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Creating Custom Pages
From KickApps Documentation
Overview
Depending on which apps you have enabled for your KickApps-powered site, it comes with several pre-configured pages that you can customize to achieve the look and feel that meets your needs. For instance the Social Networking application comes with a “profile page,” “myHome” page and a “private message in-box” for each member of your site. The Video Sharing application has a “video upload page,” a “play page” and an “edit page” where your site’s members can upload, watch and interact with each others’ videos.
With the Custom Pages application you can create an unlimited number of individual pages for your site, populated with whatever content you choose (text, images, flash widgets, javascript code, etc.). Each custom page retains your site’s global styling and navigation (including your header, background and footer), and the page’s contents are indexed by your site’s global search engine which makes all of your site’s content findable by your users.
Enabling and Disabling the Custom Pages Application
For older sites created before November 1, 2010, Custom Pages is an optional application that can be enabled or disabled in Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Add/Remove Apps page. For newer sites created after November 1, 2010, Custom Pages is enabled by default and cannot be disabled.
Note: If you disable this application after creating some custom pages for your site, all of those custom pages will become unavailable on your site and people who try to view those pages will see a message that the page has been remove. Re-enabling the Custom Pages application will make those pages viewable again.
Configuring the Custom Pages Application
When the Custom Pages application is enabled, you can specify a custom default icon to represent your custom pages throughout your site (for instance, on search results pages). Note: You can also create a unique thumbnail image to represent individual custom pages on your site. More on that, below.
The Custom Pages application has a few default text strings that you can modify in the Affiliate Center in the Configure > Language section
Creating Custom Pages
Only the site "Webmaster" and members with the "Admin" role can create Custom Pages for your site. To create a new custom page, click the “Create a Custom Page” link on the Affiliate Center home page.
The interface for creating a custom page has three main tabs.
The “Page Content” tab is where you specify the title for the page, the URL of the page and the body content for the page.
- For creating and editing body content, use the TinyMCE editing buttons to perform various types of edits, just as you might using a Microsoft Office Suite application like Microsoft Word. It's a good idea to hover over each of these buttons to familiarize yourself with what each of these do. Be sure to expand the toolset to show all buttons by clicking "More Tools" or "Less Tools".
- To create webpages using the editor, don't miss the "Table" button, which is located at the far left, in the 3rd row in the expanded view. This will allow you to create tables just as you would in MS Word, and helps you create a layout. Note also that you can set padding by adding pixels so that your table cells have space in between them.
- When you insert images, don't miss the "Appearance" tab which allows you to wrap text around images and set images to appear at the right, or the left, etc.
- Editor vs. HTML mode. Using the editor you can insert images, adjust the layout and stylize the body content of the page with the built-in features, but you can also insert any HTML code by clicking the "HTML" icon in the editor. Note: You can only insert a Flash widget or JavaScript code into a custom page while the rich text editor is in HTML mode. Click here to learn more about the specifications of the open source TinyMCE rich text editor, which we have integrated into the Custom Pages application.
Here's a screencast that shows how to insert tables using TinyMCE
The “<head /> Content” tab is where you populate certain parts of the <head/> section of each custom page you create. Enter a Meta Description and Meta Keywords in order to improve your ranking in external search engines like Google and Bing. The “Head Content” field can be populated with CSS, JavaScript or any other custom code that you want to render in the <head/> section of your custom page.
The “Page Settings” tab is where you define who can see the custom page, what type of interaction you want to enable for the page (Comments? Ratings? Favoriting?), and some other meta data which describes the page.
Clicking “Save Page” at the bottom of the form will add your new page to your site, and it will be immediately available at the URL that you specified when creating the page. You can create custom pages without publishing them to your site by checking the box to “Place this page in your site’s pending queue.” This will (obviously) place this page in your site’s pending queue, where you can review it and publish it later.
This page will also be indexed by your site-wide search engine and will appear in search results when users submit a keyword that is contained in either the title or the body of the custom page. It may take a few minutes for the indexing process to complete.
Finding Custom Pages
Each custom page that gets added to your site is immediately indexed by your site-wide search engine and is made available on the site within a few minutes after it is created. When you enable the Custom Pages application for your KickApps-powered site, a “Pages” checkbox is added to the Advanced Search form on your site, so that users can perform keyword searches against only your site’s custom pages. Click here for more information on the KickApps Search application.
Viewing and Interacting With Custom Pages
Each custom page in your site has a dedicated URL that you specify when you create the page. At minimum, each page contains a Title and “Body Content” section. Depending on which options you chose while creating the page, there might be additional “interaction components” on the custom page which allow members to add comments, ratings, tags, add the page to their favorites, share it with their friends, etc.
Editing Custom Pages
To edit a custom page, simply click the “edit page” link near the top of page. This will open the create/edit page form where you can edit all of the page’s data, including the URL. Note if you change the URL of your custom page, it will no longer be available at the old URL.
Managing Custom Pages
You can view and manage all of your custom pages in the Affiliate Center in the Manage > Media section.
Clicking the “details” link next to any custom page will allow you to view and edit the meta data associated with the page, including the comments, ratings and some other statistics about the page. Click here for more information on the KickApps RSS Feed API
Syndicating Custom Pages
Your custom pages can be syndicated in the Affiliate Center’s App Studio > Feed Builder section. To create an RSS feed of your custom pages, click the “create” button on the Feed Builder main page, then select “Custom Pages” as your “Media Type.” From there you can sort and filter the results using the standard sorting and filtering options available in the Feed Builder tool (sort by Most Recent, Most Viewed, Most Comments, etc). Note: you don’t have to use the Feed Builder tool to create RSS feeds containing your custom pages. You can also manually construct an RSS feed URL containing the “mediaType=pages” parameter. Click here for more information on the KickApps RSS Feed API
Reporting on Custom Pages
Usage of your custom pages is tracked along with the rest of your site’s content in the Reporting section of the Affiliate Center. You can see how many pages were created, and how many times your custom pages were viewed in aggregate, for any date range. Click here for more information on KickApps Reporting.
Custom Pages in Your Site’s Activity Feeds
Your KickApps-powered site comes with a number of “activity feeds” that are constantly updated as members interact with each other and with the content of your site. There is a “community activity feed” on your site’s login page which contains a running feed of all member activity across your site. There is a “member activity feed” on the profile page for each of your site’s members which contains a running feed of each particular member’s activities. There is a “my friends and my news” feed on your members’ myHome page which contains a feed of their friends’ activities and the also the activities of the people they are following. Lastly, there is a “group activity feed” on each group page which contains a feed of activities that have happened inside that particular group. Each time a custom page is interacted with (rated, commented on, added to someone’s favorites, etc), the appropriate activity feeds are automatically updated with a link to the member who performed the action, as well as a link to the page that was acted on. Click here to learn more about the KickApps RSS API. Below is an illustration of a member activity feed on someone’s profile page:
Custom Pages on Profile Pages
There is a section on each member’s profile page where links to their favorite pages on your site are listed. When a member of your site adds a particular page to their “Favorites,” this section of their profile page is automatically updated with a link to the page.
Now that you know everything there is to know about building custom pages, you may decide you want to feature one of them as a tab on your site's primary navigation. Here's a tutorial that shows you how to do it. Just create a custom page, copy the URL, and follow the tutorial's direction to create a new tab and link it to that URL.
