Overview

In the previous chapters, we discussed how to create and develop a CMS Web site. We will now concentrate on site administration tasks, starting off by focusing on managing the CMS publishing environment.

In CMS, managing the publishing environment means managing virtual storage. Virtual storage is used to organize pages, templates, and other site resources, such as images and video files. As we have already mentioned, virtual storage spaces are referred to as containers. There are three types of containers.

• A channel container stores pages and subchannels.

• A template gallery container stores templates and other template galleries.

• A resource gallery container stores site resources such as images, video files, and file attachments, as well as other resource galleries.

After the containers have been set up, users are granted rights to these containers. For example, by assigning user rights to a channel, you can specify who can only view pages inside the channel, and who can author, edit, or approve the same pages. When a user browses to a page in a channel, the page is displayed in different ways depending on the user rights. For instance, as we have seen in Chapter 5, the Web Author console is not visible to the site subscribers but is displayed to the users with appropriate rights, such as authors, editors, and moderators. To have rights in a container, a user must be a member of at least one CMS rights group that is assigned to this container. In turn, each rights group belongs to one of the CMS roles, which determines the rights the user will have in that container.

Each object in CMS virtual storage has a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) assigned to it. All objects are uniquely identified by their GUIDs, not by their names. As a result, it is possible, for example, for two or more channels to have the same name. Because these channels have different GUIDs, they are treated as two independent objects within CMS.

NOTE: To avoid confusion, make sure the publishing schedules for the channels with the same names do not overlap. This is one of the site administration tasks; we will discuss it later in the chapter.

In this chapter, we will concentrate on administering containers; in the next chapter, we will look into setting up user rights. In most cases, the Site Manager is used to perform administration tasks on CMS containers; however, certain tasks can be performed in the Web Author and Visual Studio .NET as well.