• Plone Interface
• Add a New Folder
• Add a New Page
• Edit a Page
• Sandbox Your New Ideas
• Insert Links in a Page
• Add a file to a page
• Save and Publish your Page
• Rename and reorganize content

Plone Interface

Once you've logged in by clicking login and entering your username and password, you'll see the following page.

Please notice the two new elements present once you've been authenticated.

• Personal bar (in the top right portion of the screen)
• Editing panel

• I've highlighted the four major areas we'll be using in this quick start tutorial

Editing Panel

• View tab
• Click to view page as it is displayed to the end user
• Edit tab
• Click to be taken to the editing interface to edit the selected page.
• Add to folder tab
• This is a drop down menu that will allow for you to add various content types to the site

• folders, pages, images, files, wiki pages, message boards, etc.

• Workflow state tab
• This is a drop down menu that allows you to change the state of a content item
• this will determine where and to whom your created content is visible to
• more details will be provided later

Add a New Folder

To create a new folder, you should first decide where on our site the folder is going to live. If you want your folder at the top-level folder, click on that folder.  If you want to create a folder inside another folder, you must navigate inside that folder first. Creation of all new content in Plone is dependent on location.

In this example, we're going to create a folder called test folder in the Install Mifos folder which resides in the Knowledge Center folder.

1. Click on add item (sometimes add to folder) on the green editing panel
   
2. You should see a drop-down menu appear. Select Folder <you should see the screen below>

• Give your folder a Title and Description and push Save
• In this example I named the folder test folder
• I chose not to use a desciption but if i had that would display at the top of the page and upon the link in the nav when the cursor is hovering over it.

Add a New Page

Let's add a page within the folder, test folder, that we just created.

• Click the add item menu and select page.

• You should see a similar display to what you saw when adding a folder.
• This is the interface you'll always see while adding a new page or editing an existing page.
• Title field
• Description field
• Body text
• Upload content (ignore)
• Related items (ignore)
• Allow discussion on item (ignore)
• Save as a new version (ignore for now but we'll revisit in a later tutorial)
• Let's be creative here and name this page, test page.
• We'll go into editing the body text in the next section.
  

Edit a Page

For this section let's focus on the body text area.  This area of the site uses the Kupu WYSIWYG text editor to try and make text formatting as simple as possible for the end user.

Please take a quick glance below at what these buttons look like:


Read on to see your various formatting options and what the text editor will allow you to do.  Once you feel comfortable let's move on and learn how to do some common tasks while editing a page.

Using an External Editor

1. Install the Zope external editor client.
   • Linux users: install the "zopeedit" package, then customize ~/.zope-external-edit to lauch the editor of your choice.
   • Windows users: After installing zopeedit, copy the configuration settings file ZopeEdit.ini from zopeedit's home directory into your user folder C:\Programs and Settings\<username>. Then change the "editor" line to point to the editor of your choice.
2. Log in to mifos.org. You will see a stubby pencil icon on "plone" pages. For example, see the User Manual. Wiki pages (pages where the URL starts with http://mifos.org/developers/wiki/ ) can also be edited with an external editor by clicking the stubby pencil icon.
3. Make sure "Enable external editing" is checked in your mifos.org preferences.
   
4. Click the stubby pencil, make changes, save and quit your editor. Refresh the page to see your changes. That's it!

Screenshot of User Manual mifos.org plone page with External Edit button highlighted.

Sandbox Your New Ideas

A sandbox is a safe place to try out different kinds of changes before publishing content.

Good place to perform test plone edits

Good place to perform test wiki edits

Insert Links in a Page

In this section we'll explore how to both insert a link internally to elsewhere in the site or to insert a link to an external page.

Inserting an internal link

• First you need to select and highlight the text you want to serve as internal link
• In this example, I'm going to be inserting an internal link to the Grameen Koota deployment project page
• I highlighted the text and clicked the internal link icon (looks like a chain)
• You're then presented with the link drawer which allows you to navigate through all the content on mifos.org that you can link to
• Once you find your desired page, highlight it, and click OK.

Likewise in the same manner as inserting a link to a page, you can link to a folder.

Inserting Links to Folders:

You may sometimes want to link to a folder, and not just a page within a folder. The process is similar to the above. Find the folder you want to link to and double-click into it. Now, you'll see the first item in the folder is named ". (name-of-the-folder-you're-in)". Choose that item, and hit OK.

Inserting an external link (a webpage outside of mifos.org)

• In this example, let's insert an external link to the mifos test server.
• For this process you'll once again need to select the text you want to serve as your external link
• Then click the insert external link icon (globe button). 
  
