Documents Module

Introduction

The ExSite document manager tool allows you to create, modify, and delete documents in a document library on your website(s). It automatically archives older versions of a document, and allows you to restore those old versions at a later time.

Visual Tutorials

• Introduction to the Documents web application tutorial
• How to automatically add a list of Documents to your website tutorial

Info

Start the document manager tool by clicking on the Documents icon, which looks like this:

If you have one website, you will immediately be presented with a listing of that site's documents. If you have more than one website, you will first have to select a website from those given in the list.

Websites store their documents in a library called "docs", by default. If your website does not have such a library in place, the document manager will offer to create one for you. If you do have such a library, the document manager will list the contents of the library, allowing you to select documents for download, upload a new version of a document, edit the document description, or remove documents.

If you have more document libraries than the basic "docs", the document manager will include links to other libraries that it finds, at the bottom of the page. You can switch to any of those libraries, by clicking on their names. Not all of these libraries are necessarily document libraries; for example, some might be photo albums. You can still manage non-document libraries using the document manager, but the interface may be inappropriate for some types of files.

To view a document

Click on the document name. Most non-web documents will be treated as downloads, which you can save to disk or open directly in an application. Some documents are web-friendly, however, and may be displayed directly in your browser.

To update a document

Click on the update (+) button at end of the document description. The document manager will present you with a simple form for selecting and uploading a new file. The previous version (all previous versions, in fact) is not deleted, but is kept on file as a backup.

To update the title and description of a document, click on the edit (A) button at end of the document description. The document manager will present you with a simple form for changing the document information.

To restore a previous version of a document

Click on the delete (x) button at end of the document description. If multiple versions of the document exist, the document manager will give you an option to "Roll back to previous version". Click on this link to delete the latest version, thereby restoring the previous version to active duty. If there is only one version of the document on file, the document manager will not give you this option.

To delete all versions of a document

Click on the delete (x) button at end of the document description. Next, click on the "Delete this document and all its versions" link.

To add a new document

Click on the "add new document" link at the end of the document listing. You will be prompted to enter a document title and description, and can upload the initial version of the document. Click the "upload" button when you are ready to commit the new document to the system.

Publishing Documents

After you have made changes to your documents library, it is a good idea to (re-)publish the documents. This ensures that the on-disk copy of the documents that your website users will see is fully synced with your changes. Otherwise, users may still get older versions. Note that if you publish your website, your documents will automatically be republished.

Large Files

There are limits to the size of file that can be uploaded into the CMS's revision handling system, which is what allows older revisions to be archived.  The actual limit varies from system to system, but is typically a few megabytes.  That may not seem like much, but remember than on the web you want to keep file sizes as small as possible because some users have slow connections and it is not polite to make them wait a long time for data that could easily have been made smaller.

If you decide that it is very important to exceed the file size limit in some cases, you should use the Upload plug-in to force the large file into the CMS.  It will bypass the revision-handling system in the CMS, and write the file directly to disk.  You can then use the Document plug-in to edit the description of the document.  Note that all large files handled in this way are publicly accessible.