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The Section Editor
The section editor gives you complete control over the organization of your website's content and the design of every page of the site.

Like sections of a newspaper or chapters of a book, website sections allow you to organize the content of your site into topic areas that help your visitors quickly find the information they need. When you create articles with Big Medium, you assign each article to one or more sections of the site, and Big Medium automatically builds the article in that section.

The section editor is where you add and edit sections for your website. It is used chiefly when setting up a new website or changing the design of an existing site and is intended to be used by intermediate or advanced webmasters. Here, users with webmaster or administrator accounts can:

• Create or delete main sections and subsections
• Update HTML templates for the homepage, main sections and subsections
• Update announcements for the homepage, main sections and subsections
• Update graphics for the website's navigation bars
• Change the display order of sections and subsections in a website's navigation bars

To use the section editor, click the "Section Editor" link in the left-column menu of the Big Medium control panel. The main section editor page displays all of the content sections and subsections of your site, each with a link that takes you to the section settings page for each section.

All you have to do to add a new main section to the site is click the "New Main Section" link. To edit an existing section, click the "Settings" link for the section. Either route takes you to the settings page for the section.

The section settings page

The homepage and each section and subsection of the site has its own settings page, allowing you to customize the appearance of every individual section of your site. As with all areas of Big Medium, the section settings page includes lots of online help. Clicking on the question-mark icon in each panel of the page produces a complete explanation of what each portion of the edit page does. Here's a quick overview:

Display name
The name of the section as displayed to your site's visitors. This is the name that appears in navigation bars, breadcrumbs and any other reference to the section.

Slug name
This optional field determines the directory name and web address of all articles for this section. On this demo site, for example, the slug name for the "Tour" section is "tour". If you leave this blank, Big Medium will use a number instead.

Section alias
Many websites combine a content management system like Big Medium with other programs and applications, including online forums, registration systems, shopping carts, etc. If you're using Big Medium's navigation widgets to generate your site navigation, then you need a way to include links to these site sections that are managed by other applications. That's what section aliases are for, allowing you to define a website section that is managed outside of Big Medium. To create a section alias, enter the web address where you would like users to go when they click on the section in the navigation bar.

Metadata
Metadata is data about data, in this case a description of what your site visitors will find in this section.

Section status
The "Section Status" panel allows you to control where links to a section and to its articles appear on your site. The active/inactive setting allows you to turn subsections on or off, making the subsection and all of its articles visible or invisible to your site's visitors (main sections are always on). The display preferences settings allow you to control where links to the section and its articles appear on the site.

Templates
The design templates for each section determine the appearance of all webpages for the section, giving you complete control over the HTML and design of your entire site. By updating the template for a section, you can change the design of the entire section in seconds.

Templates are not complicated. In fact, templates are little more than stripped-down HTML files that indicate how Big Medium should place content on your pages. Sprinkled within each template are Big Medium "widgets," placeholders for the text, links and HTML that Big Medium generates for your site.

To see what a template looks like, click the "View the current template" link in any of the template panels of the section settings page. The widgets are the all-capital words flanked by "++" -- for example, ++HEADLINE++ tells Big Medium where to put the headline text on each page.

To replace a template, load a text file with the new template by clicking the "Browse" button and selecting a new template. For more information about templates, click the question-mark icon in any of the template panels on the sections settings page.

Announcements
Announcements are raw HTML that get inserted into templates that use the special ++ANNOUNCE++ widget. Use announcements to plug a new site feature, a new product offering, encourage newsletter sign-ups or warn of scheduled downtime if you need to switch servers. Because announcements are raw HTML, they may include forms, images, plugins, or anything that you like in the announcement space. Consider them a highly flexible and easy-to-update portion of your section template.

Navigation images
You can use Big Medium to manage the navigation bars on your site. You have a choice between two types of navigation bars: text or graphical. This demo site uses graphical navigation for the main section of the site (see the navigation bar at the top of every page). The graphics for each section can be loaded, changed or deleted in this panel of the section editor page.

Effecting your changes

Clicking the "Save" button after editing a site's settings stores your changes in the system but they are not reflected on the live site until you trigger Big Medium to rebuild the pages affected by your changes. After clicking "Save" Big Medium will provide a link allowing you to do this, or you can rebuild pages at any time by clicking the "Rebuild Pages" link in the left-column menu of the Big Medium control panel.

The result: Within minutes, you can change the design of an entire website, even a site with thousands of pages. Say goodbye to long, painful transitions to new site designs...

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