Quick start

November 11, 2022

1 Introduction

This brief guide will provide you with the basic knowledge of how to install, run, and discover Digital Experience Manager in 30-60 minutes. It will introduce you to the basic operations you can perform with Digital Experience Manager such as creating, editing, moving and deleting content, as well as organizing the web site structure, adding some interactive features and publish your changes.

Created specifically to allow developers to extend, customize and integrate with other systems and platforms, Digital Experience Manager has the ability to perform many additional tasks than are covered in this Quick Start Guide and may be customized to meet the exact needs of the final customer. The functions provided by the default installation (CMS, a portal, DMS, and a publishing system) represent only a small part of what can be achieved with Digital Experience Manager. We hope that this overview of Digital Experience Manager will provide you with an appreciation of its capabilities and entice you to further discover the product.

To fully appreciate the underlying capabilities of Digital Experience Manager, please keep the following in mind: this Quick Start Guide focuses on a predefined set of templates (page structures), the built-in types of content, features, and layouts provided by Digital Experience Manager to complete those pages. The templates and pages provided by Digital Experience Manager are similar to a child’s wooden tray that has holes made to fit wooden pieces of various shapes. The content types and features of Digital Experience Manager that you can drop in these pages are like those wooden pieces.

If you choose Digital Experience Manager to manage your content, whether websites or professional web applications, you’ll be able to craft your own wooden trays and all the wooden cubes, circles, triangles or any other shapes you desire.

2 Jahia Community and Enterprise Distributions

2.1 Content and Main differences

The Community Distribution is the 100% free and open source distribution of our Digital Experience Manager CMS, under GPLv2 license. The Enterprise Distribution is available through a business-friendly license (JSEL) and is designed to meet the needs of the most demanding mission-critical projects.

The Enterprise Distribution differentiates from the Community Distribution by the Digital Industrialization tools it embarks:

  • The Private App Store software
  • Roles and advanced workflows
  • User directories and SSO (LDAP, AD etc.)
  • Distant publishing
  • Clustering
  • Complex environments support (WebSphere, Oracle…)
  • The possibility ton install specific packages like Portal Factory providing features like the Esigate or CMIS integration.

The Community Distribution share the exact same code base as the Enterprise Distribution (we don’t want to provide crapware, early stage or unstable version to our community) but people based and the Community Distribution cannot access to the monthly hotfixes and are not supported by the Jahia teams.

The Enterprise Distribution is available through annual subscriptions that encompass the additional Digital Industrialization tools, unlimited bug fixes, Online Technical Assistance and specific SLAs for both development and production environments.

Prices for the subscriptions can be found on the Pricing page from the website.

3 Download and Install

First, download Digital Experience Manager 7 

Once download is finished, double click on installer.exe then follow the steps of the installation tool. You must click on Next for each page, agree to the License Agreement and define a root password when asked.

Accept the license agreement

Choose a path or accept the proposed one.


Digital Experience Manager will ask for the authorization to create the destination folder, please accept.

For a quick start, we will use the “Discovery” installation with an embedded app server, embedded DB and all optional modules. For serious development or production servers, please choose a custom installation on an external DB server.

Enter a password for the root account.

If some optional tools are available on the computer on which you’re installing Digital Experience Manager, the paths should be detected automatically. Those tools are used by Digital Experience Manager to perform some operations or improve some operations compared to embedded java classes


Digital Experience Manager summarize the chosen settings before proceeding to the installation.


Digital Experience Manager installation process is actually running


Digital Experience Manager installation process is finished.

Digital Experience Manager will start its services; a console will also be launched that displays the Tomcat activity during this first startup.

The first startup and auto-configuration can be followed in the Tomcat console

How long will this take? 
The first launch of Digital Experience Manager may take several minutes, this is normal. During that time, the application will initialize itself, start its services, deploy all of the modules (plug-ins), install templates and create a first site called System Site where crucial information is stored that enables the system to run correctly. After this initial startup, Digital Experience Manager usually starts within 15 to 45 seconds on a standard PC (depending on the amount of content stored in the repository, number of web projects, number of users, etc.).

When Digital Experience Manager is ready, you are able to access it through a web browser by typing the following address: http://localhost:8080/start Digital Experience Manager will ask you to login with your username and password.


