TIP 10: Keep your CMS organized

TIP 10: Keep your CMS organized
Categories: Site Customization
Keeping your HTML markup clean and organized is important for keeping edits simple, tracking problems and even improving SEO a bit. You can use the folder system to neatly file pages and elements within pages.

How its done
When you create new pages take a moment to first create a new descriptive folder in either outer pages or user pages. You might call it “Poker Articles” or “Hold’em Strategy.” This will not affect the way you link to pages, but will make it much easier for you to find pages for editing, especially if your adding a lot of content.

Next use the @@include”page name”@@ token to seperate messy chunks of code into individual files. This way, your can clearly see what your bigger pages include, and you can edit any individual chunk of code without worrying about inadvertently breaking the rest.

Here is Raketracker’s Site Template page for example:

@@inc_css@@
@@inc_js@@
@@include:”Scripts”@@

@@include:”Image Preload”@@

@@end_body_include@@

@@include:”javascripts”@@

Without the includes, my Site Template page would be many times as long, and much harder to read. The way it is now, I can very quickly and easily see what items are in the left bar, right bar or center. If i need to edit the FAQs in the sidebar, I can just go to the Nav Faqs file I created in the Navigation folder and not have to search through many pages of code for the spot I need to make changes.

This way I save time, and keep my code clean and organized. Staying disciplined and organized when writing code will make it MUCH easier to learn HTML/CSS and to see what’s going on in your pages.