• You'll see the following box where you input the text of your external hyperlink.  You have the option of clicking preview this link to see what site the link will take you to.
• Once you've got the URL correct, click OK and this link will now be in your page.
  

Add a file to a page

To add a file to a page there are two steps:

1. Upload the file onto mifos.org
2. Insert a link to the file within your page.

Upload the file onto mifos.org

All files will be uploaded to our Resource Repository which is located within the Knowledge Center at the following url: www.mifos.org/knowledge/resources.  To add a file into the Resource Repository you must do the following:

• Navigate to www.mifos.org/knowledge/resources
• Click add item, and select file.

• Name the file and also provide a description within the description field.
• Click browse and locate the file to be uploaded from local machine.

• Click save.

Now the file has been uploaded to the Resource Repository.  Read on to learn how to link to this file from the page you are creating.

Insert a link to the file within your page

Inserting you file in your page is just like inserting an internal link.  Let's go back to the test page we're creating and insert a link to our file, test file.

• Let's make the following text link to test file, "Download our test file".
• Type in "Download our test file." Highlight the text and click the insert internal link icon and then use the link drawer to browse to our file, test file, within the Resource Repository.

• Click ok, save the page and now let's see what happens when we click the link.
• When clicking the link we just created, the user is prompted to either open or save the file we uploaded:

And that is how you upload and link to a file within your page.

Insert an image into your page

To insert an image into the page you're going to click the insert-image icon (shows a tree).  From there you need to:

Find the folder where the image is located (a folder called Images) which resides on the root (home) level of mifos.org.  You can also use the search field to find your image by name. Once you click on it, you'll see a preview of the image appear on the right side of the window.

You can "float" images to the left or right by choosing the Left or Right buttons.  Inline images will simply be inserted into the middle of the text, which will break above and below the image.

ALT-text is the text that will be shown to users whose web browsers can't display images, or used for vision-impared web browers.  In most browsers, the ALT-text will also appear when a person hovers the mouse over the image.  By default, Plone will use the image's Title as the ALT-text or you can put some sort of brief descriptive text here.

You will also have the option to choose at what size you display the image - original size and various other smaller and larger options.

Click ok and your image will be displayed.

Add a new image or file to mifos.org

When you need to insert an image that from your local machine, you'll first need to add that image to mifos.org and then go through the steps outlined above.

Adding an image is similar to adding any content type like a page or folder. 

1. Go to the proper folder and click on the add to folder drop-down menu located in the green taskbar
2. Select Image or File from the menu
   
3. Next, you'll be taken to the edit screen for that content item
4. Fill in a Title and Description
5. Browse to find the image or file on your hard drive
6. Push Save to finish

Inserting a file in a page

Inserting a file in a page is just like inserting an internal link.  You'll go through the same processes except for selecting a file rather than a page from the link drawer.

For the end user this file will be displayed as a link and upon clicking it they will be asked to open or download the respective file.

Save and Publish your Page

To save your page, click save and it will now be saved.  In our example I created the following:

By default, the page gets saved in the public draft workflow state.   This means that the content is viewable and accessible to the public (unauthenticated users). It can be linked to and will be found in search results on the site; but it's not displayed as a content item in the left hand navigation to the public unless its workflow state is changed.

Publishing a page

To make the page listed in the left hand navigation, the workflow state must be changed to published.

This can be done in by clicking the drop-down menu reading state:public draft and selecing publish.   Your content should now be displayed in the left hand navigation and site map.

Rename and reorganize content

Let's first take a look at how are content is displayed when clicking the contents tab.  This display will show you all the content items residing within that folder.  From this view, you'll be able to cut, copy, paste, rename, and change the workflow state of one or as many items as necessary.   You can also change the order of content by dragging and dropping items within the folder.



Renaming a page

We'll try renaming our page, test page, in this example.  First you must select the check box next to test page and then click rename.  You shall see the following display:



There are two fields that you change while renaming the item

• Title
• Short Name

New Title

Changing the Title will simply change the title that gets displayed in the left hand navigation as well as at the top of the page.

New Short Name

Changing the Short Name is how you will have control over your url's.  The default naming methodology is to make everything lower case and to change all spaces or other punctuation to dashes "-".

So in our example, test page becomes test-page.

Thank you for going through this brief tutorial and hopefully now you'll have a better sense of how to edit and organize content within mifos.org.  This is only the tip of the iceberg as there are many other ways to create, edit, and organize content in a powerful manner.