Alive CMS
In order to use Alive CMS it is very helpful to understand it's concepts. First concepts important for the site manager are explained. Then the concepts for developers are covered. In the following a resource can mean a page, an image or a file. Please take some time to grasp the principles below, it will make planning and managing a site much easier
You can control access to resources, in other words control who can view or edit a page and who cannot. That works as follows: you can create users with email/password access and give a user a role. Roles can be shared between users. Rols must be defined before they can be used (more on that later) and two roles always exists: 'Manager' and 'Everyone'. The 'Everyone' role is assigned to all users that are not logged in, anonymous users. The 'Manager' role is special in the sense that the Manager is allowed to do every thing.
Time for an example: let's say you want to give a user (or a group of users) the task to maintain the content of the site (or part of the site). So first you create a role, let's say you decide to call it 'Editor' and after that you create one or more users (with a password so they can login) and assign them the role of 'Editor'. Finally when you create a new page you set the 'Edit item' permission to the 'Editor' role.
Of course there are more permissions that can be set and when you create a page and the system sets them to reasonable defaults: to the roles of the user that creates the page. Usually you will set the 'View permission' to Everyone, but you also could limit the view permission to let's say a role such as Member and give certain users (or all users) a Member role.
Finally there is the concept of an entity folder, which allows you to set a set of roles to eahch user specifically for the content on of that folder (and the children contained in that folder).
No yet completely implemented is the concept of access policy. Currently if a user tries to access a page that user is not allowed to access the user is send to the login page. The intend is to make that customizable so you can decide whether to send the user to the login page, display a "Not authorized" page or send them silently to a page the are allowed to access.
The name of a page or image (actually the name of any resource) cannot contain spaces or what are called 'URL unsafe' characters. So letters, digits, dots, underscores and dashes are allowed. But underscores might lead to 'forbidden' names. More on that below.
In Alive CMS resources can be inside containers, we call them folders. This is nice to organize the site. For instance the page 'create-app' has a URL that ends in 'tutorials/create-app' because create-app is a page in the 'tutorials' folder. So we say that each page (resource) is uniquely defined by it's URL.
The URL ending with 'tutorials/createsite' is the 'view_item' action, i.e. just showing the content of the page. Normally the 'view_item' part of the URL is not used. But for all other actions that action is always present in the URL. For instance if you edit the page you will see that the URL ends with 'tutorials/createsite/edit_item' and the 'edit_item' part is the action, or as developers call it the method. In Alive CMS the name of a page can never contan a method as part of the name. But since all methods have an underscore you can avoid 'forbidden' names by never using an underscore in the name of a page or image.
You can set a new new look & feel (skin) for the whole site by selecting a skin from the list of installed skins. Setting a skin site wide is done on the 'Root folder content' page, visible the menu after logging in with a Manager role. To se a skin for one page only, select "Set skin" in the actions menu on a folder view.
Making a new skin is described in the 'Developers & designers' section.
The content of pages is stored in a database. Depending on how you plan to use the live site you have one or more options what to use as a database: