You can imagine the Wiking Management Interface (WMI) as a back door to the system, which allows the administrator to see and modify all the data which influence the final content, look and logic of the website. Many management tasks (such as text modifications) can be done directly from the website without entering the WMI, but many other aspects can only be changed here.
The management interface provides uniform access to all portal data through "database" views. These data are presented as table records, which can be created, modified and deleted by the administrator. This approach may seem a little rigid, but the great advantage is the resulting consistence of the user interface.
Important: The Wiking Management Interface allows you to switch to any of the configured languages at any time, as opposed to the normal website view, where only languages, for which the content actually exists, are available. See Languages to learn how to configure the available languages. It is important to know, that in WMI you always see only the data relevant to the currently selected language. For language dependent content (such as page texts) you only see the items for the current language. On the other hand, the current language hes no effect when viewing language independent data (such as color themes).
WMI Structure
The interface is divided into four main sections usually further divided into subsections for management of different aspects of the website:
Content
Manage available pages, their visibility, hierarchy and content. The rules are the same as when modifying a page outside WMI (see Page Management).
Look & Feel
Stylesheets
Manage the cascading stylesheets used for your Wiking site. Stylesheets, together with Color Themes (see below) allow you to customize the appearance of your Wiking site.
It is possible to edit the stylesheets directly, however this is only encouraged if you know CSS and Wiking stylesheet handling details. The primary intended use for most website administrators is management of predefined Wiking stylesheets. There are several stylesheets preinstalled with the system. Other may be created and shared by the Wiking user community.
Management is quite simple – you can activate or deactivate any stylesheet. You will immediately see the results. You can add your own stylesheets and override certain settings of other stylesheets. The stylesheets should only use symbolic color names defined by color themes to provide full color theming support.
The stylesheet named 'default.css' should not be edited, since its contents is actually not accessible through the database.
Color Themes
Color themes allow the simplest way of appearance customisation. There is always just one active color theme which is selected from the list of available color themes. The final appearance is determined by the combination of active stylesheet(s) and the selected color theme.
Several themes are included in the default installation. You can also create your own themes or customize the existing themes through a simple form, which includes further explanation. Themes can be also shared within the commutnity of Wiking CMS users.
User Management
Users
Manage registered users and their access rights.
Setup
Configuration
Modify the global site configuration, such as site title and other information, security options, current color theme etc.
Languages
This module allows you to manage the set of available languages. You can add any language as it's lowercase ISO 639-1 Alpha-2 language code.
The configured languages become automatically available for content creation.
See the chapter Language selection of Wiking Users Guide for more information how multiple language variants are served to website visitors.
Panels
"Panels" are small boxes with additional information which are usually displayed by the side of the main page content. The main content changes for different pages, but the panels remain unchanged.
There may be arbitrary textual content on each panel, but probably the most practical feature of panels is that they can display items of an extension module used in some page. For example the module News will display recent news on the panel. You can also define how many items are displayed.
There may be a different set of panels for each language variant of the website. Only panels for the currently selected language are displayed, so you need to switch the language to be able to manage panels for a different language.
The order of panels on the page is determined by the “Order” number.