CampaignFoundations.com

OK. Your ready now. You've created a framework for your new website. Now the task turns to filling it with the content which will convey your campaign's message to the voting public.

Stop the clock. It will take far more time than the two hours promised for you and your campaign team to word-smith the content you wish to offer, making it ready for prime time. A content management system can't expedite the process of writing, editing, refining, circulating for feedback and approving your campaign's messages. But a CMS will make it easy for you to post that message, once its ready for the browsing public. And it will limit what you need to know about html, php, ssi, perl, cgi, sql and the rest of the alphabet soup that describes the technology which makes the Internet possible.

Start with your menus. Go through them one at a time and for each item in the menus you've outlined, use (as any user privileged to do so) the "create content" link in the menu to put your content on your site. On the form presented, choose "story" for almost all of your content. A "page" is a static page, which can not include other stories. Generally, you will want to build your pages of smaller stories which you can re-order as you need to. Depending on what privileges your user has and what modules have been enabled, you might also be able to create blog entries, polls, flexi-nodes or other types of content. But this article will focus on the "story".

The Title and Body fields are required. Copy the most attention getting paragraph or three from the story into the Teaser field. Then check out your options in the rest of the expandable menus that are a part of this form. If you've assigned a story or page to one or more "categories", it may make sense to uncheck the "promote to front page" option under "Publishing Options".