Contents View

The Contents view for a given location shows contained items with data for each item: title, type, state (e.g. public or private), visibility (shown or hidden in navigation menu), and creation and modification dates:

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Each item has a checkbox, so you can select one or more items for performing an action, as described below, via one of the buttons at the bottom of the view:

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Copy and Cut

Copy and Cut start a copy/paste or a cut/paste operation. After copying or cutting items, go to the place where you want to move them, and there will be a Paste button active and ready. This is a powerful feature for reorganizing content.

Rename

Rename is used for changing the name, which is part of the web address (URL), and the title. If you select multiple items, then click Rename, you will be able to change the names and titles of all of the items in a single display. This another “power” feature. Imagine that you had named a number of items using a prefix ‘NEWYK-‘, then later you see decide that the prefix ‘New-York-‘ is better. Instead of visiting each item individually to change them with the Edit view, use this multi-edit feature of the Contents view.

Delete

Delete is available to delete single or multiple items in one operation, after confirming the operation.

Change State

Change State is for changing between Public and Private state. There is a checkbox for changing state of items that controls whether the state change should be applied recursively – whether or not it is carried to child items in a nested set of items. Consider a document about cars and information about makes and models. The “Cars” document could contain child items for British, French, German, American and other countries, and each of these could contain documents about specific makes and models. What if all of this content is in a Private state, because you have been working on it to prepare for publication. When ready to publish, you will want to change the state of all nested items to Public, but it would be laborious to visit the items individually, even with the aid of the Contents view. This is where the recursive setting helps. You would visit the main “Cars” document, and apply the state change recursively, and all of the car info content will instantly be made public.

Note

It is a good habit, when doing large state changes, especially when you publish a slug of content, to log out of the site, then browse around checking things, to check for missed or unintended actions.

Move Up and Move Down

Move Up and Move Down are used to walk a content item up or down in the list. This changes the position of the item in the list, but also in the navigation views. For top-level items – the ones under the home page (or can be called front page, landing page, etc.) – changing the order in the Contents view will change the order in the horizontal menu of main items in the header. Deeper within the content nesting of the website, ordering is apparent in the Contents view itself, or in the site-wide Navigation view, or in list-style or tree-style custom navigation menus.

Show and Hide

Show and Hide are for changing the visibility of items in the site-wide Navigation view. This is useful when you want items to be available on the website, perhaps for linking in documents, but you only want them to be found via these links. This can help keep navigation menus uncluttered.