Help with topics

Sites in Notanant are divided into topics and then below topics you have articles, news, posts, pictures etc depending on the type of topic you choose. This allows you to add a gallery, or a press area, or a discussion forum to your site quickly and easily. Topics can also exist as standalone pages.

As with sites, you need to choose a name for your topic. This will be shown as the name of the link to this page. Common topics on sites are 'About us', 'News', 'Our services'. But you might also use 'Our gallery', 'Forum' depending on the type of topic you are creating.

As with sites you can add a logo, which will automatically be scaled to the right size, but you should be aware that uploading big pictures (1MB+ in size) does take time and you might be better changing the size of the picture before you upload.

Topics also come with summaries and then main text. If you are using the %%topics component on the front page, then the summary will be shown in addition to the title of the topic through the component

The topic type determines how the articles in the topic will be used and displayed. The standard display is as a list, but if you use a News display, articles are shown with their date and will also be picked up by the %%newsmenu component. If you use a forum, you will have articles that people can add posts to. If you use a gallery, you will have an area that people can add pictures to (and is used by the %%gallery component).

You can also control who has access to read your topic - public is anyone who is not a member of your site, a guest has access to a shared username and password, a member is someone who has joined your site and an officer is someone who you have appointed to run special areas on your site.

In addition you can control who has access to add information to your topic. If you are running an open forum for instance then you may allow public access. If you have a site with members, but only a select group of people should make changes to topics then you should set access at officer level. If you own the site you are automatically an officer (the owner)

Where topics are displayed you can also set a rank for the topic. This allows you to control which topics are seen first in lists. If you leave it blank then topics are shown in the order you added them