The control panel is a special area in your site that allows editing, administration and general control of your website. Access to the control panel of a pagebloom website is only available after signing in and the list of functions available depends on the access rights that have been granted to the user who signed in.

A Typical Scenario:

If you go to the control panel for your website you will be able to access a wide range of functions, allowing you to change the site, upload images etc.,. This is because you have been granted 'Organization Administration' rights to your website.

If a customer of yours signs in and goes to the control panel for your website they will only see a very restricted set of functions. Typically they will only be able to see the list of orders that they have placed with you and monitor their progress. They will not have access to the functions that can cause changes to the appearance or content of the website.

If you have a pagebloom website and you want to enable others, let's say an employee for example, to edit your site's content then you can assign 'Organization Administrator' rights to your employee and they too will then be able to edit your site. You can grant or withdraw access rights to users by placing a request via the 'request page'.

See also:

How do I access the control panel?

Accessing the control panel for your site

To access the control panel for your site follow these simple steps:

1. Go to your website (or directly to www.pagebloom.com) and log on using your email address and password.
2. After logging on the 'admin' button will appear like this in the top left corner. It looks like this:
   
   Click the 'admin' button.
3. If the text in the middle of the page says 'Home -> Administration of 'YOUR WEBSITE NAME' then continue to step 5.
4. If the text in the middle of the page says simply 'Home' then you need to specify which website you want to administer. Please click on the appropriate website link in the left hand column.
5. You are now in the control panel for the website.

Word adds some extra formatting information when you copy/paste from a word document. The rich text editor in pagebloom has a special button especially to cater for pasting from Word documents. This button will paste

When you copy/paste from a Word document make sure that you use the 'Paste from Word' button in the pagebloom's rich text editor tool bar (third button from left in top row) and this will make for a cleaner paste without the normal formatting problems.

From the Website > Styles menu you have direct access to the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that is used for your pagebloom site. Using this you have complete control over text colors, panel background colors, menu coloring, text font and size etc.,

If you have added an image to a description or some other field that is edited via the Rich Text editor form then you can move that image around by simply dragging and dropping it with the mouse.

Pagebloom has a wide spectrum of forms that allow you to edit various aspects of the content of your website. Some of these forms therefore have a large number of fields. It is a good idea to make sure that your browser window is full screen before performing any site changes to reduce the need for scrolling when you open up the various content editing forms.

You can use the text editor to create tables in your content but quite often you just want the table to help you layout items in a 'grid' like system and you don't really want the border to be shown around each cell in the table. Showing the border in these cases can make your site look old fashioned. Fortunately turning off the borders is quite easy.

To remove borders from table:

1. Right click on the table and choose Table properties…
2. Set the border width to 0
3. You normally need to increase the cell padding and cell spacing so set these both to larger values eg., 10 or 20 to create a space between cell contents.
4. Click OK on the table editor form.
5. As always, after making changes in a properties form click somewhere in the main body of the text editor to focus the cursor in there again (without doing this the editor sometimes thinks there has been no changes and so does not save the changes).
    

Editing with style!

In web terminology we can apply a CSS (cascading style sheet) 'class' to elements such as images when editing content in the various pagebloom content editors. A 'class' simply tells the browser how the element should be laid out in the page. The class can be set up to specify where a particular element should be positioned (eg., left or right) and whether to insert space on one side, both sides, top or bottom for example.

In pagebloom there are a number of predefined classes that you can use to specify how you want your image elements to be laid out.

Specifying a CSS style

It is very easy to specify the class for an image or other element:

1. Right click on the image
2. Choose properties
3. Click the 'Advanced' tab
4. Enter the desired stylesheet class name in the 'Stylesheet class names' field (choose a value from the list below)
5. Clear out any values in the 'Style' field.
6. Press OK
7. Click somewhere in the text editor to give it cursor focus again
8. Press the Ok button.
9. Press the preview button to see your changes.

You may not see the effect in the editor (after step 5) but you should see it in your browser when you preview the page (Step 8 - you might possibly need to do a page refresh to tell the browser to get the latest page contents).

List of predefined pagebloom CSS classes

pb-pos-left
Position the element on the left side and provide space on the top, right and bottom sides.

pb-pos-left-top
Position the element on the left side with no space on the top but with space to the right and on the bottom

pb-pos-right
Position the element on the right side and provide space on the top, left and bottom sides.

pb-pos-right-top
Position the element on the right side with no space on the top but with space to the left and on the bottom

Optional panels

A number of panels are optional. They can appear in the sidebar and can be turned on or off.

The optional panels are:

• Card icons panel - displays Visa, Mastercard etc., icons as payment options
• Share on Social Networking panel - a panel for easy addition of tweets, comments etc., on social networking websites.
• Subscribe to our newsletter panel - a panel that allows visitors to your site to sign up to your newsletter.

Configuring the optional panels

To configure whether a panel is visible or hidden:

1. Sign in to pagebloom
2. Click the pbAdmin button in the left/top corner
3. Click Website and choose Settings
4. Click on the Basic Settings link
5. Adjust the check boxes for the various panels as reuired.
6. Press OK.
7. Press Preview.