Reason Documentation

Finding your way there

After logging in to Reason, you may see one of two pages:

If you have access to multiple Reason sites, you will see a page that looks something like this.

If this is the case, choose the site you would like to work on from the menu on the left side of the page.

If you only have access to a single Reason site, you will not see this page — since you don't have any sites to choose from — and you will be taken directly to the one site you have access to.

Once you have entered a specific site, you will see a menu of all the kinds of things you can edit:

The list of these kinds of things may vary depending on how your Reason site has been set up, but typical options are pages, images, assets, posts, and events.

The "Go to Public Site" link at the top of the page shows you what your site looks like; it can be handy to click this early in an editing session and leave the public site open in a separate window or tab. This way you can go back and forth between editing and checking your work by simply switching windows or tabs.

The Sites Dropdown menu at the top provides access to other sites you manage.

The page management area

Choose Pages.

You should now see the area where you can manage the pages on the site. It looks like this:

This area in Reason has a hierarchical view of all existing pages. Pages are oprganized as children and parents -- children go below their parents in the site organization and navigation.

View additional child pages by clicking on the blue triangles, which will reveal pages lower in the site hierarchy.

Use the Filters form to quickly find pages in a large site.

And last, but certainly not least, Add Page creates a new page on the site.

Adding a page

Choose Add Page. You should now see a form that looks like this:

This form asks you to fill in both content and metadata for the page. The term "content" is easy to understand -- it is the information that actually appears right there on the page. But metadata is a little trickier. "Metadata" refers to additional information about the content of the page. Metadata is very helpful in putting together a good website, because it:

1. Provides different ways of finding and categorizing web content
2. Makes searching work better, and
3. Makes reusing content easier

Fields that contain content

Fields that contain actual content — or determine the content that will be placed on the page — are the title, content, and page type fields.

Title

The full title of the page. This will be displayed in relatively prominent type immediately above your content. A good, descriptive title goes a long way towards the goal of engaging your reader.

Content

This is often, but not always, the main content of the page. Certain types of pages draw the main content of the page from other parts of Reason, or sometimes even from other databases altogether. For example, if the page is an event calendar, the main content of the page is drawn from the events on your site. If it is a blog, the main content is drawn from the posts assigned to the blog that has been placed on this page. So if you happen upon a page that you know contains some content, but which does not appear to have anything in this field, you are probably dealing with one of these kinds of pages. In that case, take a look at the page type field -- that will often tell you why the page is behaving differently from what you expected.

This field is a rich editor that allows you to edit and structure content without knowing HTML. By default, Reason uses an editor called Loki (see how Loki works). If your copy of Reason has installed a different editor, it might look different from the Loki example.

Type of page

This field determines how page is laid out and what is on the page. Depending on your role, you may see many options or you may see just a few. The options provided should be (somewhat) self-explanatory; if you have any questions, feel free to ask someone who knows more about Reason.

Fields that contain metadata

Fields that contain metadata include the following:

Link Name

This field is optional. If you page title is already short and sweet, leave this field empty. However, if your title is wordy, you can provide an alternate title here for use in the site navigation.

Description

This field ised by Google and other searches. It may also be used in some page listings as a "teaser" for the page. It's good practice to always include a description on your pages, but it's not good practice to simply repeat the page title, since the description is displayed below the page title and redundancy looks silly. If you can't think of a nice 1- or 2-sentence summary of the content of the page, you can leave this field blank.

Parent Page

This field allows you to specify the page's position in the structure of the site. If you are not sure, Reason makes it easy to come back later and rearrange your pages.

Page URL Name

This field is used to assemble the full address people use to access the page. The current page is located at "http://apps.carleton.edu/opensource/reason/docs/create_page/" and the Page URL Name of this page is "create_page." We could create a child page of this page, and make its Page URL Name "again", and the full web location would be "http://apps.carleton.edu/opensource/reason/docs/create_page/again/". A rule of thumb for coming up with a good page URL name is to take the title of the page, remove any words which appear in the titles of its parents, and shorten the remaining words as much as possible. You have to stick to letters, numbers, and underscores, however -- there are no spaces or other punctuation allowed in this field.

Show this page in navigation

"yes" means it will show up on the left-side navigation bar

"no" means it will not show up on the left-side navigation bar, but it may still be linked to in other manual or automatic ways.

Metadata used for searching and managing content

Author

Who actually wrote the content of this page? If it's someone other than you, enter their name. If it's you, enter your name. If you don't know, don't enter anything.

Keywords

This field is used by people searching the site to understand the content of the page. Enter the main concepts of the page and variants on those words that you think people might search for when they want to find the page. It is particularly useful to include words which describe the content but don't appear there.

State

Pending means that the page is unpublished, but you can still edit it from within Reason.

Live means that the page is published on the site.

Saving your work

It's a good idea to save your work often. Browsers can crash, and if yours does while editing a page, you will lose the changes you have made since the last time you saved. To do a quick save, select the "Save and Continue Editing" button at the bottom of the form.

Once you are done working on the page, select "Save and Finish." Go to the public site, and take a look at your results!