Introduction

A tab is a collection of pages. They represent the highest level of organization in the portal. Tabs are displayed in a row at the top of the screen. For example, in the following screen shot, the Academics tab is selected.

Each tab has a default page. When a user navigates to the tab, the system displays the default page first. Although a few tabs cannot be modified, you can add, rename and rearrange most tabs.

For more details on managing tabs, see Working with Tabs.

A subsection is a child element of a tab. It is essentially a collection of pages. By default, a link to a subsection is represented as a folder icon in the sidebar at the left side of the screen (although you can hide these icons).

Like a tab, each subsection has a default page. A subsection can also contain child subsections. For more details, see Working with Subsections.

The sidebar is a pane, usually at the left side of the screen, that lets users view the structure of the currently displayed tab or subsection. The sidebar lets users navigate directly to a particular page or child subsection. For more details on managing this, see Working with Sidebars.

Tabs and subsections are sometimes referred to as contexts. For each context, there is an administrative console called Context Manager, which authorized users can access to make changes such as selecting a default page, managing permissions and so forth. Among other benefits, this structure allows you to grant administrative privileges to a role in certain contexts, but not others.

Context Manager is discussed in Managing Tabs, Pages, and Subsections and in the Managing Page and Context Permissions section.

A base installation of JICS comes with several different types of features, each of which is associated with a specific type of content or activity. For example, the Announcements feature lets users post announcements, the Bulletin Boards feature lets users post information about items for sale, and so on.

Each time you add a feature to a page, you create a feature instance. The information contained in the feature instance is often unique to that instance. Feature instances are represented on a page as a series of windows.

A page can host up to 10 feature instances. At any point, the user can maximize a feature instance, which sometimes allows the feature to display additional information.

Depending on the type of feature and on your school’s needs, you (or other managers of content at your school) might add several instances of a single feature type to your site. For example, you might set up one instance of the Calendar feature for faculty members and another for coaches. You can set up different permissions for different instances of the feature.

The setup process for the different feature types is covered in the Working With the Base Features section.

If desired, you can give your portal a name that will be used in automated messages throughout the site. You can also create messages to be displayed upon login, logout and so forth. These topics are covered in Naming Your Portal and Managing Sitewide Content.

In some cases, you may want to make a JICS page or feature instance available from within an iFrame on another web site. You do this using a feature called direct links. This is covered in Placing Content on Another Site.