So you’ve just gotten your hands on IMiS and don’t know where to begin, a daunting monolith of a system with so many terms — IQA, BOD, RiSE — that just seems so contrived of a problem. Why not just use some other CRM? But at this point, we’ve already migrated and realised that 3rd party is where ASI wants us to go. They’ve got an “ecosystem” after all, and you’re gonna use it…
IMiS is a cloud platform produced by ASi — although at this point I might as well compete with a better out-of-the-box solution — purporting “Designed for the unique needs of association, union, and membership management.” Nice claim, but it is indeed a software that may serve larger enterprises which have a dedicated IT team. It also claims to be the world’s first “Engagement Management System”. Nice, but that’s just the same as Monica being the world’s first “Personal Relationship Manager”. All bark and no bite. It also has a steep learning curve with, from what I can tell, no staging environment. This is unfortunate.
As a quick introduction, IMiS is designed to decouple the actual website templating or where things are allowed to go where, the components that fit into those places and slots, and the SQL database. This aligns with a component-based architecture. What this means is that there are really two levels to the overall website mapping or affectionately known as the “site map” and a “component system” which is where things get complicated.
## Website Design
At the highest level, a website is a set of pages traversable by hyperlinks. So what if you just have an entire database of pages, and just allow the user access to a few of them at a time? Let’s begin with pages.
So what’s this entire database of pages? That’s available under Page Builder>Manage Content. These content folders range from locked folder to writable folders, primarily Shared Content and Web. Notice that the content folders don’t show the files only folders, you will need to select a particular folder to show their child pages.
So you’ve double clicked on a page. Why does it look like that? There’s no HTML and I thought HTML made pages! What an astute observation, that’s because you’re using a Page Layout. Notice in the top right near the title where it says layout, that’s the particular one you’re using. Layouts are mostly predefined, so you won’t usually have to modify them directly, but they are just simple HTML snippets with numbers (1,2,…etc.) instead of content so they just replace the numbers with whatever you have placed in the content spots. You don’t need to know much about page layouts, just that they are used to define the spots where content items should go.
To those astute of us out there, notice that the webpage content doesn’t actually change that much from each page, but each “page” is so different from one another. How can this be? That’s because of a concept called Website Layouts. Website layouts contain “Content Types”and what’s called the “Main Content Placeholder”, which is just a special Content Type. Mull over that for a second. You can access Content Types under Maintenance>Content Types.
Note that Pages also contain Content Types because what Website Layouts do is allow you to reuse one Website Template for all of your webpages!
Here’s a quick recap of everything for website templating.
Here’s how it would look like on a normal webpage.
Now we have established that we have a large directory of Pages templaed by a Page Layout, which is nested inside a Website Template which is a specific instance of a Website Layout, both of which can contain Content items.
How do we choose which pages we want to display? We’ve created a large number of them, but just don’t know where to go from here. That’s where a sitemap comes in handy. A site map is a map of the entire site, and details which pages are traversable and which order they appear in the primary navigation. This just means that the website knows which pages should be considered part of the website and which pages shouldn’t.
I believe the navigation also utilises the site map (primary navigation bar Content item for example uses the site map to populate its entries).
You can see that Home is the landing page for the website, and where most traffic should end up. It therefore redirects to a page in the database of pages. If you’ve been following so far, continue reading. If not, please turn back and try to understand the preceeding chapter. I’ll briefly touch on the implementation details for the website design.
### Website Design
— Todo: touch on where the page goes and how it should be rendered
