CityDesk Primer
This wiki-site introduces the content management system (CMS) tool CityDesk and includes worked examples of how to use CityDesk to manage your website and online content. Although intended to be a companion site to the course Online Documentation for Technical Writers, the information contained in this site should help anyone starting out with CityDesk.
Here are the steps we will go through to prepare our CityDesk site.
What is CityDesk
CityDesk is an affordable, full powered CMS that you can run on your own computer. The folks at Fog Creek Software, the creator's of CityDesk, make the following claims:
With CityDesk, people who don't know anything about HTML or web servers can easily add, edit, and remove articles from a web site, using a program that is as easy as a word processor. CityDesk will automatically apply standard formatting, according to templates you provide, to those articles. Then it copies them to your web server automatically. Each article can include pictures, sounds, and other media elements.
While all this is true, once you have your site configured, configuring the CityDesk templates and style sheets, including the use of CityScript does require some HTML knowledge, CSS knowledge, scripting experience, and a little design experience. That's where this site comes in. Here we will walk you through creating a template including working with CityScript, CSS, and some HTML basics.
Let's look at CityDesk in more detail.
CityDesk is developed by Fog Creek Software (www.fogcreek.com). A Starter Edition of CityDesk can be downloaded from their site at http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/Starter.html. This edition allows you to create a site up to 50 files in size (this includes images). The full featured version of CityDesk can be purchased online at https://shop.fogcreek.com/?sCategory=CityDesk and will cost about $300. You will want the Professional Edition as this permits you to create your own site (as many as you want).
What is a Content Management System
A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a Web site. Typically, a CMS consists of two elements: the content management application (CMA) and the content delivery application (CDA).
The CMA element allows the content manager or author, who may not know HyperText Markup Language (HTML), manage the creation, modification, and removal of content from a Web site without needing the expertise of a Webmaster. Often this element supports a range of account privileges providing access to the appropriate capabilities required.
The CDA element uses and compiles that information to update the Web site. Content is published using a set of templates. This provides format controls to ensure that content adheres to both the aesthetic and functional requirements of the site.
Together, these two elements allow us to create and control the content of our site independently from the layout and formating of that content.
