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5What can be messed with?

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Lists of useful things you can change with Smallsite Design.

How useful a content management system is is dependent upon what can be changed, but that has to be balanced with how much technical knowledge is required to do that successfully. For example, building sites with HTML, CSS and JavaScript provides the most flexibility, but also requires the highest technical competence to produce useful sites. Smallsite design hides those technologies, but offers many options that produce good-looking and functional sites with a lot less knowledge.

The other major trade-off is how much risk of privacy and security is allowed in order for flexibility. Smallsite Design does not allow plugins. They are third-party code that can may not be designed to the same standards as the product itself, and thus have flaws that require the site owner to independently keep updated, if their makers do provide newer versions. Plugins can provide a lot of extra functionality, so Smallsite Design includes a lot of that natively, which is detailed in this article.

Smallsite Design itself is only dependent upon PHP, which the hosting provider keeps up to date.

Structures

A site is a three-level structure, with a variety of article types.

The three levels are:
  1. a.Subsites – with their own home page and navigation tree.
  2. b.Categories – to group related articles.
  3. c.Articles – where the real content is.
The types of articles are:
  1. a.General – can contain sections, subsections and mini-glossaries.
  2. b.Navigation – like the home page, and can have cards, a catalog or image gallery linking to categories and articles.
  3. c.Procedures – for formally documenting processes and procedures, and can form a hierarchy of interlinked procedures up to 10 deep with backlinks to the calling step or substep.
  4. d.Tests – of up to 20 questions for visitors to gauge their knowledge before or after reading an article, with customised comments depending upon the quartiles that the result score appears in.
  5. e.Diaries – of time-ordered sections, for a mini-blog or topical rant (latest first), or timeline of comments for a project (latest last).
  6. f.Contact – listing a variety of contact methods, including web-based email so no address is exposed.
  7. g.Policies – for privacy, site usage, and customised conditions.
  8. h.Glossaries – for listing common terms and abbreviations, and their definitions.

Locales

Locale enable multilingual sites to be localised for the languages and scripts used in a region.

There are for multi-lingual pages, and they can:
  1. a.Be one of 500+ provided with PHP and its intl extension.
  2. b.Use one of 108 user interface languages.
  3. c.Use one of 17 quote-subquote pairs.
  4. d.Use one of the other locales as part of a fall-through hierarchy to get text from if the current article does not have text for the current locale.

Files

Files can be imported, categorised for their purpose by their extension, and images further by their dimensions.

File organisation is by:
  1. a.Purposes of banner, insert, card, aside, icon, image, audio, video, or other, being used to specify what is listed in file option lists for elements and other uses.
  2. b.Sets of variants, with the first for the master-locale, and optional variants for reverse rendering or another locale, where image variants must be of the same size.
  3. c.Default not able to be linked to by another site, but can be made to be.

Themes

The look and feel of pages can be changed per subsite.

The theme parameters that can be changed are:
  1. a.One of 17 hues to specify the basic colours of pages.
  2. b.One of six saturation-luminance combinations, from greyed, light, mild, strong, headings (dark on lighter page background) or dark.
  3. c.One of nine options of the hue offset of headings from the page background, either the same or one of four hue half-steps either side.
  4. d.Sans-serif or italicised serif page headlines.
  5. e.One of seven border curvature radii.

Banners

The look and feel of banners can be changed per subsite.

The banner parameters that can be changed are:
  1. a.Up to two lines of individually sizable lines of text.
  2. b.Sans-serif or italicised serif banner text in choice of three colours.
  3. c.Choice of a background image or an insert, like an icon.
  4. d.Offset the text horizontally.
  5. e.One of nine options of the hue offset of the banner background from the page background, either the same or one of four hue half-steps either side.
  6. f.Banner padding and insert sizing and offset are configurable.
  7. g.Text and settings from the main-subsite master-locale banner fall-through to the others unless modified.

Users

Users are for performing tasks for the site owner, including editing articles.

The type of users are:
  1. a.Manager – who can view any management pages.
  2. b.Master manager – who is the first to log in when no other manager is, and who can solely change most site settings, and assign tasks to other users.
  3. c.Writers – who are only allowed access to the articles that they are assigned tasks to perform for, and what other articles they can get content from.
  4. d.Guests – only for demonstration or training sites, where each allows multiple logins for many to independently navigate the site without being able to change anything.

Article workflow

The content of article is managed in stages.

The stages of an article body's lifetime is:
  1. a.Work-in-progress (WIP) – from creation or updating, all the intermediate versions created with each change, allowing undo.
  2. b.Draft – for reviews or release candidates.
  3. c.Release – final version to be made publicly available.

Writers and managers can be assigned tasks of writing, translating, reviewing or editing, with the workflow explicitly itemised, along with expiry indicators, and queries and notes enabling the master manager and taskee to have logged communications with each other.

Other features

There are more things that can be changed.

Other features that can be tweaked are:
  1. a.Articles can be created as templates for use as proforma, or to hold predefined element arrangements to clone from.
  2. b.The default copyright setting is All reserved, but the text can be changed, such as to use Creative Commons, and can have a URL specified for the page where its conditions are listed.
  3. c.Renamed articles and categories automatically have redirects created for them, but redirects can be created for a single page, wildcard group, or even the whole site.
  4. d.Authors can be specified at a site, subsite, or article level, and if they have a website, be a link to it.
  5. e.Guest mode for demonstration sites, with guest accounts, one of which can be public, as for the product's demonstration site, which allow multiple logins so many can navigate the site independently without being able to change anything.
  6. f.Inbuilt search facility, but an external search provider can be specified.
  7. g.By default, any page viewed for more than 30 seconds will send the time, page code and locale to the site, but it can be stopped, and statistics deleted on a per week basis.
  8. h.Automatically and manually generated archives, which can be used to overwrite a site, or elements from them can be imported into the site.
  9. i.Registration details can be specified for legal reasons, such as business numbers.
  10. j.The page headline and byline are included in browser tabs and search engine listings, but extra text can be added to wrap those in.
  11. k.Passwords are checked anonymously against the Have I Been Pwned database, but another provider's URL prefix can be specified.
  12. l.Several MIME types for files to be displayed in the browser are already specified, but future ones can be added as browsers accommodate them.
  13. m.Specific site search robots can be blocked, such as GPTBot.
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