Let’s start using the “root” Account, as no other account exists yet. Login: root
Password: the password you’ve chosen during the installation process Once these details have been verified, Digital Experience Manager will display your personal dashboard. By default, the section “My web projects” is selected. As the software is brand new, there is not a lot of information to display on this page, but you will find useful links to start your exploration.

From this dashboard, you are able to complete your Personal Profile (located in My Settings) and choose what information within this profile will be either public or private. After content has been added to Digital Experience Manager, you will be able to access the content you have written, your personal tasks list, and your personal files. Note that, the dashboard is extensible: other panels can be developed and deployed on your platform to match your needs. Click in the Mode menu in the top bar, and choose Administration.

4 Create a site

From the user dashboard, click on the “create new Web-Project button”

or go to DXM administration mode and choose Web projects:

In this interface, administrators can create new projects (empty), import prepackaged projects or import previously exported projects by selecting them on their hard drive.

In order to further explore Digital Experience Manager, the best solution is certainly to play with a real web site and not to start with a brand new, empty, site. So, we will use the second option and import the “ACMESPACE Demo” project by clicking on the “Import” button.

The next screen is pre-filled according to the information Digital Experience Manager has found in the package. We won’t change anything yet, just click on the “Import” button.

Digital Experience Manager greys out the screen during the import and displays a loading bar. Depending on your computer, this import may take around one minute to be executed.

Once the import is finished, the grey layer disappears and the page is refreshed, showing a new line for the site we’ve just imported.

We can now leave the Administration tools and start editing the web site. To access the editing UI, click on the pencil icon at the end of the line corresponding to your newly created site.

Note that, if you go back in your User Dashboard using the top bar menu, you’ll see that the site you’ve created now also appears in the page “My Web projects”

Each green arrow is a link and gives you access to the site in a particular mode. As you’re logged with the root user, you also have access from this panel to some the site export feature that is also available in the server administration part.

5 Editing your site

A few words about “Modes” - in Digital Experience Manager a “Mode” is a particular way of calling and displaying a web project. Depending on the chosen Mode, Digital Experience Manager conducts different security checks, applies restrictions and will provide editing tools or not.

By default, the Mode appears in the URL but is masked for visitors on production servers for obvious SEO reasons.

There are four main Modes:

  • Render Mode: this mode displays the content requested in the URL and nothing else. Typically, when a visitor of your website will browse your pages, it will be in the Render Mode, even if he/she does not know it.
  • Contribute Mode: this Mode displays pages with a very light and simplified editing interface. We will not look at this mode in this Quick StartGuide as we want to quickly discover some advanced features. Editing principles are the same as in edit mode, but some features are not available to keep this mode easy to use and secure for non-advanced users.
  • Edit Mode: this Mode displays pages with a rich editing interface. This is the Mode we will use in this Quick Start Guide in order to discover Digital Experience Manager. When working in Edit Mode, you work on staging versions of your content. Thus, until you decide to publish your work, all the changes you do in Edit Mode does not impact the Render Mode and the visitors continue to browse your websites or web applications like they were published the last time.
  • Studio Mode: this Mode is for developers and allows them to create / update modules (plug-ins for Digital Experience Manager) and templates. Dedicated guides explain the Studio in details; we won’t look at the Studio in this Quick Start Guide.

5.1 Edit Mode GUI

The Edit Mode GUI is divided in 3 parts

  • The Toolbar (red frame at the top of the page). The Toolbar provides access to the various Modes for the current page, plus global tools like publication, workflow, access to the Document Manager, the categories Manager, the user dashboard, the logout, etc.
  • The Selector (blue frame on the left) provides several tabs to display content stored within Digital Experience Manager and insert that content into the work plan.
  • The Work plan (green frame, central panel) displays the page you’re currently editing.

As we’ve just left the Administration tools, the page displayed by default is the home page of the web site we have imported.

Important: the GUI adapts itself depending on the role(s) granted to the user. Using the root account, when you switch to Edit Mode, Digital Experience Manager considers you like some kind of god, therefore all the buttons, menus and tools are displayed, which makes a rather heavy UI. But once the system is installed and set-up, it is rare to use the root account. This one should be reserved for complex administration tasks. Other roles like Editor, Editor in Chief, Reviewer and Translator allows access to the Edit Mode with lesser permissions, and then lighter interfaces.

