When you first point your browser at your brand-new Plone site, you get a single page, welcoming you to Plone. You can edit this page to look like you want it to, but then what? You want to start building your site structure, with pages for every section. Here is an example of creating an about us page in the site. We want this page to show up in the navigation menu on the left-hand side of the page.

First, a couple of concepts:

• Just like windows explorer, the menu gives you a view on the folders in your site. If you click on a folder in the left-hand menu, the contents of the folder will show in the main (middle) section.

• If you do not want the contents to show in the folder, you must create a default page, usually called index_html. If you have worked with a plain html website, this should be familiar.

So, the way to create an about us page that shows up in the navigation menu, would be to create an About us folder, with an index_html document inside it that contains the about us information. Let's do that:

Create the folder:

Using the add new item dropdown in the top right corner (In the green box), create a new folder. You will now see the Properties tab of the folder, where you can fill in the following details:

Short name: about

The short name is the name that will show up in the web address for this folder. It's usually a good idea to keep this short, lower-case and without any spaces.

Title: About Us

The title is the name that will show up in the navigation menu. Usually a one to two word description of the section.

Description: About our company

This shows up when you hover your cursor over the menu item. Keep it to a sentence or two.

Once you have these fields filled in, click save.

Now you will see the empty folder, with a button to create a default page.

Create the default document:

Click on the Create default Document button. You will now see the Edit document page, where you can fill in the following details:

Short name: index_html

Keep the short name as index_html. This will let the page show up instead of the blank folder listing.

Title: About Us

This title is the name that will show up at the top of the page, as well as in the top browser bar. Usually a one to two word description of the page.

Description

This will show up in bold at the top of the page, as well as in the description part of the meta-tags (invisible on the page, but used by search engines). Keep it to a sentence or two in a single paragraph. You cannot format this text.

Body Text

This is the actual document text. The content of the page goes here.

Once you have these fields filled in, click save.

Now you will see the document as it will appear.

Publish the folder:

The folder will not show in the navigation menu if you are not logged in. This is what we want, since a normal site visitor will not see it until you are finished with this part of the site.

Now comes the tricky part: You are now looking at the default document for the folder, NOT the folder itself. You can publish this document, but the folder will not not show up in the navigation menu until you publish the FOLDER.

To view the FOLDER, you need to click on the contents tab at the top. Now you should see the folder listing, showing the contents of the folder (Just the about us document we created in the previous step).

Now you can publish this folder: Click on the state: visible item at the top right, and choose publish from the dropdown menu.

Done! The folder will now show up in the navigation menu on the left for site visitors.

The rest of the site is built in the same way.