Scope Training Materials

Welcome to the Scope section of our CMS Help site! Our Scope elements are designed to plug into CMS websites to deliver re-usable content throughout the Skidmore web site.  In this way, a news item can be entered once, and shared across multiple Skidmore web pages without individual site editors having to re-enter the information -- saving server resources, employee time, and promoting efficient sharing of information across departments.

Scope elements consist of news, announcements, events, people, and right column displays.  You can see these in action on the Skidmore home page.  Not all of these features are available for every website, and when they are available they are usually limited to the home page of the site.

You will need to work with the Web Team to determine which features are available to you, and have them installed on your site.  Once you have them in place, you will be able to maintain them using the Scope editing system.

• News
• • Adding images to news stories
    
• Announcements
• Right Column
• People
• Testimonials

Events is a more unique widget, interfacing with the college calendar.  Items entered onto the college calendar can be earmarked for visibility on various departments, according to relevancy.  This feature requires a fairly active activity calendar in order to make full use of the features.  If you feel that your department can make use of this feature, contact the Web team for more information.

General Information About Scope Posting

A brief introductory warning – do not copy/paste directly from Word into any Scope item.  This brings in some background coding that can render your item incorrectly on Web pages.  Always copy the text into a text document first, and then copy it into the text editor window, this will remove the nasty background code and make it more workable.  You will then be able to add the formatting (bolding, links, spacing, etc).  See this blog article for more information.

CMS can only be edited using Firefox 3.0 or higher or IE 7.0 or higher, it does not work with Safari and has not been tested with Chrome or other alternative browsers.

If you are working from home and wish to edit these Scope items, you must be logged in through the Skidmore VPN.  Some basic directions are located on the IT website, but you will have to contact IT directly if you have questions or problems with the VPN.

Scope items don’t always appear immediately upon being posted, there is a built-in time delay to prevent overloading our servers with requests.  If you must see your item immediately and you have access to the page where it would appear, go to the page and get into Author mode.  Under Properties and Actions select “Clear & Update Cache”.  That will refresh the page and your item should display.  If it still does not, go back to the Scope admin section and double check 1) the start and end dates, particularly the year, and 2) whether you have selected the item to display.  Save your changes, go back and clear the cache again.  If your item still does not display, contact Jenn Crewell or Liz Katzman for assistance.

Thumbnails and embedded images should be prepared ahead of time in your photo editing program of choice (PhotoShop, etc.).