Think about the community structure
Thanks to the content management system, you’ve got full control over the structure of your community. This means that you can control the Main Menu, Footer and the Home pages. To create this structure, it’s good to know that you can use any link in the menus (including links to external websites) and you can create drop-down menus with two layers, as can be seen on the screenshot below. Since the menu is typically populated with relevant content for your members, it’s good to think about what you’ll want to include in there so you can create your first content.
Create first content and first groups
After reviewing and determining the configuration, you’re ready to create content and create groups. For example, you might want to start with creating:
- A Basic Page as a “Contact” page
- Book Pages for “Community Guidelines”
- A Group as a dedicated space for specific users to get together
- A Topic as a blog, resource, and/or news
- An Event as a first community activity
- At last create your Homepages, using either a Landing Page or a Dashboard as your Alternative Frontpages
As a reminder, you can navigate to the Content Overview page from your Site Manager Menu which allows you to see all of your content and create new content. You can also use the “+” sign in the main menu on the right-hand side to create new content.
If you are searching for inspiration on how to put the content together and would like to see some examples, please check Community Content Best Practices Guide.
Learn more here about Content Management.
Create the community structure
After you’ve got your first content, you’re ready to determine the structure of your community platform and the experience of your members. The platform allows you to control the main menu, the footer, the navigation menu as well as your public homepage (the one your visitors will see before they login) and your community homepage. You can control this in the Site Manager Dashboard under:
And you're set! Continue to our suggested reading materials to build your community and extension manuals.
Interesting videos on onboarding & member engagement