DotAdmin User Guide

The Page Editor

The Home Zone

All the pages of your website are stored within the hierarchy of zones which exists inside the “Home” zone of the CMS. Within each of these zones, you will see a listing like the one shown below, which displays all the pages which are stored in that particular zone.

A list of pages within a zone.

Pages are sorted in alphabetical order by Title, and 30 items are shown per page. If you have a lot of pages in a particular zone, and are looking for a specific page which you know will be near the end of this alphabetical list, you can filter the list to return fewer results by using the “Find” search function at the top of the page, or change the sort order of the list by clicking the arrow buttons at the top of each column in the table.

In the example shown above, the first record in the list has a special file icon. This icon represents a special page known as the Zone Index Page.

Zone Index Pages

Whenever a zone is created, an “Index Page” is also created within that zone. An Index page is so-called because it is often used to provide a table of contents for a zone, or to provide a brief overview of the type of information that can be found in that zone. In some cases an Index Page is the only page in a given zone, if no more content pages are required. Because Index Pages are so important, they cannot be deleted. To delete an Index Page, you must delete the zone itself.

The Home Page

The Index Page of the “Home” zone acts as the front page, or “home page” of your entire website, and will be the first page that most of your visitors see when they arrive at your website. The Home zone, and its Index page, cannot be deleted.

File Locking

When a user opens a page for editing, the DotAdmin CMS locks access to that page so it cannot be edited by another user until the first user is finished with it. This is to ensure that no page can be edited by two people at the same time (which could result in one author's changes being overwritten by the other), but can sometimes lead to a user locking him or herself out of their own document by mistake.

If you close your browser window while the Page Editor is open, you will be logged out, but this will not remove the file lock. If this happens, and you log back into the system and attempt to edit that page again, the CMS will report that the page is being edited by another user and will refuse to give you access to that page. This problem can be avoided if you always close the Page Editor by clicking the “Save” or the “Quit” button, rather than closing the browser window.

Should this happen, it's not a complete disaster. File locks are automatically removed by the CMS after 15 minutes of inactivity, so try again later.