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Accrisoft Freedom Demo Tour

A guide to working with Accrisoft Freedom: a truly scalable, content

management solution.

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Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3

Accrisoft Freedom ......................................................................................................................................... 3

Your Freedom Demo ..................................................................................................................................... 3

Logging Into Your Demo................................................................................................................................ 3

Intro to Interfaces ......................................................................................................................................... 4

Blue Interface ................................................................................................................................................ 5

Home Module ........................................................................................................................................... 5

Web Pages and News Module .................................................................................................................. 5

Events and Forms ...................................................................................................................................... 6

Events .................................................................................................................................................... 6

Forms .................................................................................................................................................... 6

Blue Interface Summary ............................................................................................................................... 6

Green Interface ............................................................................................................................................. 6

Modules .................................................................................................................................................... 7

Layouts ...................................................................................................................................................... 7

Page Layouts ......................................................................................................................................... 7

Module Layouts..................................................................................................................................... 8

File Manager ............................................................................................................................................. 9

Stylesheets ................................................................................................................................................ 9

Security ................................................................................................................................................... 10

Configuration .......................................................................................................................................... 10

Template Library ......................................................................................................................................... 10

Green Summary .......................................................................................................................................... 10

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 10

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Introduction This is the Accrisoft Freedom Demo Workbook. This workbook will not take long to get through and

should answer any initial questions you have about using Accrisoft Freedom.

Accrisoft Freedom Accrisoft Corporation is a leading provider of web-based software that makes it fast, easy and cost-

effective for its resellers to create and maintain professional websites. Accrisoft Corporation develops

Accrisoft Freedom™, a complete solution for building and managing dynamic, database-driven and

content managed websites. It offers the flexibility to produce beautiful sites with all the latest features,

yet is intuitive for anyone to use, regardless of technical expertise.

Unlike the standard open source offerings, Accrisoft Freedom is a complete, hosted solution that doesn't

require custom programming or third-party plug-ins. Accrisoft Freedom is backed by Accrisoft’s

dedicated support and development teams, providing its resellers with stable, well-integrated software

capabilities and helping them stand out from the crowd. Capabilities of Accrisoft Freedom include e-

commerce, email marketing, event management and the ability to implement social media tools like

private communities and blogs.

Your Freedom Demo Welcome to your Accrisoft Freedom Demo. The exercises in this workbook are designed to help you get started using the Accrisoft Freedom system to build a website using a standard design consisting of HTML and graphics. After you complete the exercises in this workbook, you can apply these same procedures to building other websites. You should be able to complete all the exercises in this workbook in a little over an hour. This workbook is designed to simulate how you would take a design from a graphic artist or a website template and add it to an Accrisoft site. You can use almost any website design for a site powered by Accrisoft Freedom.

Logging Into Your Demo To access your Freedom Demo account, use the login credentials that were emailed to you from your

Accrisoft Representative.

All Freedom Built Websites can be access by adding /admin.php to the end of the URL.

If this is the first time you’ve logged in, you will need to accept the Accrisoft End User License. After

reading the terms of use, check the “I accept the License Agreement” box and click “Accept”.

Once you’ve accepted the License Agreement, you will see the Accrisoft Blue Interface.

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Intro to the Interfaces

Accrisoft Freedom websites keep the design of the site separate from the content. This allows you, the

web developer, access to the entire site, but only allowing your client access to the content. The content

of the website is accessible in the Blue Interface, while the development of the website is done in the

Green Interface.

You’ll notice that your website backroom is composed of interfaces, a set of modules and tabs within

these modules. Let’s take a look at an Accrisoft Interface.

You’ll notice an Accrisoft logo in the top left area. If you click on this logo, the live website will open in a

new tab. Just below the logo you’ll find a question mark and Help icon, which will open Accrisoft help

documentation in a new tab (make sure pop-ups are enabled). On the opposite side of the Help icon,

you’ll notice a set of Green, Blue and White LED icons. These allow you to toggle between the Green and

Blue interfaces. The White icon opens the live website.

On the left side, you’ll see the list of modules enabled for this website. The main section of the interface

is your Active Window. When you select a new module, your Active Window will open the management

of the module selected.

Notice that each module has its own set of tabs and sub-tabs. This design ensures an organized, easy-to-

use interface for you and your clients.

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Now that we have an understanding of the Accrisoft Interface, let’s take a closer look at the Blue

Interface.

Blue Interface In this section, we’ll briefly examine some of the major modules and highlight key features of Accrisoft

Freedom. As we navigate through these modules, notice how similar each of them look. If you know

how to use one module in Accrisoft, you know how to use all the modules.

Home Module As soon as you login to the Blue Interface, you will start at the Home module. The Home module

contains a set of basic tabs about the website. Users can also change their password here and access

training videos.

