Create pages

With Sitefinity CMS, content authors can create pages in a simplified and seamless manner. When creating a new page, you only need to provide the essential properties of a page. At any point in time, you can further configure the page behavior by defining additional page settings. Once you create your pages, you can easily reorder and manage them from the list of pages screen. Searching for a specific page is made easy with advanced filtering and sorting options.

To create a Sitefinity CMS page, perform the following:

1. On the main menu, choose Pages.
   The pages management screen opens.
2. When you are using multiple languages, click on (Filter pages) located next to the Create a page button. From the Filter pages sidebar, select the language in which you want to create the page from the dropdown Languages.
3. Click on the Create a page button.

   Optionally, you can create a page as a child of another page by selecting the checkbox of the parent page and clicking Create a page.

4. On the next screen provide the following details:
   1. Type page name – enter the desired name of your page. The page name is used to identify your page in the Sitefinity CMS backend. It is displayed in the list of pages, different page selectors, navigation widgets and so on.
   2. URL – This is the URL name of your page. As you type the page name, URL is automatically populated. Sitefinity uses this URL to dynamically build the full URL of the page, so it can be accessed by website visitors.
      If you need to change the auto generated URL name, click on the edit icon next to it.

      NOTE: URL names must be unique.

      To change the URL structure, you must click on the Edit structure button. This enables you to edit the parent portion of the URL as well as the page URL name, , for example remove the parent page from the URL and have your page resolve form the website root. To restore the original URL structure, click the Restore structure button.

      NOTE: Sitefinity CMS uses a regular expression to create SEO-friendly URLs from the page name. For example, whitespace is replaced with a dash. If you need to modify the regular expression behavior, refer to the article Replace special characters in Page URLs from the Sitefinity Knowledge Base.

   3. Put this page… – Specify the page location in sitemap. By default, it will be created at the root level. To select a parent page of your new page, choose the Under parent page… option.
   4. Navigation options
      • Show in navigation – select this checkbox to make the page show up in the automatically generated navigation widgets. If the Show in navigation checkbox is deselected, the page is not displayed in the automatically generated navigation, and it can be viewed only if linked or accessed directly. You can also control the page access by the page's permissions. For more information, see Grant permissions for pages.
      • Make this a group page – select this checkbox to specify that the page is a group page.
        Group pages serve as containers for other pages. Group pages do not have their own content. When you open a group page it redirects to its first subpage (child).
      • Redirect to another page – select this checkbox to specify that the page you are creating will not have its own content but will serve as a redirect page instead. Redirect pages serve as a placeholder in the sitemap, and redirect to another page from your website, or an external URL. To specify where your page redirects to, click (Select page). On the next screen, select a page from your site or use the Web address tab to specify an external URL to redirect to. Once finished, click Done. 

5. Click on the Create button.
6. On the next screen, select the template you want to use for your new page. The selected template determines your page framework (MVC).

   NOTE: This step is mandatory. If you want to start from scratch and define your page layout directly using the layout editor, select the default template for the corresponding framework. The default template contains one placeholder.

7. Proceed with adding content to your new page.

If you need to modify additional page properties, see the Modify page title and properties section below..

Sitefinity CMS pages expose additional properties that enable you to further control a page’s behavior. These properties can be accessed via the page edit screen, by clicking on  (More options) located in the upper right corner of the screen, and selecting the Title & properties option. Alternatively, you can select Title & properties from the Actions context menu available for every page in the list of pages screen.

The Title & properties screen enables you to change all properties you have specified when creating a page. Additionally, you can adjust the following settings:

You use keywords to fine-tune internal search results. You can add keywords to pages with the New UI using custom fields. To do this, perform the following:

Create the custom field

1. In Sitefinity CMS backend, click Pages.
   
2. Click (Settings) to open the Settings for pages sidebar.
   
3. Click Custom fields for pages.
4. To add a custom field, in Custom fields section, click Add a field… button.
   A dialog window opens.
5. In Type dropdown box, select Short text.
6. In the Name field add a name for the field.
   For example, enter PageSearchKeywords.
   The name of the field is different from its label. The name of the field serves as reference for that field in the backend.
7. Do not select the This is a hidden field checkbox. The custom field is not visible on the website or in the backend if you selected it, you can only use it in the code.
   If you selected it, you can later unhide the field, by clicking it in section Custom fields and changing the selection on Appearance tab.
8. In Interface widget for entering data dropdown box, you select the widget which the creator or editor of the content item or page will use to complete the field.
   The default widget is Textbox. It displays an input field with labels and instructions.
9. Click Continue.
   The Settings window appears. You can configure in-depth settings, such as character limits and error messages, but these are not necessary for this example.
10. Click Done to confirm the creation of the custom field.
11. In the Custom fields page, click Save changes.

Add the custom field to the search index

The next step is to add the newly created custom field to a search index and reindex it.
To add the custom field to a search index, perform the following:

1. In Sitefinity CMS backend, navigate to Administration » Search indexes.
2. Click the search index that you want to modify.
   The Search index properties screen opens.
3. In Advanced Settings, add the custom field to the Additional fields for indexing section:
   1. In Field name, enter the name of the custom field.
   2. In Type dropdown box, select the corresponding type of the custom field.
4. Save your changes.
5. In the Actions menu of the search index, click Reindex.

For more information, see Create search indexes.

Configure the search widget

The next step is to configure the Search results widget. To do that, perform the following:

1. Open the page that has the Search results widget.
2. In the upper-right corner of the widget, click Edit.
3. In the bottom-right corner, click Advanced.
4. Click Model.
5. In SearchFields field, enter the name of your custom field.
   For example, enter PageSearchKeywords.
6. Save your changes and publish the page

RESULT: Your search results include the keywords from your custom field. You can further customize the Search box widget to state whether the keywords should be included in search suggestions when users type in the search box.
For more information, see Search box widget.
You can also customize the Search results widget to highlighted the keywords in the search results. For more information, see Search results widget.

You can view how a page looks like on a mobile device. You can do this in page editing mode.

1. Open a page for editing.
2. Click More actions » Preview for mobile.
   You can see various mobile resolutions on top of the page.
3. Drag the resolution bar left or right to the desired resolution.
   The icon in the middle shows the orientation of the mobile device and the resolution is saved for your next preview when you close the page.

To configure how to display pages on mobile devices, see Responsive design.