Page User Item

Overview

The Page User Item adds a page to the site. You may add text and/or HTML to the page via the Main Content property. You may add other User Items to the page via the User Items list.

Title Section Properties

Title

The Title property sets the title of the page.

Enabled

The Enabled checkbox controls whether or not the User Item is processed when GedSite is making the site. If Enabled is checked, the page will be created. If Enabled is unchecked, the Page User Item is ignored.

Filename

The Filename property determines the filename of the HTML page. Specify a filename only, i.e., do not include a filepath and do not include a filetype.

PageSet

The PageSet property determines the PageSet used for the page. The default is User Page.

Menu

The Menu property determines whether or not a link to the page is added to one or more of the site's menus. The Menu property defaults to "none". Change it to one of the other choices to make the item appear in a menu.

The Menu property is ignored when the page is not at the top-level (left-most) of User Items.

Content Section Properties

Main Content

The Main Content property adds text content to the page. This content is added before any User Items that are nested on the page. Use the Edit > Open Editor... command (F7) to open an editor window that is suitable for editing multi-line text values.

Error Pages

You may use a Page User Item to create an error page. Error pages are used by some web servers to respond to invalid requests.

GedSite treats any page whose filename matches the pattern "40n.shtml" as an error page. The file for an error page will be stored at the top-level of the Output (-o) folder. If that folder is the top-folder for a domain, and the web server uses Apache, the web server will use the page to respond to the error indicated by the number in the filename.

The most common error is 404, "Not Found". If you set the Filename property to "404.shtml", the filename passes the filter described above and Apache will use the page to respond to a request for a page that is not found.

Limitations

There are several limitations associated with testing and deploying error pages. For GedSite users who publish to the main folder for their own domain, and whose web hosting service uses Apache, most of the limitations below will not be an issue or will not apply. In other cases, it may not be practical to use GedSite to create error pages.

• When testing a site locally, an error page will not appear when you attempt to open a non-existant page. When reviewing pages locally, your web browser opens the web page files and does not use a web server. As mentioned above, GedSite error pages are designed to be compatible with the Apache web server, and that web server is not part of the process of reviewing local pages.
• You may open an error page by locating the file in Windows Explorer and double-clicking it to open it. If you do that, you will discover that the page is unstyled, i.e., your site's colors, backgrounds, etc., will be missing. The menus will look like lists, and everything will use default fonts. Also, the links will not work.

  All that is normal.

  When the page is published, and when it resides at the top-level of a domain as described above, the styles will be applied and the links will work. The missing styles and the broken links only occur when viewing the page locally, and are the result of not using a web server to serve the page.

• If your GedSite-produced pages are not at the top-level of your domain, GedSite-created error pages will not work.

  For example, if your domain was "example.com", and you put your GedSite-produced pages in a subfolder named "tree", the URL for your GedSite produced pages is www.example.com/tree. The URL for a "404.shtml" page would be www.example.com/tree/404.shtml. Without a custom configuration, Apache will not use that URL for error pages. Also, if configured to use that URL, some HTML techniques that GedSite uses in the error page will not work properly.