formVista™ Users Guide
Before we jump into editing your website there are a few key concepts that you need to understand.
formVista consists of two "sides" each with their it's own unique features.
The "frontend" is the website your users see. Depending on how you assemble it, it may be a public website open to the world, or a private website open only to a community of your choosing or something in between.
The "backend" is the part of the system that you and your staff use to edit the website, peruse the contact database, and send out mailings. The backend has it's own separate login and is typically located at the page /formvista/backend on your website.
formVista includes, among other capabilities, a powerful website content manager which we call refer to as the Integrated Content Manager or iCMS for short. iCMS is the tool inside formVista you use to manage your website.
iCMS has two sides: a public facing "live side" which is what the world sees when they view your website, and a "staging side" which is what you see when you are working on your site. Changes that you make to your website are all on the "staging side" and do not show up on the "live side" until you actively publish them. This lets you tweak your website without affecting your visitors.
iCMS further organizes a website into "web pages". Each "web page" has two names, one that is used in the address bar of your browser to load the page or in links when you link to the page. The other is a more reader friendly name used in a navigation tree (a.k.a. site map) With iCMS, you can create as many pages as you like. Each page also has some properties associated with it, such as whether or not it should be password protected, whether it should be seen in a site map or hidden, and what meta tags it should display for search engines.
Each page that you create in iCMS uses a "page template" selected from a list. The features on the page will be determined by the template you select. For instance, you may decide to create a page consisting of just regular text, such as the formVista features page, in which case you would select a text template. Or you may wish to create a user forums page, similar to the formvista forum, so you would select a forums template. There are a number of "stock templates" included with the themes that ship with formVista. However, a web designer can very easily add page templates to an existing theme to possibly add or combine features that are not represented in the stock set, or a web designer can create an entire new "theme" for your site. A designer can even take your existing "flat" (not content managed) website and "chop it up" to turn it into a formVista theme and set of page templates.
Each template will have a number of "hotspots" which are spots on the page you can change. When viewed from the iCMS edit window, these hotspots can be identified by (edit) links next to them. Clicking on the (edit) link lets your change the content of the hotspot. Hotspots can be something as simple as a block of text or a graphic and as complicated and involved as a multi-user forum, blog or private web messaging system. Each type of hotspot has it's own "admin screen" which is what is displayed when you click on the (edit) link for that hotspot.
There are two kinds of hotspots: page level hotspots and global hotspots. A page level hotspot, such a text spot, has it's content tied to that particular page. Imagine two pages, "about" and "help", that both use the text.tmpl page template. You edit the content in the "text01" hotspot on the "about" page. Then you edit the "text01" hotspot on the help page. The content on the two pages is different despite being same kind of template having the same spots.
The second kind of hotspot is a global hotspot. It's content is the same on every page where it's displayed. For instance, the top naviation bar on the formvista site is a global hotspot. Change it on any page and it will be reflected on every page. Global hotspots can be identified by the word "global" in the name when you view the admin screen for the hotspot.
There are a large number of different types of hotspots. There are text, graphic and list types. There are login types, forum and blog types. A single page template can have multiple hotspots of the same types. They are typically named with numbers. For instance text01 is typically the first text hotspot, text02 the second.
Each hotspot type is actually a component written in a language called the formVista markup language of FVML for short. New hotspot types (a.k.a. components) are being added all the time. Developers can add their own components/hotspot types. A key advantage of the formVista design is that components are completely self contained making them very easy to develop. Because they are self contained there's no integration need. New components can simply be copied into the right directory and then called from page templates.
Actually the entire system is built in FVML.
The "content" or "settings" for a hotspot are stored in the database. The "theme" of the website, it's appearance, can be changed without changing the settings and/or content of any of the hotspots. (This assumes the designer created the page templates correctly.) Because of this you can change the look of your website without changing any of the content or functionality.
There are some features that are "site wide" including a default of Meta Tags, Third party advertisements and the MyLegalFirewall third party legal documentation preparation service, which can be used to quickly and inexpensively generate terms of use, privacy policies and subscription agreements.
iCMS is called an "integrated content management system" because the front end website that you create using iCMS is then automatically tightly integrated with the backend contact manager, mailing list manager and optionally some extensions that are available such as our website analytics package we call goalTracker.
Whenever a website user offers up some contact information about themselves it is automatically added incrementally to a single contact record. Everything about that individual is stored under that contact record including any contact forms, customer support request, purchases, accounts, etc. This gives you a single place where the entire relationship is stored.
iCMS is also integrated with the mailing list manager, which itself is integrated with the contact manager. As a result, John Doe can subscribe and unsubscribe from your announcements lists automatically without you have to be involved. You can modify the content John Doe sees when he subscribes or unsubscribes directly in iCMS.