5.2 Manipulate content

You can navigate within Edit Mode using the site tree that appears in the Selector or as if you were browsing in a normal website by clicking in the menu directly. Let’s go to the Events page, by clicking on the Events entry in the menu.

5.3 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 blue when the mouse moves over it.

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

Select one of the Event items in the central column, then double-click on it or select it and do a right-click then 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 “Edit-Engine” in the Jahia lingo.

5.3.1 Content tab (displayed by default)

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

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 Digital Experience Manager 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 an Event item, and the first tab gives us access to the fields that compose this item, the actual data of this content. To modify it, just change the values you want in those fields.

In Digital Experience Manager, 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) Digital Experience Manager 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.

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 your 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.

5.3.2 Layout tab

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 of their site. As a result, this tab differs depending on the type of content and of the various options pre-defined. On our Event item you can switch from a Standard View, to a detailed one. On lists, it is possible to apply multi-column layouts, ordered lists formatting, or sliders for instance.

5.3.3 Metadata tab

The third tab displays the metadata of the content.

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

5.3.4 Tags tab

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

5.3.5 Categories tab

Categories are taxonomy terms organized into a tree structure. This taxonomy is managed by administrators with special permissions.

Editors can only apply categories on content items to qualify them and make them more relevant, but can not expand the taxonomy by themselves.

Our exploration of the Edit-Engine Tabs will stop here for the moment. Click on the “Save” button, at the bottom of the Edit-Engine to save your changes. 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 want to have different options in those tabs than the one Digital Experience Manager 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 Digital Experience Manager. 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, Digital Experience Manager 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.

5.4 Create new content

To create new content depending on your preferences, you can: -  Find and click on the “add” button in the part of the page where your new content should appear. Each part of the page that can be edited has this kind of button available; the parts of the page that are editable are defined by the template.

  • - Use the Selector’s second tab to see all the components available, choose one and drag and drop it in the page at the desired place. (note that you can use the little field above the list to dynamically filter it, this fasten your work when you know the name of the content type you are searching for)

In both cases, a form-engine will pop-up, exactly the same form-engine as when editing content, but the fields will be empty as this content does not exist yet. Note: if you try to drop a component inside an area that does not allow it, your cursor will change to

Exercise In the “Events” page, at the bottom of the events list, you’ll find an “Event” button. This means that when you click on that button, a “event” content type will be created. In other pages, you may see “Any content” as a label, meaning that any kind of content can be created in that area and you’ll be prompted to choose the type of content you want to add.

Let’s click on that “Event” button. A form appears in the main panel, other panels (Selector on the left and toolbar at the top) are greyed-out until you close the form, by saving your changes or cancelling.

To add an event in the list, just fill in the fields with the desired values and click on Save. The form then disappears, and your page appears once again with the content you have created at the bottom of the list.

Note that the list containing all those events is set to manual ordering, if the ordering had been defined on an automatic sorting (by date of creation, or date of the event, or else) the new event would have appeared perhaps somewhere else in the list, obviously.

To change the ordering of the event, as it is currently set to manual ordering, you can move each event by drag and drop inside the list. To change the ordering settings, you can select the list itself (a border should surround all the events items), then do a right-click to call the contextual menu, then choose “edit.

In the form that appears, click on the second tab named “list ordering”

Uncheck the “use manual ordering” checkbox. The automatic ordering options appear.

Here you can change the automatic ordering. Automatic ordering can be done using three cumulative fields to allow very precise orders. Metadata fields (like creation date, modification date, creator, modifier) are always available, and also the fields of the “event” content type, as the list can contain only “event” items. You can restore manual ordering just by checking again the “Use manual ordering” checkbox.

Let’s create a bit more content in the website

Go into the Activities page

The page is basically built in two columns

  • one on the left that contains by default a menu
  • one, larger, on the right for the content of the page.

In the main column, a breadcrumb and the page title are displayed. This structure and some of the elements that appear are directly driven by the template. The lower part of the main column is itself divided in two columns created directly in the page.

