In Site Designer, select Manage websites. From the toolbar, choose New > Website to create a new iMIS site, choose Edit to change an existing site, or choose Organize > Delete to delete a site. Define the site's Properties, Site Look and Feel, Navigation Areas, and Access Settings.
When specifying the URL(s) pointing to the IIS website root, you must use the URLs communicated to you by the person who installed WCM on your organization's web servers. This list of URLs defines the specific servers that should host this site.
After saving the site definition, the site is in a Working state. Ensure that the site is selected, then from the toolbar choose Publish to promote the changes to all associated servers that host this site. When presented with publishing options, you must select the Publish children as well checkbox to ensure that the site's corresponding sitemap and content folder are published too. Both the sitemap and the content folder have the same name as the site.
■ If the corresponding sitemap and content folder are empty, you must define at least one navigation item in the site's sitemap and a corresponding content record in the site's content folder before you can preview the site with a web browser, because at this point the site is effectively empty. You must also designate at least one of these initial navigation items as the default web page and Home link for this site, by selecting the This navigation item is the Home link for the sitemap checkbox in the Options section of the navigation item's definition.
Note: If you attempt to preview the site before creating a navigation item (and corresponding content record) to be the default web page for the site, IIS will display an error message because the master page is expecting a default web page but none exists yet.
To copy theme files to other server hosts
If your site is being hosted by multiple servers (you specified more than one URL in the URL(s) pointing to the IIS website root field), you must manually copy these template files to the other servers that are hosting the site.
Copy the following files from their location relative to the root of the physical path associated with the iMIS application on the iMIS application server to which you were connected (through the staff view of iMIS) when you created the new site. On all the other WCM web servers, place these copied files in the same location relative to the root of the physical path of the IIS applications and IIS web sites that that host the iMIS site on each server:
■ ~\Templates\Masterpages\[websiteName].master
■ ~\[websiteName]\Default.aspx
■ ~\App_Themes\[websiteName] (the entire folder)
Troubleshooting
■ You must be a member of at least one content authority group (CAG).
■ On every web server that you plan to use for hosting iMIS sites, you must have performed all the steps described in Installing WCM on web servers, and you must know the URL that points to the IIS application or IIS web site that you created during that procedure for hosting your iMIS sites.
■ If you plan to host an iMIS site on multiple servers, you must have administrative access to the file systems on each server.
■ Modifications to your master pages may be required if iParts appear to overflow the boundaries of iPart zones. In general, this requires modifying the template's master page and accompanying CSS files to make the Home page and interior page layouts larger than their default size.
Note: Membership in the SysAdmin security role effectively grants the full set of Document System permissions and the full set of CAG permissions (you are effectively a member of a MasterAdmin CAG too). However, to participate in web content authoring workflow, even members of the SysAdmin role must be an explicitly-listed member of at least one CAG.
Where to go from here?
When you have created a brand new iMIS site, the system automatically creates a corresponding sitemap and a content folder that is already configured so that its children content records are included in searches that are performed on the site. The content folder is also configured by default to publish its children content records to all publishing servers defined in the system, which means that the publishing service for every IIS application and IIS web site that hosts iMIS sites will render .aspx files for every published content record in the folder and place them in the Local Publish Path as specified in each publishing server's definition.
This default configuration of the site's corresponding content folder makes it easy to build the site content by creating content records only in that particular content folder, and then creating corresponding navigation items for each of those content records.
While this approach is simple, it doesn't take advantage of the flexibility and sophistication that WCM content folders and publishing servers can provide. Here are some ideas for creating more sophisticated web content authoring and publishing configurations:
■ You can use any combination of content folders and their content records to populate a site. This enables you to reuse a single content record in multiple sites. To do this, you must make the following changes to every content folder that you want to use for a particular site's content. (See Defining content folders.)
□ Specify the site in the Include content in Searches for these additional Sites field to ensure that searches performed on the site will find the content records in the content folder.
□ Ensure that the Publish on Servers field resolves to a set of publishing servers that will publish the content records in the content folder to all of the IIS applications and IIS web sites that host the iMIS site.
■ Enable workflow for content authoring on one or more of the content folders that you use for the site's content to create a structured web content authoring environment. See Enabling workflow for content authoring.
Modifying the site navigation areas
Another aspect of a site's look and feel is the configuration of the navigation areas that are supported by the site's master page. In the Navigation Areas section of a site's definition, you can choose exactly which of the supported navigation areas are made available for use in the site's navigation items. You can also change the behavior of the available navigation areas by modifying their definition (but this affects all sites that use those navigation areas so care must be taken).
Additionally, you can define entirely new navigation areas and make them available for use in the site's navigation items if you also add supporting code for them in the site's master page. See Defining navigation areas and breadcrumb areas.
The Auxiliary navigation area has two other additional controls following it, which visually appear to be part of the Auxiliary navigation area but are actually independent. If you modify the master page to relocate the Auxiliary navigation area, the following two controls will remain in their original location in the page layout. (See Integrating hand-built master pages and themes with WCM.)
■ Authentication control - this is where the Log On or Log Off link appears.
■ Surf-to-Edit control - this is where the icon that toggles Surf-To-Edit mode appears for users who are logged on to the site and have the required permissions to use Surf-to-Edit.