Please ignore this announcement if your site was created after 1 January 2010.
As an administrator of your site, you will be familiar with Channels and Postings. Over the last couple of years, we have received a lot of feedback regarding the confusing nature of these concepts. This feedback has told us that most of you would much prefer to concentrate on creating pages without needing to work out in advance if you need to create a Channel first.
In response to this feedback, we are phasing out the distinction between Channels and Postings. We have begun this process already, and a future release of the Cubik software will complete this as well as introducing an improved interface complete with enhanced content authoring screens, a better way of managing your resources and a quicker editing experience.
In future, you will simply create pages of content on your site, then if you later decide you wish to create further pages which will appear under those pages in your site's navigation, that will be much simpler to achieve than at present. You will also be able to move pages around and restructure your site and its assets far more effectively than is currently possible.
For now, we have begun by introducing a change to the behaviour of your site's navigation as the first stage of this transition.
Previously it was possible to inadvertantly create inconsistencies in navigation behaviour across different parts of your site. As the first stage of the transition to our enhanced editing environment, the current version of the Cubik CMS now prevents these inconsistencies from being possible.
The typical approach when creating a Channel previously was to create and name it, then create its first page - usually a Channel Summary page - and set that page as hidden so it does not appear in the navigation. You now no longer need to do this. When you create a Channel, the first page is automatically created, and the navigation now makes no distinction between the Channel and the first page.
If you decide you don't want the first page to be a Channel Summary, you can opt not to create it when adding your Channel, and you can then create a different type of page instead. In this case, however, you no longer need to remember to hide the page because it will no longer appear as an independent item in your navigation.
This prevents instances we've seen with some sites where some Channels' first pages appear in navigation and others don't.
The vast majority of Cubik websites will not look or behave any differently after this change, as most sites have been set up with hidden first pages already. Some sites, however, may exhibit different behaviour as a result of this change, if hidden first pages were not used previously, or were only used sometimes.
If your site's navigation has changed and you are not happy with how it now works, please contact our Helpdesk on 0113 238 6735 or help@cubik.co.uk. We can quickly analyse your website to highlight pages that may now look different, and then help you make the changes needed to get things looking right again.
