Getting Started in Campusuite

It's simple. If you've not yet received your login information from your system administrator, you will need to contact them to have your credentials sent to you. After you get your login credentials, login to Campusuite and we'll briefly go over the following topics:

• Main menu
• Editing pages
• Hard and Soft Paragraph Breaks
• Adding new pages
• Campusuite modules
• Adjusting page properties
• Adding images to pages
• Pasting text from Word or other documents
• Proper Internet Filenaming Conventions
• Formatting your content using styles
• Adding news and calendar items (Campusuite modules)

 

Main menu

Let's start at the Main Menu.

From the main menu, you will see various tabs along the top. The tabs you see may vary from those shown above based on your access. Below the tabs, you will see all the "departments" that you have access to manage. These departments could be anything from your personal "faculty web site" to the schools main Admissions or Alumni areas.

Click a department to jump out to that page/department. You will notice that the page looks very much like the public web page because it is! However, you being an content publisher with the right access, you will see a grey bar at the top of each page similar to what's below.

You may or may not see the "Edit Page" and "Edit navigation" buttons in the grey bar. These will be displayed if you have access, and if the function is relavent at that point in time.

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Editing pages

The most common task in Campusuite is editing existing pages. You are proof-reading the information on your web page and stumble across a grammar error, a mis-spelling or just plain outdated information. Does this sound familiar? Here's how to fix it, instantly. See the Quick Reference for detailed Page Editing documentation.

• Click the green "Edit this Page" button in the top dash bar
• The page is loaded into a friendly "Word-style" content editor
• Find the problematic content and make your corrections
• Click the green "Save this Page" button at the bottom

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Hard and Soft Paragraph Breaks

It is important to understand hard and soft paragraph breaks in Campusuite. Briefly, a hard paragraph break is when you press the enter (or return) key to start a new paragraph. A soft paragraph break is when you hold down the "shift" kwy while pressing the enter (or return) key. The difference is that instead of starting a new paragraph with a hard break, you are starting a new line with a soft break.

This is significant and important to understand as you apply styles in your pages. Styles are set up in Campusuite to allow you to select some text and then apply a style by selecting one from either the "format" or "style" pull-down menus. When a style such as H1, H2, etc. is applied, it is told to apply to the entire paragraph. If there is a soft break, the style would continue to apply until the next hard break. In many cases, there could be two soft breaks that look like a single hard break and this can leave the user wondering why the style is not applying right. See the example below to see the difference between a hard and soft break.

Watch a demonstration that illustrates the difference between a hard and soft break.

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Adding new pages

A living, successful web site has content added almost daily. If you've had it with sending your content to the webmaster and having to wait a week, or even longer to finally see it on the web page, we've got good news for you. To easily add a new page:

• Click the "Edit navigation" button in the top grey bar
• Notice the left-hand navigation is loaded into view
• Clicking the green "Add Parent" button adds a new link to the left-navigation and you have the opportunity to create a brand new page for your content
• Clicking the grey "Add Child" button next to each parent link adds a new link under that navigation item
• You can add new, static pages of content, or you can link to Campusuite modules such as a news page, a calendar page, or even photo galleries or FAQs
• You can set the status of of your new page to "Hidden" if it is not yet ready
• You can also link directly to any outside URL or even a local document, such as a PDF file

Note: If your organization does not allow you to publish direct to the live web site, you will be saving your page as a draft, and then sending it to your content approver for review. Click here to see detailed instructions on how the draft workflow process works.

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Campusuite Modules

Campusuite modules take frequently updated information that is always consistent in format and helps you manage it in large amounts. For example, all news releases will have a headline, a date, body copy and perhaps contact information. Events always have an event name and a start date/time, and photo galleries always have gallery names and of course, pictures within them. There are several Campusuite modules to choose from and they can be linked from your site navigation just as easily as you link to a static page. While you are in the navigation editor, instead of linking to a static page, look for the available modules you can connect to next to the label "CS Module." Click here for more information about Campusuite modules.

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Adjusting page properties

While you are editing any static page, you will notice an icon called "Properties" at the top-right of the page.

Expand this to adjust the invisible attributes of your page. For example, Add META keywords and descriptions to make your pages more sticky for search engines. Or, on the contrary, check the "Add META noindex/nofollow" checkbox to tell bots not to index the page in the search engines. You will also find other advanced options, such as page syndication and web 2.0 content tagging abilities that you will eventually be interested in as you become familiar with the Campusuite system.

Note: If your organization does not allow you to publish direct to the live web site, you will be saving your page as a draft, and then sending it to your content approver for review. Click here to see detailed instructions on how the draft workflow process works.

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Adding images to pages

You can add images to your web pages by clicking the image icon in the top bar of the text editor. You can upload images from your computer, link to already existing images on the server, or link to images within your organizations image library (Imagespace).

• Uploading to the server
• Selecting an image from the image library
• Aligning images and borders
• Resizing images

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Pasting text from Word or other documents

Of course you can copy and paste content from existing Word and Excel documents, but keep in mind these external programs often use proprietary or non-standard mark-up that can have an adverse affect on the appearance of your web pages.

• When copying text from a Word or Excel document, be sure to click the "past as text" icon in the page editor to strip out unwanted mark-up
• Once you've pasted the text into the page editor, re-style it using the available styles from the top pull-down menu
• Apply hard breaks (carriage returns) after headlines that you plan to apply h1, h2 styles. This will make it so your styles don't bleed to the following paragraph

Your web site templates have been designed with strict CSS and HTML compliance and we strongly encourage you to use the tools and styles that are readily available in the page editor (described below.) You will find that they provide all the flexibility you need to create stunning pages that excite and engage your audiences. Click here for more details on how to properly copy and paste from Word.

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Proper Internet Filenaming Conventions

It's important to understand what characters should not exist in documents (the physical filename) that you plan to upload and link to your web site. For example, a pound or hash sign is reserved for bookmarking in URL's. If you had a hash sign in your physical document name, then the link will most likely render a broken link error. This is not the only character that is bad. Click the link below to see some examples. 

Click this link to read more about good and bad file names.

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Formating your content using styles

• Full screen editing
• Heading formatting and styles
• Removing a style
• Difference between hard and soft breaks. This comes in handy when formatting headings because they require a hard break.

Note: If your organization does not allow you to publish direct to the live web site, you will be saving your page as a draft, and then sending it to your content approver for review. Click here to see detailed instructions on how the draft workflow process works.

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Adding news and calendar items (Campusuite Modules)

When you arrive on a Campusuite modules page, such as news or calendar, simply use the on-screen tools available.

Click the green "Add News Item" button to add a new release, or click the title of any existing release to edit it.

There are many other functions you can use with Campusuite modules and over time, as you discover new things you want to do, you'll find the Campusuite modules are flexible enough to accomplish most any task.

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We hope this brief overview of the basic tools in Campusuite was helpful. You will find much more detailed help, FAQ's and answer to your common questions in the support site. We encourage you to bookmark the Campusuite support site so that you can find help just a click away.

Click here to go to the main Campusuite support page | Click here to login