Replacing original About

[Marek J]

Every Story page can be assigned it's permanent url. 
When you post a story page then you bring it up using its 'Edit this page' and
you will see on the bottom the Page Admin Box with a radio button for making a
permanent url (there are other radio buttons for deleting or making a story a
home page). What you do is type a permanent url for the story. 
Let's say you type 'about' and you site's name is
http://soapbox.radioPossibility.com/ then the page will be 
http://soapbox.radioPossibility.com/about

if you type 'agent/bio' you will create a page called 'bio' and a folder called
'agent'. By creating folders you can group pages so you can type
'agent/whatTheyaresaying' and you wil have the following pages. 
http://soapbox.radiopossibility.com/agent/bio
http://soapbox.radiopossibility.com/agent/whatTheyAreSaying

Also you can access the folder but the trick is to add a trailing slash at the
end '/' so the address to the folder is 
'http://soapbox.radiopossibility.com/agent/'
and NOT
'http://soapbox.radiopossibility.com/agent'
YOU MUST HAVE a Slash / at the end. Otherwise Manila will try to find a page
called 'agent' rather than a folder. (remember the 'about' is a page not a
folder)
When you set permanent urls for your pages useing Page Admin box (which is very
easy) then they will automatically be added to your XML site structure (found
on advanced page [host]/admin/sitePrefs/default$advanced#sitestructure)

Mine looks like this. 
<hierarchy>
  <category name="agent" pathname="agent">
    <story msgNum="129" name="Biography" pathname="bio"/>
    <story msgNum="130" name="What they are saying"
pathname="whatTheyAreSaying"/>
    <story msgNum="131" name="RESOURCES !" pathname="resources"/>
    <story msgNum="132" name="BOOKS YOU CAN BUY !" pathname="books"/>
    </category>
  <category name="conversations" pathname="conversations">
    <category name="weinberger" pathname="weinberger">
      <story msgNum="249" name="Loosely Joined Conversation with David
Weinberger Part One." pathname="LooselyJoinedOne"/>
      </category>
    </category>
</hierarchy>


Then you can go to your navigation
([host]/admin/sitePrefs/default$advanced#navigation) page and set up links like
this. 
<navigator>
  <item name="Discussions" pagename="/discuss"/>
  <item name="Referers" pagename="/stats/referers"/>
  <item name="AgentBio" pagename="/agent/bio"/>
  <item name="OthersSay" pagename="/agent/whatTheyAreSaying"/>
  </navigator>


Check these page for more info: 
http://manilanewbies.userland.com/howTos/sitestructurereference
and this page
http://manilanewbies.userland.com/howTos/sitestructure


Marek J
http://soapbox.radioPossibility.com/

--- DarwinPR <DarwinPR@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Can anyone recommend the best way to replace "About" page (which comes 
> "built in" when you first sign up to Weblogger)?
> 
> I have deleted a bunch of test discussion pages which I had originally 
> created with my new site the other day (the first message (#1) had been 
> hooked up to the default "About" page).
> 
> I've since created a new message (#10) and have been able to hook up a 
> similar page which I call "About Us" which has an entry in the 
> Navigation box (under Prefs --> Advanced) such as follows:
> 
> > <navigator>
> >    <item name="Home" pagename="/"/>
> >    <item name="About Us" pagename="/discuss/msgReader$10"/>
> >  </navigator>
> 
> When a person clicks on the "About Us" URL off the home page, the 
> resulting page is the message (#10) as I desire, but it also include 
> the HTML forms to fill in for actually posting a response to this 
> "discussion" message.
> 
> By contrast, the default "About" page would render an HTML page that 
> would who only the message text, but would then have a URL below it 
> that would require the user to click on a link ("Discuss") to actually 
> post a response to this text. This is what I'm having an incredibly 
> hard time finding. Is this page only available through some sort of 
> hidden plumbing or macro in Manila (and once it is unhooked from the 
> original message via someone deleting that message (#1), that's it, 
> there's no way of re-hooking the original plumbing)?
> 
> Thank you for any help / suggestions.
> 
> -Darwin
> 


=====
Marek J
---
http://soapbox.RadioPossibility.com/
Green Goose Theater Presents 
Monologs from Agent of Worst Practices.

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