How to add a new website or site section to content.vic.gov.au (adding a term to the sites vocabulary)

This guide covers how to add a new website or site section to the Single Digital Presence (SDP) content management system (CMS). Only users with site admin permission can perform this task.

Introduction

The sites vocabulary contains a lot of details about websites and site sections.

Sites are standalone websites with their own URL, e.g. multicultural.vic.gov.au.

Site sections are a way of organising and managing a group of content, such as content about a topic (e.g. women’s equality) or an agency.

The creation and naming of site sections has implications for:

• side navigation (menus)

• permissions

• analytics.

Examples of site sections in the content.vic.gov.au CMS:

• DPC (corporate) is a site section of the primary site vic.gov.au

• Buyers guide is a site section of the primary site buyingfor.vic.gov.au

Steps for creating a site section

In the CMS, go to Structure > Taxonomy > Sites and click List terms.

2. Click Add term.

3. Complete the mandatory fields.

• Name: not displayed on the front end so can include acronyms

• Domains:

  • for site sections put vic.gov.au

  • for sites, see the instructions below

• Main menu: leave the box ticked

• Footer: uncheck the box (it’s on vic.gov.au so it uses the universal footer menu)

• Acknowledgement of Country: already pre-filled with our standard statement

4. Click Save.

5. Drag the new term into position on the site taxonomy screen.

The site taxonomy screen is manually ordered to help site admins understand which section belongs to which department. We drag new site sections into alphabetical order under the departmental owner’s ‘corporate’ folder and click Save.

Additional fields in the site vocabulary for creation of a standalone website (semi-independent)

Often you’ll create the site taxonomy before the developers start their work and then come back to add more detail as it becomes available, such as:

• logo and image files

• site theme values

• social media links

• site feature flag values (for occasional custom things e.g. no Vic logo on header and footer for some sites).

Slogan: Leave blank, this isn’t being used

Domains field - copy from the vic.gov.au site taxonomy and edit for your new URL, noting some URLs have hyphens. This includes develop, master and other environment used for build and testing. Don’t include https:// or www.

Menus: Sites (semis in content.vic.gov.au) have a main menu and a footer menu, so both checkboxes are left ticked.

Rename the newly created menus: OOTB they get called ‘Main menu - site name’. To keep our menus screen helpful for us site admins, we should edit the menu title so tells us where the menu belongs - i.e. put the parent domain first, section name next and then retain header/footer. For clarity for our CMS users, I’ll often replace ‘main’ with ‘side’ when it’s a section (e.g. buyingfor.vic.gov.au - Buyers guide - Side menu). This also pushes the renamed menu to display in the relevant place on the screen.

After the menus are created, it’s good (but not essential) to build out the footer menu for the client so it meets our standards (to include Privacy, Disclaimer, Copyright, Freedom of information, Accessibility, Sitemap). It tends to be one of the things they forget about.

The sitemap gets automatically generated after go live based on the top 2 levels of the main (top) navigation. Rather than linking to a node as the other menu items do, you add a menu item, type in the site’s URL and add /sitemap on the end. (If you ever want a less visually useful but accurate/complete list of all pages on the site for an audit, just type .xml on the end of that. For a big site, you may need to then add '?page=1'.)

Homepage: create a page that will be used for the site’s home page and then add a link in the site taxonomy. This sets it to display when a user visits the root URL. You can add this later but it must be done before the site goes live.

Acknowledgement of Country

• If you're creating the taxonomy for a site section, leave this field blank.

• If you're creating the taxonomy for a new site, add the following: 'The Victorian Government acknowledges Aboriginal Traditional Owners of Country throughout Victoria and pays respect to their cultures and Elders past and present.'

Prominence of acknowledgement of country: Leave this field blank. This is a custom feature only used on the First Peoples State Relations website that displays the statement directly below the header.

Site alerts and notifications: Leave this field blank.

Edit our common pages to tag the new site

Tag the new site on our common pages: all core footer pages and the ‘Testing page for analytics’. The footer pages are Privacy, Disclaimer, Copyright, Freedom of information and Accessibility.