Web Pages and News Module Click on the Web Pages module. You’ll notice the Active Window now displays a list of Web Pages and a

new Set of tabs appeared (Web Pages and Categories). From here, you can quickly edit, delete and copy

webpages, or you can view the webpage by clicking on the name of the page.

Click Edit next to the first Web page. The Active Window when editing a webpage consists of a few basic

fields and a WYSIWYG editor. Each webpage, and most other items within Freedom, needs to be

categorized. Categorizing webpages makes it easy to search for the right page and enables development

filtering.

The editor is the TinyMC editor with a Freedom skin. You can easily toggle between the visual editor and

HTML editor.

Below the editor are check boxes that allow you to split the page, make the page searchable and if

membership is enable, you can restrict the page. You also notice Meta Info. Each page can contain it’s

own window title, keywords and description. We will discuss this more later.

Go ahead and Save this page or Cancel. The Active Window will again display the list of webpages.

Switch to the News Module by clicking “News” on the left side of the interface. Notice the News module

looks very similar to the Webpages module. The tabs include News Articles, Categories and an Archive

tab. The Active Window contains a list of news articles with the ability to edit, delete and copy articles.

Add a new article by clicking the green “Add a new News Article.” When creating a new article, you

simply need to fill out a few basic fields and editors.

By now you’re beginning to notice how easy it to edit the content on your site. Let’s look at a few more

modules then move on to the Green Interface.

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Events and Forms

Events

The Events module allows your client to create events and edit existing events. Events can be one time

occurrences or recurring. Notice there are a few more tabs associated with the Events Module. Let’s go

ahead and edit the first event. You will be prompted about editing just the selected event or the entire

series of recurring events. Let’s just edit the selected event. When editing an event, you’ll see set of sub-

tabs (Event, Registration, Attendees, Reports and Information). The events module is very robust,

allowing your clients to sell tickets, track attendee, create reports and more.

For a full guide on the events module, please view the Help documentation.

Forms

Let’s switch to the Forms module now. The forms module will collect live website form submissions such

as Contact Us. Submissions are quickly manageable on the Active Window. Click the Web Forms tab to

access your forms. Forms are quick and easy to edit and create. Within this list, you’ll notice a few

system forms indicated by the brackets[].

For more information about creating and editing forms, please see the Help documentation.

Blue Interface Summary By now you have noticed that Accrisoft Freedom was built for clients in mind. The Blue Interface is

extremely intuitive and easy to navigate. Your clients have complete control over their content and

anyone in their office can make changes.

At this point, feel free to navigate some of the other modules. Once you are done, we’ll move on to the

Green Interface, or the Development Interface.

Green Interface Let’s get into a development state of mind and switch over to the Green Interface. To do this, you can

click the green LED icon near the top right of the screen.

Welcome to the Green Interface. You’ll immediately notice it looks very similar to the Blue Interface.

The home module is also known as the Dashboard. The Dashboard provides direct access to the

Ecosystem, it lets you view the live site, displays recent Ecosystem activity, allows you to download a

new template and provides a search for your entire Accrisoft Freedom Site.

We’ll examine the modules here and soon you will realize that it’s no coincident Accrisoft named its

CMS Freedom. You have the freedom to do whatever your client’s website needs and wants are.

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Modules To view a list of available modules, click Modules on the left. Here you see the Modules enable to your

client. You can configure modules here and quickly add more by clicking “Add a new Module.” You can

also hide certain modules if you don’t want your clients to have access to them.

For more information about configuring modules, please view the Help Documentation.

Layouts Click on the Layouts Module on the left. The Layouts Module is home to the entire HTML that makes up

your client’s website. Here you can view Page Layouts and Module layouts. What’s the difference?

Page Layouts

Page layouts allow you to setup the frame of your client’s site. Start by editing the Home page layout.

The Active Window shows a text editor with a tool bar above it.

The Toolbar contains icons for inserting additional page layouts, module layouts, tags, snippets, color

values, links and file paths.

The editor is an HTML editor you would see in any web software.

When editing the [Home] page layout, you’ll notice a few page layout and module layouts indictated by

brackets ([[page.Header]], [[layout.webpage_home]], [[layout.news_home]], etc). These layouts are

similar to PHP Include tags, however, there is no need to know PHP when using Accrisoft Freedom.

Below the editor are a few other options to make the page secure or restricted.

You can quickly access other page layouts by using the drop down near the top right.

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The Default layout dictates how the interior pages will appear. You can create multiple layouts, Display

Types, if other page layouts are needed.

Now that we have an understanding of Page Layouts, let’s take a look at Module Layouts.

For more information on Page Layouts, please see the Help documentation.

Module Layouts

Module Layouts are the HTML, CSS, and Javascript composition of each module. Module Layouts dictate

how the content of your client’s website is displayed.

