The Layout Manager controls the website's structure. It has two main tasks.

• Page Control: enables the designer to add, delete, move and rename secure pages, sections and other components in the website.
• Layout Control: enables the designer to control Navigation, and other Layout Elements.

In understanding how the Layout Manager works it is important to see how the Layout Elements interact with the pages on the website.

At its most simple a website is a series of 'pages'. These pages are linked together and are ordered in to a hierarchy.

The Page Control allows you to add a page from the Component Bank to the Web Site. When you add a page to the site there is an associated position in the site. This particular page is either above or below another page. There can be complex, branching relationships in a tree of positions, but every page has a position associated with it.

 

 

 

 

 

The act of moving the 'page' from the Component bank into the 'Web Site' places the page in relation to all the other pages. The System is aware of the relationship between the pages of the site, and this 'awareness' is made available to the website designer as Navigation.

The Layout Control manages the Layout Elements that 'surround' the webpages in the website. Each webpage - in fact, each Component - has Layout Elements associated with it. They are positioned above, below, to the left and to the right of the page, and there is no limit to how many Layout Elements there may be for any particular page. The Behavior Editor for each page controls whether or not a Layout Element is used on a section-by-section, or page-by-page basis.

Layout Elements have a relationship with each other depending on their order or sequence. Layout Elements are applied to the website in their order in the Layout Manager. Layout Elements have a number of attributes they can posess, which are managed using the Layout Edit control. Layout Elements can be:

• Empty
• Contain Text
• Contain an Image
• Contain Navigation