Getting started

You should have received a message from SWCP with your admin username and password, and the URL of your vlw installation. Assuming your url looks like: http://www.mysite.com/vlw/, you'll find your admin panel at http://www.mysite.com/vlw/admin/

Login with your admin username and password and you'll be presented with a panel for setup and editing your vlw web site.

To start

1. Set the site name and the footer as you'd like them. If you plan on a large logo in the top area, set the sitename to be empty.
2. Check the admin email to be sure it's set to something reasonable.
3. Don't change the site URL. This only changes when you move the site to a different location in the Unix file system.
4. For now, don't set the logo. We'll talk about uploading a logo picture a little later.
5. Press the setup button. It will save your changes and bring you back to the admin tools panel.
6. Next select a template. Choose from the available templates and press the "Change Template" button at the top or bottom of the page. After changing the template you will still be on the change template page. At this point I usually want to see how the site is looking, so I
7. Select the "View Home Page" option. This will take you to your home page.

Note, VLW comes with several example pages preloaded to show you some things you can do with the CMS. When you are logged into the admin panel VLW will display two buttons at the top of the content of all pages. These are the Edit Page button and the Admin Tools button.

Edit page opens the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor for that page.

Admin tools returns you to the admin tools panel. When you logout these buttons will disappear. When you are logged in an additional button appears in the side navigation menu labelled "Logout".

At this point we recommend viewing the sample pages, trying out the editor, or reading about VLW. If you have questions or problems you can send email to help@vlwcms.org. Thanks!