First try to insert “rich text” in the central column by using the selector’s second tab, then dragging and releasing the rich text component just after the “acme space activities” paragraph.

When the component can be inserted, a dashed line appears to show where exactly the content will be created as shown in the following screenshot

In the Edit-Engine that pops, you can enter dummy text then validate, this exercise is just here to show you that for each content type, Digital Experience Manager will draw a different Edit-Engine.

5.5 Activate and use other areas

Once you’ve added a rich text in the main column, you may want to put content in the left column of the page, just under the sub-menu. Right now, nothing can be inserted in this column; The menu is automatically created by the template, but you can see two bars, one red, one grey, named side and contextual-side.

Those bars represents available areas for editors to write content but they are not yet activated.

Areas identified with a grey topbar are local to the page, meaning that the content inserted in this area will be displayed only in the current page.

Areas identified with a red topbar are called absolute areas. An absolute area works a bit differently from a standard area; As soon as content is inserted in an absolute area, this content will appear in all sub-levels where this area exist. In other words, if you add a content in the absolute area in the Activities page, all pages below containing this area will display the same content at the same place. This is a very convenient way for editors to impact multiple pages at once.

To activate an area, just click on the

 icon to activate it.

The page is refreshed, the icon turned blue and a

 button has appeared. Now the area exist and you can click on the button to choose a type of content, or use the selector to drag and drop a component in it.

For instance, add a “location” item to this column (basically a “location” item is an address), give this content a title like “Cap Canaveral” fill the fields with the folloàwing address 100 W Gore St, Orlando, FL, United States. Save. If you reopen the edit-engine, you’ll see that Digital Experience Manager (in fact the location module, has found by himself the latitude and longitude for the given address, silently. This could proove very useful later on).

You will now add an image into the left column; just below our Cap Canaveral address

You can drag and drop the component named “Image (from the Document Manager)” into the column to do so. The following Edit-Engine appears

Click on the field “Image (from the Document manager)” to open the file picker that let you choose the image in the files repository.

Open the tree to view the folders, select the “Space-pictires” folder. Select an image in the right panel then click on Save. Then save the Edit-Engine.

If none of the images suits you, you can upload a new image easily, using the icons in the top bar, or right-clicking on a folder and choosing “upload”.

An overlay appears which allows you to select one file on your disk. Once you’ve selected a first file, a second “select file” button will appear and so on, so you can add as many files as you want in one unique sequence.

You can close the Edit-Engine at that stage, but it is greatly recommended to fill the “Alternative text” field for accessibility and SEO reasons.

If you need to make your image clickable, you can set a link, internal or external.

Another possibility to insert your image in the page is to use the Selector in the fourth tab, which also allows you to browse the Document Manager directly, then drag and drop an image onto the page.

When, releasing the image, you will be asked to choose if the image should be treated as an “image (from the file repository)” (meaning that it will be displayed as an image) or a file reference (meaning that it will be displayed simple a file link). Choose the first option, fill the edit-engine that appears and then save. As you can see the sequence is inverted, but you’re doing nearly the same actions in both cases.

Once you’ve added the “location” on your image, your Activities page should look something like this

5.6 Move content in a page

To move a content item from one location in a page to another location on the same page, just drag the content item and drop it on the desired location.

You can move content, for instance, from the central column to the left column and vice-versa, or reorder content items in the same column.

For instance, return to the Activities page, select the rich text you created and drop it into the right column, above the “TEST content” then move the standalone image up to place it above the “TEST content”. Now your page looks like this:

If the move is possible for the destination location, a green icon appears

.

If the move is not possible then a red icon

 is displayed.

Always use the free online Word doc to HTML converter to avoid messy code on your websites!

In some pages, I can’t I move my item just anywhere I want, it is frustrating!
Well, you could do that if the template allows for it. But, honestly, do you think all your fellow colleagues (that don’t have the same expertise as you) won’t break everything if they were allowed to move any component of the page anywhere they pleased? Your web designers and the marketing guys would soon become desperate, not to mention your Corporate Identity Manager. So by default, an area can receive any type of content, and according to functional needs, the site manager (site administrator, editor in chief, whatever his/her title…) can restrict areas to some content types in order to preserve the site coherence.

