The Datasite is truly both easy to use and powerful, and does not limit your design freedom or force you to learn a new way of creating websites. The basic concept is simple - in your HTML editor, create a page template for the underlying layout of a page, place Datasite tags where you want to have content, copy the HTML code into the Datasite page template, customize the interface as you would like it, then create pages using that template. Here's a more in-depth description.

Page Template Setup

In your HTML editor, you design a single template for each style of page you are creating and add simple text Datasite tags (custom HTML comment tags) directly into your page, either in design or code view. If you insert it in design view, you can apply whatever formatting you would like to the tag just as if it were the text you will insert on each page, including font attributes, alignment, etc. For example, if you inserted a tag and formatted it like this:
<!—field:title -->
all text inserted at that tag would be bold, italic and teal by default.

Once you have set up the page, simply copy the HTML code and paste it into a page template form in the Setup module – the Datasite will automagically find the tags you inserted and create a custom page editing form, including text fields, textareas, checkboxes, and drop-down selectors of images or files. You can then customize this form, including changing the order of the fields and their names and adding content to checkboxes--You can set up the form such that clicking on a checkbox inserts different text, images, or layout code where you placed the corresponding tag in the page template.

Creating a Page

To create a page, you click on the + button located in the Page Edit module and add your page URL name (such as "MyPage") and the page description, which are both displayed in the page list, and the link name – the text that is inserted in the site wherever you place a page link tag. Select the page template you want the page assigned to, click Add, and you’re ready to add content to your new page.

Page editing is a breeze. Our built-in HTML editor for textareas (for Windows/Internet Explorer) makes entering and formatting text and images as simple as using a word processor.

Placing page links, images, file links, or any Datasite forms or applications is as simple as selecting the object's name from a drop-down menu, copying the tag that's generated (such as <!-- form:Signup -->), and pasting the tag wherever you want the object to go.

Scratching the Surface

This is only the beginning, the basic foundation of creating a website within the Datasite with no bells and whistles. On this level, it is a powerful, easy to use content management system. You can also add very flexible forms, extremely sophisticated authentication/password protection, a growing number of plugins such as a shopping cart system or interactive community features, but the most powerful feature of the Datasite is what we call the Arrays Module.

With the Arrays Module, you can create very flexible data arrays which can be used and displayed in unlimited ways – navigation bars, catalogs, photo albums, paginated lists, etc. — basically, any layout of information and/or formatting that repeats the same format with different content. Each Array includes unlimited layouts, or views, so that you can display data from the same Array a thousand different ways, and a Single View layout for displaying an expanded view of an individual Array Element on it's own page. It also includes a powerful, very fast search engine – you could use it to create a Yahoo-style directory with hundreds of thousands of entries. There’s a lot more to it, which you can read about on our site’s Datasite description and in the Help system which is an example of an Arrays Module application.

For more information, and to access our Datasite demo, you'll need to sign up as a guest member of our Affiliate Site. Of course, your information is kept completely confidential and will not be distributed in any way. If you should decide that you are not interested in our Affiliate Developer Program, let us know and we will promptly remove your membership along with any information you have entered.