Advanced Glossary

Each type of content, that the CMS can add to your page, has an associated content layout.
This holds all the HTML (and possibly JavaScript and CSS), required to make that piece of content look and behave as expected.
The CMS hides all of this complexity from users, only asking the user to specify the text / images that should appear in the content type.
This is how the CMS both simplifies the editing process and ensures that extra HTML / JS / CSS code will not be added to your page, unless it is needed.

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Navigation objects (nav objects for short) are instructions to the CMS to go off and do something (e.g. find all content of this type and include them here, using this content layout).
We define them in the CMS and then call them by referencing their ID number, either in content types (e.g. an ‘NUIG Code Only’ content type), or else in content- or page-layouts.

They are so-called because they are the mechanism by which the site's navigation is built - e.g. a nav object lists all sections from your homepage down and displays them as links in your side navigation bar.  Another nav object creates your site's breadcrumb trail on every page.

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The site design is stored in a page layout (aka template).  Page layouts store the HTML code, required to build a page that looks that way.
You can have multiple page layouts defined in the CMS.   For example, NUI Galway's site designs from 2011, 2015, and 2022 are all stored as page layouts on the CMS.

NUI Galway really has one page template but we've created a number of page layouts to enable slight variations of it for:

• Irish language pages
• College, School, Sub-site and Discipline pages (which are exactly the same as normal pages but with differing start points for their side menus)
• Pages that include content that was generated by IRIS (Institutional Research Information System), which requires some things that our normal pages don't need.

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