's Role

As a site contributor, your role is to add content to the Web site and update it, as necessary. You might be updating a portion of a web page, several web pages, a section, or the entire site. Once the site is created, the designer or manager will notify you of the web pages that must be updated (possibly by using e-mail notifications or workflows).

Before you begin, you should learn as much as possible about the Web site that you are contributing to. For example, you should:

• Become familiar with the site. Is it a departmental site, an internal site, a public site? How is the site structured? Where are things located?

• Learn about the current style and formatting choices for the site. Does your organization use a style guide to enforce consistency with word use, sentence structure, and the like?

• Find out what part of the site you are responsible for and see if you will be sharing that responsibility with other contributors. Your organization may choose to implement workflow functionality to assist with this process.

• Find out what type of content is used on the site. Does the site consist of Site Studio data files, native documents, images, and video? You edit data files with Contributor, and you edit native documents with the application used to create those files (for example, Microsoft Word for files with the .doc extension).

You can then start making changes directly to the site using Site Studio Contributor. You can make changes and preview those changes before updating the site. Your changes are saved in a file (called a contributor data file) that is stored on the content server (see Chapter 2, "Getting Started With Contributor" and Chapter 3, "Editing Web Pages in Contributor"). Alternatively, you can create and edit native documents (such as Microsoft Word files), which are converted into web pages that appear on the Web site (see Chapter 10, "Working With Native Documents").

1.3 The Contributor Editor

The editing environment available on the web pages depends on the editor set up for use with Site Studio Contributor and the content type that is being edited (text, image, and so on). By default, the editor used with Site Studio Contributor is based on FCKeditor, which is a light-weight, JavaScript-based editor that does not require any kind of installation on the client computer. Your content server administrator may have chosen to set up an alternative editor. If that is the case, your editing environment may look slightly different than shown in this guide. Also, there may be minor differences in the editing experience (for example, some editing features may not be available or work slightly differently).

The Contributor application is launched by pressing a special key combination (Ctrl+Shift+F5 by default) on web pages that are managed by Site Studio and Content Server and that the site designer has made available for editing by site contributors. Once launched, Contributor displays a special graphic next to each area on the web page that can be edited.

Figure 1-1 Contribution Graphic

Description of "Figure 1-1 Contribution Graphic"

This graphic shows the name of the editable area, an edit icon, and a menu icon. To edit the selected area, click the edit icon (or click the menu icon and choose the edit option). As soon as you are done editing and save the data file, the Web site is updated to reflect the changes. See Chapter 2, "Getting Started With Contributor" to learn more about the Contributor editor.

1.4 System Requirements

The system requirements for Site Studio Contributor are as follows:

• An operating system that can run Internet Explorer 7 or higher, or Firefox 2.0 or higher (for example, Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, or Mac OS X).

• Access to the content server running the Site Studio component (to access the managed site assets and content).

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or higher, or Firefox 2.0 or higher, or Safari 4.0 or higher. Performance is enhanced in Contributor if you use an up-to-date browser.

  To view the resulting web pages, you need Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or higher, or Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 or higher, or Safari 4.0 or higher.

1.5 Accessibility Features

There are many keyboard shortcuts available for use while editing in Contributor. Keyboard shortcuts help contributors with disabilities to work in the editing environment. In addition, keyboard shortcuts can speed up editing, since they enable you to work while keeping your hands on the keyboard and not having to constantly switch between the keyboard and the mouse.

This section contains the following topics:

• "Keyboard Shortcuts for Contribution Mode"

• "Keyboard Shortcuts for the Contributor Form"