In ocPortal, the front page is your home page e.g. nameOfSite/index.php and will look like this. It’s an area for new members to sign up or existing members to sign in.

This page can be left as it is or can be edited but to create some of our own content, we first need to understand what the existing content is.

So let’s edit the page, look in the middle left of the main screen area and click on the “Edit this page” link.

This brings up the ocPortal editor ready to accept your changes.

The content you can see has been generated by ocPortal for you. The welcome message has been generated from your site name that you entered during the set up wizard. The code blocks are as follows.

Main greeting.

Note “main” prefix indicates that the block is on the main page body. Thanks to RichT for pointing this out.

This code block generates the code required to show specific messages so

new members or those not signed in will see the following welcome message which includes links to either “Join” or “Sign up.

Existing members who sign in will see the following.

Page tag.

This creates a clickable button which links to your start page, it will look something like this.

Clicking the link takes users to the site start page. As shown below.

Main image fader.

Used to rotate a selection of images but as we don’t yet have any images, we can’t use it so let’s just leave it as it is and revisit it at a later date.

Making some changes.

First we will add a small bit of text directly under the welcome notice, and above the main_greeting code block.

Click your mouse between the two and type your text.

The next thing I want to do is to add a direct link button to the site forum or it could be any other page on site..

We can use the page tag code block as follows.

Simply click on the block to highlight it and right click/copy. Then place your cursor next to the existing page tag code block then right click and paste.

You then need to double click the pasted code block and edit its settings.

In my case I wanted a link direct to the forums so I select “forums” from the tree list. Scroll down the page and change the Tag contents which is the text that will be used for the link.

Save your work and preview the page.

You can see the text we added and the button we copied and edited.

Scrolling further down the screen, we will come across the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tagging section and the Permissions section.

SEO.

So very important for each and everyone of your web pages. Search engines are complex beasts, they search the internet for content to index, how they index your site is influenced by Meta information and two types of meta information are Keywords and Descriptions. By filling these sections in correctly, you help search engines to index your site correctly and give precise text for the search engines to show in their results.

Keywords.

As I have decided to build a web site based on ocPortal, some typical keywords I might use could be:

ocPortal tutorials, ocPortal templates, ocPortal add on’s, ocPortal help, ocPortal forum

Note, keywords are comma separated.

Description.

When you do a search for something, search engines return pages of results. The results are made up of a Page title, Pages description and a link. The description is what searchers read before deciding to click the link to you site, it is the first impression they get of you. Leave it blank and the search engine will make it up for you from page content but fill it in and the engine will most likely use your text. So go ahead and fill it in with a concise description of your page content.

Adding keywords and descriptions to your page do nothing to the page appearance but the code is added to the page code and can be seen by the search engines via the page source code when the page is published.

Note* The screen clip below is taken from viewing my web page in my browser and selecting View/Source. You can see the Description and keyword meta tags with the information I entered in the wizard above.

Finally let’s look at Permissions.

Permission control who can see the page on the internet. As this page is our main join sign up page, it stands to reason that we want everybody to see it so we will for now leave the permissions untouched.

Phew! We have done some small adjustments and have started to take ownership of our site.

Next we will look at how we can change the forum section to better suit our requirements.

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