Umbraco User's Guide

SEPARATING CONTENT AND STRUCTURE

Before you learn about the details of how Umbraco ultimately presents the content, take a look at what it means to separate content from structure. Umbraco has a very clear separation of tools and responsibilities when it comes to maintaining content and layout—structure, design, and media assets. Although Chapter 4 discusses the separation of layout and structure in greater detail, right now the focus is primarily on Umbraco's toolsets and interface.

Understanding the Umbraco Backoffice Structure

The backoffice, also known as the admin user interface, is made up of sections, as shown in Figure 2-1. A section is an area of the backoffice that contains specific functionality targeted at predefined roles, such as for a developer, an editor, and the like. A set of standard sections comes with every Umbraco installation. However, given the extensibility of the Umbraco application programming interface (API) you, as a developer, can also create your own custom sections (covered in the samples starting in Chapter 15). The following discussion breaks down and covers the backoffice sections.

FIGURE 2-1

Each and every section within the Umbraco backoffice is made up of trees. These trees contain nodes that are made up of the various types of content—media items, content pages, users, permissions, and so on.

WHAT IS A NODE?

This book refers to the various ...