The site is now live, and you've got your check. You're all paid and everything.
What more is there?
Well, did you train your client to make their own changes to the Web site?
This isn't really hard to do, and it will save your time later.
You can set your clients up to make changes to the front-end of the Web site only,
which is really great, because it's a very friendly environment to edit from the
front-end of the Web site.
Let's show you how that works right now.
So, if we scroll on down the page here on the front-end of the Web site, and I go
to my Login link here, and I'm going to log in with my Super User login name and
Password, and what you're going to see is -- of course, I'm winding up on the
distributor page, because that's where I've redirected this page to.
You're going to notice this little gear icon that shows up here inside of this template.
And when I click that, there is the option here to Edit this particular article.
And if I click on that Edit, this will, in fact, put me into an
editing environment.
As you can see here, I have a Save button, I have my editor is available,
I can make changes to the text here, I can make changes to the ability to
publish or unpublish that,
the Access, and so forth,
what Language this is offered in, and any Meta Description or Keywords that I
want to include for this particular article.
All of this I can edit right here from the front-end of the Web site.
So, this is really convenient for your clients, because what they can do -- I'm just
going to hit Cancel here real quick.
What your client can do is they can surf to some page or another, they can
say, oh yeah, we have to update this biography. They go to the Edit button, and
they are jumped right into editing here, and they can go ahead and make whatever
changes they want to make to this particular article. It's great!
So I would encourage you to take the time to sit down with your client, and show
them how editing works, and what the JCE editor is like, and how they can edit.
Reassure your client that just because they have logged into the Web site, and
they can now see these little gear icons here, they may be worried that they can
edit, or that anybody who's logged in to the Web site can edit any of the articles
that are here on the Web site.
That's a very legitimate concern.
If I log out as a Super User, and down here at the bottom of the screen, I go
log in again as joe, 123456,
notice that I don't have that gear icon over here as I go about, and I visit these pages.
I don't have the ability to edit these pages on the Web site.
That's because Joe is just a Registered user, and Registered users don't have
permission to edit things on the Web site.
So you can set your clients up at some level.
You might set them up as an Editor, which would allow them to edit any of the
content on the Web site from the front-end, or you could set them up as a
Publisher, which would also allow them to publish and unpublish content from the
front-end of the Web site.
Unfortunately, Joomla's front-end editing capability does not give you the
capability of linking a new article up to a menu. Unfortunately.
You can't do that from the front-end of the Web site.
What you'd have to do at that point is give your client a back-end login.
If you decide to go that route, I would encourage you to watch my lynda.com video
on ACL; Access Control Lists.
I will walk you through the process of creating a customized environment
for your client to log in to, so that they can only have access to the items
that they need to edit.
Usually that's something like the Article manager, the Category manager, the
Media manager, as well as the menuing capability.
And they don't necessarily get access to the components, or to the modules, or
the templates for sure.
So that is one way that you can handle editing for your clients, either here on
the front-end, which is very friendly, or if they have to have the ability to
link things up to menus, you can always give them editing access on the
back-end of the Web site.
Just be sure to strip down that interface to give them the minimum number of
tools, and the minimum amount of confusion to maintain their Web site.