Site Builders Guide

Welcome to the Open Berkeley Site Builders Guide.

This guide covers additional actions that can be accomplished by Site Builders on the Open Berkeley platform. 

For an overview of basic editing functionality, see the Editors Guide. For information about website cache and how to flush website caches, see Website Cache and Flush Cache

Login and Interface

If you have an editing role on an Open Berkeley website, you can log in to either your live or test environments.

If you log in to either the live or test environment and do not see a black admin bar across the top of the screen, that means that you do not have an editing role on the environment(s). Please contact a Site Builder on your site (since Site Builders can assign user roles), or contact web-platform@berkeley.edu.

Live Website

https://[yoursite].berkeley.edu

  • Log in via CAS https://[yoursite].berkeley.edu/cas.
  • Once you log in, you should see the administration menu bar at the top of the screen; you can use that menu bar to navigate.

Test Website

If you would like to experiment on your test website environment but do not know the URL, please contact Web Platform Services (web-platform@berkeley.edu). 

Recommended Site Building Workflow

  1. Determine the navigation of your site (see Planning Your Website).
  2. Your Open Berkeley site comes with some helpful starter content. Use this content to get an idea of how content can be added to your site, and reconfigure the content as necessary as you build your site.
    1. "Welcome" homepage widget (a Text widget).
    2. "Recent Stories" widget, which contains the most recent "News" items.
    3. Starter content in the main menu:
      1. "Sample Content Page," which is a Content Page.
      2. "Sample Landing Page," which is a Landing Page.
      3.  News" menu item, containing some starter "News" items.
      4. "FAQ" menu item, containing some starter "FAQ" items.
  3. Create top-level (parent) pages and add them to your main menu. Try to keep the number of main menu items to 6 or fewer, and make the menu item titles short and succinct.
    1. Top-level pages can be either Content Pages or Landing Pages; additional sub-pages (child pages) should be mostly Content Pages. Landing Pages can be used for top-level pages if you would like to use full-width Hero Widgets and Color Bands, or if you would like to add three or more widgets to the page.
  4. Create sub-pages (child pages) of the top-level menu items (sub-pages should be mostly Content Pages).
  5. Select layouts and create widgets on your home page and other pages as necessary to enhance your content.