As I wrote in my last post:

I’d like to pretend I’m setting up an “editor” account for the client and feel out how they would experience adding and manipulating content.

Adding a new user

So that’s what I’m going to do. In the top right corner of the admin screen you’ll see a “users” tab.

If we click that we’ll get a list of users and a nifty “New User” button on the right.

You can also see the FrogCMS uses Gravatars for their avatar system. This is pretty cool. If you don’t know already Gravatar.com allows you associate an avatar with your email address. So any time you enter your email address on a site (to either register, or post a comment like on this blog) it’s possible for that site to use your gravatar.

Now I can register a new user as an “editor”.

When I log in as this new user I can see only the “Pages” and “Files” tabs are available to me.

Adding content as an editor

The first thing I was going to try to do was edit the content on the homepage. Apparently I can’t edit this page as an editor (it’s not a link). I might be missing something but I’m not sure the reasoning for this.

I’ll go ahead and edit the “Lessons” page instead.

Now I’m going to imagine myself as a client. I see I can add some text to my page here but I want to add an image. How do I do that? Well unfortunately there’s no simple way to add an image that’s built right into FrogCMS. There are some image gallery plug-ins linked to from the FrogCMS contributed plugins page but half the links are down and none of them seem to be what I’m looking for. The only option seems to be to upload the image through the FrogCMS file manager and then link to that image using either HTML, Markdown or Textile. If you’re not familiar with the latter two they are basically a different form of mark-up that’s suppose to be more writer friendly than pure HTML. These tags would be converted to HTML when the page is saved.

Adding an image to a page

So let’s run through this with Markdown. I imagine I would instruct my client how to do this.

1. Click the “files” tab and then “Upload file”.

   

2. Choose the image. I chose this photo of a gong being beaten.

   

3. Add the appropriate markdown for displaying an image. The markdown site shows the syntax as this:

   ![alt text](/path/to/img.jpg "Title")

   So I’ll put in this (title is optional):

   ![Bangin the gong](public/GongStrike.jpg)

   Note: Both the markdown and textile options have a little toolbar that will help you out. That’s nice. There is even an image button but it seems to want to use absolute URLs.

   

Yep, that worked:

Well, I think I get the gist of it. As with anything, there is definitely more to it but I think I’m done my experimenting. In the next part I’ll do a quick write-up about my overall feelings and whether or not I think I would use FrogCMS.

Next: Playing with FrogCMS (Part 7: My Conclusion)