6 Preview and publish your work

Now that we have completed some changes to the pages, time has come to make them available to visitors. But first, it could be useful to verify what the site will look like for the visitors, to be sure that they will see the site like we have in mind.

To do that, you can click on the “Mode” menu located in the toolbar and choose “preview” (the preview will replace the current window) or “preview in a new window” which is often more convenient.

This will open a new tab in your browser displaying the current page in Render Mode, like it will appear for visitors if you publish it right now. You can navigate in the Preview Mode, exactly as if you were on a published web site.

If the result is correct, then go back in the Edit Mode and click on the “Publication” button in the toolbar:

There are several entries in this menu:

  • Publishing the “Page Name” will publish the page currently displayed and all the items that appears in that page.
  • Publish all under “Page Name” will publish the page and all items below, content and sub-pages.
  • Publishing the site “Name of the Site” will publish absolutely everything.

Note that a publication process is always launched for one specific language. If your site is in several languages and you want to publish a modified in, let’s say, English and French, you must launch a publication in English, then switch to the French language and launch a second publication process.

The third entry is the one we want to use right now. This is very useful for a first publication, but once a site is live, if there are several editors it can be dangerous if used too often (you could publish staging content people do not want to be published yet for instance).

As we are publishing for the first time, let’s use the “Publish Site ACMESPACE - English” option. This opens a dialog box, click on the “Bypass Workflow” button. As you are the only user on this system and acting as root, you have this capability. Normal editors would not be able to do this, and they will have to follow the workflow process defined by the administrators or editors in chief. However, this is too much to explain the workflow in this Quick StartGuide.

The complete publication should take a few seconds; during the publication process, Digital Experience Manager copies everything (pages, content items, photos, thumbnails, etc.) into another part of the repository.

You can verify the result of your publication by clicking on the “mode” menu then choose “live” or “live – open in a new window” option.

The pages appear without Digital Experience Manager GUI, nor editing tools and helpers like the name of the different areas. As you can see the page in edit mode was already close to the final look and feel and it’s one of the advantages of using Digital Experience Manager as a web publishing system.

Let’s go back into the Edit Mode and perform a few other operations.

6.1 Move content between pages

To move a content item from one page to another, the easiest way is to cut and paste. Left-click on the content you want to move, then right-click on it and choose “Cut” in the menu.

Use the Selector to go into another page, and then click on a List to select it. Right-click, then choose “Paste” in the menu. Your content appears in the page, and has been removed from its previous location.

6.2 Delete content

To delete a content item, select it in the work plan, then right-click on it to access the Contextual Menu.

Digital Experience Manager will react depending on two criteria:

Is the content real content or a reference?

  • If the selected item is real content, the menu will propose a “Delete” option.
  • If the item is only a reference (an alias to display content which in fact is not actually located here in your page) then the menu will propose a “Remove” option. In this case, the item will disappear from the page, but not from your repository, nor will the other locations it may be in use. If you are about to delete content that is displayed as a reference in various locations, then Digital Experience Manager will also warn you about that!

Is the content already published or not?

  • If the content you are trying to delete has never been published, then the content is deleted instantly (and cannot be recalled later).
  • If this content has already been published (and so is visible in Live Mode by visitors) then it is not deleted instantly but is “Marked for Deletion” and will be truly deleted when the publication will occur. If the publication is approved, then the content will disappear at the same time - live and when edit so that the site remains consistent in all cases. Until the true deletion, the content appears with a special layout (strikethrough texts).
Hey, how can I know if content I wrote has been reused across our platform? Will I be warned about this only if I try to delete it?
No, if you open the Content Engine, a tab called “Usages” provides you a complete list of where this content is in use right now with direct links to those locations.

To avoid errors, Digital Experience Manager will always ask for a confirmation and will propose you to add a message attached to the deletion. This message will be visible by reviewers when asking to validate your changes. Once you’ve confirmed the deletion, the page will be refreshed and the content to be deleted will appear under an overlay. When the page will be published, the content will completely disappear. Until that moment, it is still possible to right click on it and choose “undelete” if you change your mind.

