How to Organize Sites
Site types provide a way to categorize minisites. Reason uses site types to organize minisites in the sitemap module. Reason also uses site types as a way to provide different theme options to different sets of sites (About creating Reason themes).
In order to best use the site types feature, it is useful to think about the general buckets your various minisites might fall into. Remember that a site can be placed in several different site type groupings, so edge cases can be accommodated fairly smoothly.
At a small college your site types might be:
- Academic Departments
- Administrative Offices
- Committees
- Student Organizations
- Athletics
- Portals
- Etc.
At a company, your site types might be:
- Products
- Promotions
- Corporate
- Intranet
- B2B
- Etc.
To create your initial set of page types, go into the Master Admin, go to Site Types, and use the Create Site Type link to create your types one by one. Don't worry about having the perfect taxonomy — you can add additional site types later, and you can reassign sites to different site types at any point. So make your best stab at it and come back later when you've set up a number of sites to reevaluate your site taxonomy.
Using Site Types to build a site map
In order to use this organizational scheme to build a site map, simply create a site (perhaps called "site map," although you can name the feature whatever you want) and give its home page the page type "Site Map." Your site categories will be used to automatically generate an organized list of (live) sites that will remain up-to-date automatically as sites are made live, moved, or removed. If you want to re-order the groupings as they appear in the site map, go into the site type listing in Master Admin and choose "Sort these items."
Using Site Types to manage theme availability
When you set up a Reason theme, you have the ability to specify which sites should be able to select that theme for themselves.
For example, you may want to give one set of sites a limited set of available themes, because it is important that they have a consistent look and feel. In the case of the small college, it's not hard to imagine wanting to keep departments and offices pretty much in line with established identity standards, so you could assign only a few official themes as being available to those sites.
On the other hand, for another set of sites -- perhaps student organizations, in this example -- a much broader and less branded set of theme options may be appropriate.
To make a theme available to a set of sites (as defined by a site type,) edit that theme, choose "Select site types that can choose this theme" in the left sidebar, and select the site type groupings that should have access to that theme.
Alternately, you can edit the site type, choose "Themes available to sites of this type," and select the themes that are available to sites tagged with that site type.