7. Custom Pages - Basic CMS

Navigate to 'Miscellaneous > Custom Pages'. A list will appear with existing custom pages. Click the 'New' link. A form appears into which you can enter your content.

The 'ID' field is a unique text-based ID for the page. This will form part of its URL, and it is also what appears as the name of the page when listing custom pages in the back end. So a good descriptive ID is best. The ID cannot contain spaces and special characters should be avoid. Hyphens (dashes) should be used in place of spaces. For example, these would be appropriate IDs:

Privacy-Policy
About-Us
Frequently-Asked-Questions

The text is the content of the page. HTML can be entered here too, using the HTML editor button to the bottom right of the text field. Don't forget to save the content after editing (the save button on the toolbar above).

The 'Title' field is used within the breadcrumb trail. Originally we used the page ID here, and replaced the dashes with spaces. But this means page titles cannot include dashes or other characters, and furthermore are not language specific. Hence we created a specific field for this.

SEO fields are also available to be populated.

On our demo, you will notice a slideshow in a prominent position towards the top of the home page. This content area of Kartris is a free-text HTML area that you can easily add in content to. Simply edit the 'Default' custom page, and the content will appear here.

You can also use the SEO fields for the Default custom page too, which will control the values used on the home page of your web site.

The breadcrumb trail, as on other pages, is created automatically. The page name in this comes from the 'Title' field of the custom page.

In some cases, you will want to nest content, and have the breadcrumb trail indicate this. To do this, you can select another custom page from the 'Parent Page' control. For example, you might want the breadcrumb trail for a particular page to appear like this:

Home > Services > Repairs

I this case, you'd have to first create a page called 'Services'. You can then create 'Repairs' and select 'Services' as the parent page.

Custom pages will not automatically appear on the web site. You must add them to menus manually, or create links in your skin to them.

If you look at our demo, you will see a light grey coloured menu. The content for this comes from the web_menu.sitemap file which is in the root of Kartris. You can edit this XML file manually to create the menu structure you require. Kartris will probably need to be restarted for changes to take effect.

You can also add Hyperlink controls to the .master file to provide links to your custom pages, such as those we have in the footer. We recommend using ASP.NET Hyperlink controls rather than standard HTML <a> tags, because URLs can be specified relative to the app root using the ~/t-Sample.aspx format. These will work correctly from any friendly URL page, and whether the site is running in a subfolder of localhost, or on the root of a fully-qualified domain.