6.3 Use content in multiple places at the same time

If a content item is unique in the system, it does not mean that you only need to display it once in a particular page. In fact, the same content may be useful in various pages, with different context and layouts, in multiple web sites at the same time, etc. To reuse a content item, there are many possibilities, including using queries and automatic retrieving. You can see in the “News” pages a list of news retrieved automatically using the Last news retrieving component. The news are not really located in that page but are coming from all the web site and just displayed here. Let’s look at a simple and manual way to reuse an existing content: - Select an item in a page (left-click on it). - Use the contextual menu (right-click) to copy the content. - Go into another page, select an area (left-click). - Use the contextual menu (right-click) and choose the menu entry “Paste as Reference”. The content now appears in the page, but we did not move or modify it, neither have we duplicated it, we have just created an “Alias” (meaning that if the original content item is changed, the reference will also be changed).

This ability to easily reuse content across different pages and sites is very powerful. Correctly used, it allows content writers to focus on the data, and webmasters to focus on how the content is used and displayed, with the certainty that the content they put in pages is always correct and up-to-date.

6.4 Control the rights

Management of roles and rights is a very vast topic. We will perform a basic operation during this Quick Start Guide in order to demonstrate the principles. Let’s say the “Community” page and all subpages should not be visible for visitors, and we want to restrict them for registered users.

Edit the “Publication” page by right-clicking on it in the sitemap tree and choose the “Edit” item in the menu.

In the engine that appears, go to the tab named “Live roles”. The tab looks like this:

Individual users

 and groups
 appear in the first column.

For each role, you see a box with the list of users/groups which have the role for the current item, and by default on all its sub-items. You can add Individual users  and groups  by clicking on the corresponding button.

A role defines a set of coherent permissions.

The “Live roles” tab display roles that have an impact on the live workspace only (and therefore does not impact the editing of the content, but on browsing it).

There are 2 interesting lines here:

  • Guest user”: a generic user, that represents any anonymous visitor browsing the website in Live Mode, i.e. people that are not recognized by the system.
  • Users”: this group contains all registered users within Digital Experience Manager. So that when you grant permissions to this group all registered users will have the permissions activated.

The role “reader” is very simple as it defines only one permission - the ability to read (view) content.

Logically, to restrict the section to simple visitors, but keep access rights to all the registered users, you can remove the user “Guest user” from the role “reader”.

Role changes need to be published to have effect in live, so that as soon as the engine is saved and the modification is published, all anonymous visitors (non-registered users) will no longer see the Publications pages nor any of its sub-pages/contents.

In Digital Experience Manager, by default all permissions are inherited by all sub-items, so when removing read rights to the visitors on the “Publications” page, all sub-content will also be hidden. This inheritance mechanism allows Administrators to set-up very fast and with high efficiently the rights. The inheritance can be broken at any level if desired, so it is possible to remove some permissions on a page or content and restore the same permissions on sub-content, if necessary.

The permissions can be controlled on any content item. The operation we have made to a page may be executed on a tiny content item inside a page, so the page will appear for all users except that specific content.

If you validate the roles changes described above, publish the site, then log out, you will see that the “Publications” page and all sub-pages are not visible anymore. If you log in with any other user (try root or jenifer/password), then the page will reappear.

We will not explain the “Edit roles” tab in details in the Quick Start Guide; however, you can click on the “Edit roles” tab to see that the screen is very similar to “Live roles”, but the proposed roles are different (contributor, editor, reviewer, etc.) Each role provides different privileges and will enable users or groups to perform various actions on the staging version of the pages.

For instance, on the Publications page “jenifer” is a reviewer, meaning that during a workflow process she can validate that page and accept its publication. John has the translator role, so he will be able to edit existing content in various languages (translate), but not create new content.

7 Managing sites

7.1 Site structure

To reorganize your website, all of the operations can be done using the first tab of the Selector.

Here, with the right-click menu, you can:

  • Edit pages properties;
  • Delete pages;
  • Publish pages
  • Copy, cut, paste pages
  • Translate page
  • Export, import pages
  • Lock pages

Using drag and drop you can also move pages anywhere within the tree.

To move a page from one section to another you just have to drag-and-drop it above another page. When releasing the mouse, the page will be moved as a child of the page you’ve dropped it on and the tree will be automatically refreshed, displaying the updated structure.

