Editing - the basics

The admin menu is where it begins

That fact that you can see this page means you are logged in and have sufficient privileges to edit page content. At the top of the page, you should see a cute little page admin menu like the one shown in the picture in the aside. That menu lets you:

• Switch to edit mode, where you see edit outlines and controls for editing content and for adding and deleting items in the page. The icon lets you turn on edit mode. Once you are in edit mode, this changes to the icon which lets you turn off edit mode. 
• View page settings using the  icon. 
• Add new sections to the page using  the  icon. Just clicking this adds a whole new section complete with a heading at the bottom of the page. There is more discussion about sections below.
• Add new asides to the page using  the  icon.
• Retrieve hidden items using the icon.

Outlines are on your menu

When you are in edit mode, each piece of page content will have an edit menu attached to its edit outline. The edit menu lets you edit or change the settings for a particular piece of the page. Edit outlines show you precisely what piece of the page is controlled by a particular edit menu. A typical edit menu appears in the aside. Edit menus vary depending on the type of content (heading, paragraph, picture, etc.). 

The fact that outlines and menus are visible in edit mode has a significant effect on the page layout. To see how the page will actually look to users, just click to turn of edit mode. You can switch quickly in and out of edit mode, but make sure you have saved any changes you have made in editors before you switch out of edit mode.

On the same page

The icon takes you to a page giving information about a page and allowing you to edit page content and settings. This page is mostly for advanced users, but you can change the name of a page as it appears in the menus and you might want to set the internal name for the page, which is useful for adding internal links.

Internal names are case sensitive and it is a bad idea to use characters other than letters, numbers and the underscore symbol ( _ ) in them.

Doing it in sections

Clicking the icon adds a new section at the bottom of your document. A section is a chunk of of content with a heading and some paragraphs and maybe some pictures, tables, etc. In modern thinking about web pages, the section concept is designed to encourage the practice of breaking up pages into parts that correspond to particular topics. This should help screen readers to figure out the relationships between the bits of content in a page and facilitate analyis of relevance by search engines. BanksyMS obliges you to structure your web pages in this way, because you can only add paragraphs, pictures ad so on to a new section.

Clicking puts your new section at the bottom of the page. You can move it up to where you want it using the icon (only visible in edit mode).

By way of an aside

Asides are a bit like sections but they are out of the main flow of the page, so they appear to one side. You have probably seen the little aside boxes that appear on many pages. You can add an aside by clicking the icon. Like sections, newly added asides appear at the bottom of the page, but you can move them to where you want them using the icon. When the page is viewed on a narrow device (e.g. on a phone), the asides are collapsed to link boxes as shown in the aside, but can be viewed by clicking on the link in the box.

Bringing back your (un)dead

When you click on the delete item in the edit menu for an item, the item is not actually destroyed. It just becomes undead - well, hidden really. If you delete an item by mistake, don't panic, it is quite easy to retrieve undead items. Clicking on the icon in the admin menu makes all undead items visible and (provided you are in edit mode) lets you retrieve them by clicking on the icon in the edit menu for the item. This icon replaces   in the edit menu for undead items.  

If you have moved or added other items since pressing for an item, the undead item may not appear where you expect. You may need to use the icon to move items to the correct order.

Editing your words of wisdom

Of course, the first thing you would want to do is edit a heading or paragraph. Clicking on the icon will open an editor like the one in the picture below. In the editor, you can edit the text, italicise or embolden text and create dot point or numbered lists. You can also add links to external pages and to pages within your site (although that is a more advanced topic). When you have finished editing, pressing the save button will save your changes. While you are using the editor, all of the other edit controls on the page will dissappear and the edit menu will just show the cancel item which lets you cancel any changes you have made. Once you have done with editing (either by pressing save or ), the edit controls for all of the items will reappear.

As you can see in the picture, the editor itself contains some controls for text editing.

• Select some text and press B to make it bold. Pressing B again removes the bold.
• Select some text and press I to make it italic. Pressing I again removes the italics.
• There are icons for putting in numbered and dot-point lists. The best way to see how these controls work is to try them.
• The remaining controls are for adding, editing and deleting links. These are discussed on the Working with links page.