Creation of a web page describing your latest and greatest research or a new exhibit that you've curated often takes more than one page. There are two ways of creating multi-page documents in the AMNH CMS: the multi-folder approach and the linked approach. (Ok, there are probably more ways to go about this, but these are the two methods which integrate well with the CMS and, best of all, are simple)

The Multi-folder Approach

You already know by now (I hope) that a file called index_html or index.html, when placed in a folder, will automatically be displayed when that folder is opened: this is called the default document. You also know that a folder which is published (by setting its state to published) appears in the Navigation box on the left. If you put these two bits of information together, you can see how you can create a document which has a clean separation of pages (one document, index_html, per folder) and has a ready-made page index.

You can see this type of document by looking at Article 1. Look in the navigation box on the lefthand side of the screen: there is a link there for Article 1 and a link for all of the subsequent sections of the article. Clean, ready-made navigation.

Each of the article sections is in its own folder below the article1 folder: this is a nice way to organize your files (images, PDF documents, movies, etc.) for each section. Within each folder there is an index_html document which is automatically displayed by the CMS when the viewer clicks on the link for that section.

There is one drawback to this method: if your article is very long, or if it appears far below the top level of your department's site, the Navigation box will start to get very long, possibly moving the navigation for your article below the text of your document. It's not a huge failing, but it is something to pay attention to when you are creating your documents.

Creating a multi-folder document:

• Create a folder for the top-level of your article - when you create the folder, put something meaningful in the Title box of the folder creation form.
• Create a default document (index_html should be the short name in the document creation form) in this folder. You could use this document as the introduction of the article, or you could use it to hold the abstract.
• For each subsection of your article, create a new folder within the parent article folder and give it a Title appropriate for the section title (it's not really important what the short name is, as long as it is unique).
• Create an index_html document in each of these folders to hold your text. Put the images and other supporting files in each folder.
• Change the state of each folder to Public.

The Linked Approach

This approach is the more "traditional" approach which is used in a lot of plain HTML sites: it requires putting a line of HTML where you want the "page index" to appear — this line of HTML is simply a list of links to each page. All of the documents, or pages, are located in the same folder.

Creating a linked, multi-page document:

• Create a folder for your documents and make it Public (so it appears in the Navigation box).
• Create a default document, index_html, which will be visible when the folder is viewed.
• Create the other documents and name them appropriately (e.g. page2.html, page3.html). Place these documents in the same folder as your index_html file.
• Create the page-to-page navigation by putting the following HTML at the bottom of each document:

     "Page 1":index_html | "Page 2":page2.html | "Page 3":page3.html
  

• For very long documents, you might want to put this navigation line at the top and at the bottom of your document.