For instance, click on the “About Us” page (the line becomes blue), keep the mouse button clicked and move the page onto the “Activities” page (the line becomes grey)

then release the mouse button.

The ”About Us” page has been moved to be a sub-page of the “Activities” page.

To reorder pages without moving them to another level of depth, you can complete the same operation; however, do not drop the page onto another one, but in between two other sibling pages (A dashed blue line is displayed at that time to show the insertion point). The page will stay at the same level, only reordered.

According to the moves you do in the Selector, the menu of your pages will be automatically updated.

7.2 More detailed publication

Go back into Edit Mode, and onto the “Corporate News” page to modify at least three News items from the list (edit the titles so it is very easy to see the changes).

Then publish the “Corporate News” page using the “Publish all under Corporate News - English” in the Publication menu.

You can see that:

  • It is faster than the first full-site publication (should be instant, in fact).
  • The modifications in the “Corporate News” page are visible to visitors
  • In the “News” page, the central area that automatically retrieves news from the “News” page has been also modified.
Hold on!!! I’ve changed 3 articles on my “News” page, but I don’t want to publish all my changes right now because I’m still working on one of them!
Well, that’s not a problem. If you choose to publish a “page”, all the content inside that page will be published because Digital Experience Manager considers that when you an editor requesting to publish a “page”, you want to publish all that currently appears in that page.

As Digital Experience Manager is a very granular system, you are not obliged to publish the whole page, you can publish individual items.

Go back into Edit Mode in the Corporate News pages and change at least two news items. One of those two news items is not ready to be published now, but you want to publish the other one. In this case we won’t use the “publish site” nor the “publish page” features, as we have previously seen what the results will be.

Instead, click on the modified news item you want to publish and use the Publication Menu to select “Publish - name of the selected element”. This way, only the selected item will be published, all the other modified items in your page will remain in the Staging State. In the popup window choose “bypass workflow” to fasten things then go in live mode to see the result

8 Going further with interactive features

Our Quick Start session is nearly finished, but we will show one more things before closing this guide. You have already learned how to add, edit, move and delete content, which are the most fundamental operations. You have worked in the Edit, Preview and Live Modes, seen how a page is composed of multiple areas, filled with content items and how the content moves from staging to Live when published.

But editing content is not worthy if there are no readers. In order to attract and retain readers it is essential to provide the maximum added-value around that content, whether it is complementary information, efficient navigation and search tools or interactive features, for instance. Demonstrations of what Digital Experience Manager can do would take hours, but we will take two simple examples to show you how it works in its principles to add more advanced features.

As we’ve already said it, with Digital Experience Manager, everything that appears in a page and stored in the repository is Content - not Editorial Content, just Content. This is a very important concept because it means users can add advanced features to their pages the same way they created pages, news items, events items, articles and other press releases. In Digital Experience Manager a feature, even the most complex one, can be manipulated like any other and simpler content.

We’re going to give on example of interactive feature, just for the demo purpose, there are many more available by default in Digital Experience Manager and no limitations about the numbers and variety of other features that can be added by developers for you.

8.1 Add a poll

Let’s continue on the same page. Now we want to know if the visitors have already heard about Cap Canaveral. For that, we will set up a poll. Go into the Selector and type “poll” in the above field to filter the list of available content types. Drag-and-drop the Poll component onto your page.

 Fill in the Edit-Engine by typing a question and Save.

The page is then updated with your question and an embedded area to add the possible answers.

Click on the “Answer” button to add a new possible answers to the question. You can add as many answers as you want.

Publish the page and go into Live Mode - your visitors can now vote on your poll (the same user can’t vote more than once). The look and feel of the poll is defined in the CSS of the website and of course can be completely changed.

What if I want to be notified each time someone votes on this poll? 
Digital Experience Manager provides several mechanisms to do such things. You could add a simple rule in the system saying that each time an “answer” node is created, a mail will be sent to the Administrator, or modify the poll script to call an external system and send you an SMS, for instance.

This very simple example concludes our Quick Start Guide with Digital Experience Manager. You aren’t an expert yet - and we’ve seen only a very small portion of Digital Experience Manager’s feature scope – but don’t hesitate to send in your feedback or questions in the Community Section of our website, call our sales team to evaluate your projects or receive more information about our trainings.