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3 June 2014

Metrici MiniSite

By Andrew Clifford

Metrici MiniSite makes it easy to create websites in Metrici and gives you complete control over who can update and read them.

Over the past couple of newsletters we have covered how to build a simple website in Metrici, including setting up permissions to share your stuff with a defined group of colleagues or publish it more widely.

Metrici MiniSite is an application written in Metrici that makes it easier to create websites.

You can use Metrici MiniSite for free. Sign in or register at www.metrici.com. Then, from the Metrici Store, select Metrici MiniSite.

After you have installed MiniSite, you will be taken to the main page for your site. This is just a normal page, like we covered in Building websites in Metrici. (We have made a couple of improvement since then, to make it easier to create pages, and to include content from other pages.)

Installing MiniSite also creates a Settings area, which you can see when you click on Home. Inside this area is a settings area for each MiniSite you create, and inside that are two important components, the site manager and the permission manager, as well as a link to the MiniSite reference guide.

The site manager gives you a view of your entire site, with sorting and filtering to help you find particular pages. It lets you create, amend and delete pages, and upload images and other files. It also lets you mark which pages you want to make public.

As the name suggests, the permission manager manages permissions on your site. It works by scanning through your site and setting permissions based on rules and roles. The rules are driven by tags which are attached to pages and, in this case, indicate whether to make the page public. (Tags are used widely in Metrici for a variety of purposes.)

For MiniSite, we have configured the permission manager to support four roles. There are roles to administer, update and read all of the pages on the site. There is also a public role to read pages that you have marked as public. You can reconfigure the permission manager to support other rules and roles if you need.

We are not trying to pretend that Metrici MiniSite is a serious competitor to WordPress, Dreamweaver, GoDaddy, 1and1, and the like. But it does meet a need for quick and simple websites with good security and which can be extended to include any content or functionality. You are welcome to use it for free. (See Metrici pricing for details.)

MiniSite and all its components are built in Metrici itself. We have not used any extra software or needed any special permissions to build MiniSite. You can extend MiniSite as you need. You could develop an alternative website creation and management tool, and make it available for others to use. Like everything else in Metrici, it is all just an arrangement of interlinked nodes. Starting next newsletter, we will take a look in a bit more detail at how we build applications like this in Metrici.

Next: Metrici derivation

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