How Plinkit Stores and Displays Items

As we saw in the previous section, your Plinkit site contains many items of different content types. These various items stored in folders and are the building blocks that make up the Web page that is displayed in the main area of your Plinkit site. To help you navigate through your Plinkit site and perform editing and maintenance tasks, it is important to understand how Plinkit stores and displays these various items.

The Contents Tab

Up until now, we have primarily used the navigation portlet and the tabs across the top of the Plinkit page to navigate to the pages and items we needed to view or edit. Another way to navigate through a Plinkit site is to use the contents tab.

The contents tab is essential for Editors because it allows them to see all of the content items in their sites. As we will see in the next section, the navigation portlet does not display every item in a Plinkit site.

In the screen shot below, we have clicked the News & Events tab and then clicked the contents tab. This allows us to see, in the main content area, a tabular listing of every content item stored in the News & Events folder.

You can use the contents tab to navigate through your site content in much the same way that you can use Windows Explorer or Macintosh Finder to navigate through the file structure on your computer. If we click the News folder shown in the example above, the contents tab refreshes and displays a listing of the content in the News folder, as shown below.

The breadcrumb trail that appears above the contents tab provides a visual indicator of where we are in the Plinkit storage architecture. We can click the Up one level to return move one link to the left in this navigation trail. If we click an item that is not a folder, that item is displayed in the view tab.

For more details about the information displayed on the contents tab and tasks you can perform from the contents tab, see The Contents Tab.

The Navigation Portlet

Unlike the contents tab, the navigation portlet does not list every content item that exists within a Plinkit site. We can use the same example to demonstrate this.

In the contents tab in the screen shot below, we see that this News & Events folder contains a page called News & Events, three folders (Library Calendar, News, and Events), and two images (Newspaper Icon and calendar), and that all of these items are in the “published” state, which suggests that they should be visible to all users. If we look at the navigation portlet, however, we see that only one of these items—the Library Calendar—is shown under the News & Events folder there.

The items that appear in the contents tab but not in the navigation portlet have been assigned a special property called Exclude from navigation. This property is assigned on the properties tab. If we click Newspaper Icon in the page shown above and then select the properties tab, we see that the Exclude from navigation option has been selected. Again, the breadcrumb at the top helps us to know which item we are viewing the properties for.

The Exclude from navigation property is an important setting for items such as images that you want to incorporate into other pages on your site but do not want users to navigate to and view in a standalone manner.

Folder Display Options

We can also use the contents tab to illustrate how Plinkit displays folders. For this example, we’ll click About Us in the navigation portlet and then select the contents tab to view all of the content items stored in our About Us folder.

Now let’s take a look at what is displayed when the About Us folder is opened. We can do this by clicking the About Us link in the navigation portlet, the About Us tab, or the view tab.

We have just seen, in the contents tab, a list of the actual storage contents of the About Us folder, and we might expect a similar list to be displayed when we view the About Us folder. Instead, we see the Who We Are page.

This example helps us to realize, again, that the navigation portlet is not a literal representation of our site’s storage structure.  Clicking the a folder link in the navigation portlet does not necessarily open a folder contents list, as it does in the contents tab or in file directories like Windows Explorer or Macintosh Finder.

In this case, the display setting for the About Us folder has been set so that a specific page that is contained within the folder is displayed when the folder is clicked. You can change this display setting so that a summary of the folder’s contents is displayed (that is, in fact, the default setting for new folders), but your patrons might find an actual content page more useful and satisfying.

To change the default display setting for a folder, click the display menu on the green bar and make a selection from the drop-down menu. For more detailed instructions, including a description of the available options, see Changing the Default Display Setting for a Folder.