This FAQ is for Big Medium 1.x only. It does not apply to Big Medium 2.0
or later.
Question
It seems that homepages and section front pages are good only for displaying
links. How do I add and edit text to these pages?
Answer
Big Medium does not treat the homepage or section pages like regular content pages. Instead, they're basically simple containers that hold links to other pages (in the case of the homepage, it holds the latest links to all other pages), but no content of their own. As a result, there's no editing interface for creating article text to appear on the homepage or section page itself.
There are several workarounds available, depending on your needs...
Upgrade to the most recent version of Big Medium
Big Medium 2.0 or later allows you to add and edit text on all homepage/section pages.
Hard-code your text into the section/subsection template
Put the text that you want to appear on the page directly into the template for the page in question (i.e., the homepage template, the section page template or the subsection template). It works, but it has the downside of being difficult to edit if you need to make changes at all frequently.
Add the ++ANNOUNCE++ widget to the template, and enter your text into the section's announcement field.
This is similar to the previous option but allows a bit more ease of editing. The downside is that the announcements are located in the section editor and are available only to those with webmaster and admin privileges. And you have to edit the text in raw html.
Use section aliases
If your goal is to create a section or subsection link in your navigation that links directly to an article page, then this is a good option. Here's how it works:
- Create an article page that you want to act as a section page by clicking the "new article" link from the editor menu. Edit this page like a normal article and assign it to one of the sections of your site.
- Create a new main section, entering the section label (the title of the section to appear in your navigation bar) and the slug name. In the section alias field, enter the URL of the page that you created in step one. Save these settings (no need to load template files for this page).
- Rebuild all pages. Your new section should appear in the navigation bar, and it links to the article page that you created in step one.
Import article text from other Big Medium-edited pages
You do this by using server-side includes to import article pages edited with Big Medium. This is the most flexible solution in terms of allowing easy editing of the article text as well as being able to assign articles to the sections. But it's also a bit complex. Here's how it works for adding editable text to the homepage.
Create a new main section called, for example, "section pages". Check all of the "display preferences" settings:
- Don't show section's articles on homepage
- Don't include section in navigation bar
- Don't generate a spotlight article for this section
- Don't offer a stand-alone news feed for this section
Make main-section and subsection templates essentially empty like so:
<html>
<head></head>
<body><body>
</html>
The article pages of this "section pages" section will be used as includes
to insert content into the homepage and/or section pages. So the article
template should be very stripped-down to the basic content. For example,
it might contain just these two lines:
++HEADLINE++
++CONTENTS++
Save the new section.
Create a new article with the headline and text that you would like to include on one of the homepage and/or main section pages. Assign the article to this new "section pages" section. For the homepage for example, you might enter a custom slug name of "homepage" for this article.
Take note of the URL of this new article page. For this example, we'll say that the slug name of the ghost section is "sections" and the slug name of the article we've just created is "homepage." That would make the URL:
http://www.example.com/moxie/sections/homepage.shtml
In the Section Editor, go to the homepage settings page. Edit the homepage template by adding a SSI include tag where you would like the headline and text to be inserted. This tag will import the text from the article page you created earlier and insert it into the main section page:
<!--#include virtual="/moxie/sections/homepage.shtml" -->
The path in that tag is the article URL that we noted above with the domain name lopped off.
Save the homepage settings, and rebuild your pages. The homepage should now include your article text.
Making it work for section pages
You can also repeat steps 3 to 6 above to add article text to section and subsection pages, choosing a unique slug name for each section page in step 3 and editing the relevant section template in step 5.
Or, even better, in step 5 use the ++SECTIONSLUG++ widget in the include tag for your main section template and/or subsection template like so:
<!--#include virtual="/moxie/sections/++SECTIONSLUG++.shtml" -->
...and then set the slug name for the corresponding article page to the section's slug name. For example, if you have a section with the slug name "news" then you would give the article page to include in that section the same "news" slug name.
This trick allows you to use the same section template in multiple sections so that you have fewer templates to keep track of.