To access the Module Layouts, click the Modules tab within the Layouts Module. The Active Window

displays the layouts associated with each module. Using the dropdown combo box on the right, you can

filter by module.

Let’s take a look at the News Articles module. You’ll notice there is a [Detail], a [Lister] and a

news_home layout. The majority of the modules will have a [detail] and [lister] layout.

Before we look at each of the layouts, open the live website and click on the News link in the menu. This

page is dictated by the [lister] layout as it displays a list of news articles, or items within the News

module. Now click the headline of any article. This page, and all other articles, is dictated by the Detail

layout.

Let’s look at the layouts.

Detail

Edit the News Module Detail Layout. Detail layouts compose a single Accrisoft item (news article, blog

post, event, etc). In this case, each news article will take on this composition.

Each detail layout will include settings. In the case of news articles, you can select the source of the

articles and how many words will appear on a page. Below these settings is an HTML editor that’s very

similar to the one used when editing a Page Layout.

The editor includes a limited Toolbar. The first icon allows you to insert tags associated with the module.

The tags reflect the fields from the module in the Blue Interface. News Modules tags include author,

publication date information, blurb, body, copyright, etc. Tags will print the text associated with that

field in the module.

Other icons included in the Toolbar are color palette, file reference and a “Display Original Layout” tool.

*All HTML editors include a “Toggle Stylesheet View” which opens the stylesheet below the HTML

editor.

Switch to the [Lister] layout using the combo-box in the upper right area of the page.

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Lister

The lister layout is very similar to the detail layout. The top includes settings such as Data Source,

Category and Number of Articles to be listed at a time. There are also more advanced sorting and

filtering options.

Every Lister Layout in Accrisoft Freedom includes a body, repeat and item section.

The body determines how the layout will be structured. You’ll notice there is a [[repeat]] tag in the body.

The [[repeat]] makes the website dynamic by allowing you to edit the structure of all the news articles at

one time.

The repeat section has a [[item]] tag. This tag causes whatever is in the item section below to repeat.

The item section determines how each item, or news article will appear. Click on the “Insert a Tag” icon

to select the fields to display. These tags reflect the fields available in the Blue Interface.

Finally, let’s take a look at the news_home layout. Switch over to this layout using the combobox in the

top right corner. Navigate to the homepage on the live website. This layout is dictating what shows up

on the news section in the middle of the homepage.

Glancing at the settings, we see that it is displaying only the 3 latest articles and the blurb will only show

30 words. Compare the Body and Item sections with what appears on the live site. Notice the tags

within the item section.

File Manager The File Manager keeps all your files in order. You can create additional directories with the File

Manager as well. Larger files can be compressed and uploaded, then unzipped once in the File Manager.

Files can be deleted, copied, renamed and moved. Images can be viewed within the manager and the

height and width in pixels can be displayed for quick reference.

Stylesheets The stylesheet module allows you to create new sheets and manage existing sheets. By default, the

main stylesheet, stylesheet.css, is referenced in the head of the Home Page Layout.

The stylesheet editor has a toolbar that includes quick style references, a color palette, file reference

tool and Menu Styler. The Menu Styler will create a chunk of CSS that is associated with a menu that has

already been created.

Styles for your clients can be created using the Blue Styles Tab. These styles will be enabled when a

client is using the WYSIWYG editor.

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Security Users can be added and edited using the Security module. Within the Green interface security module

(also available in the Blue Interface if enabled), users can be limited to specific modules, given blue and

green access, and even restricted to an IP Address.

Configuration The Configuration Module allows you to adjust many settings about your client’s website. Human

readable URLs can also be adjusted here.

For more information about the Configuration module, please see the help documentation.

Template Library The Template Library is Accrisoft Freedom’s form of open source. Your designs and individual module

layouts can uploaded to your Library and downloaded onto other sites. Your templates can be public or

private.

If you have a portfolio of Freedom built websites, your clients can select a design and other components

like a calendar or staff list that they particularly like. You can then download these specific pieces saving

you time.

Green Summary Accrisoft Freedom keeps its design separate from its content. The Green interface is used to build the

HTML and styles of your client’s website without them actually needing to touch this component. Let

them focus on what’s important to them: the content of their site.

Feel free to explore the tabs and subtabs of each Green module. For more information, please view the

Help documentation.

We also highly recommend watching the Green Interface training videos available on the Accrisoft

Ecosystem. If you have a firm understanding of the Green interface and how Accrisoft Freedom works,

you may be interested in watching Photoshop-to-Freedom, a video tutorial for turning your client’s

website design into HTML.

Conclusion Thank you for using Accrisoft Freedom. This demo account is yours to test and experiment with. Try to

create your own website with this demo. Turn on new modules and use this as a demo for your clients.

You can start a blog or send out an email marketing campaign. If you have any questions, please email

them to support@accrisoft.com. One of our Success Managers will reply or call you back shortly.