Standard installation components

The standard installation of Sulu comes with a set of components (called „modules“) required for the content management process:

Contacts

The Contact module has two main purposes: The first (and in many cases most important) is managing the users that have access to the administration backend of the website. The second is organising the user-data collected through the website (e.g. newsletter registrations etc.). In more complex environments this module can also be used to manage community members, online-shop customers or other contact based data.

Assets

The Assets module let you upload and organize any type of documents such as pictures, text documents (PDF, Word, Excel etc.), videos or audio clips. Once uploaded an asset can be used in as many webpages as required remaining its single source in the Assets module. This means if you would like to change a document that it used in serval different webpages you would only have to replace it once in Assets. Pictures will be automatically transformed to web-compatible formats and resized to the required formats of the templates while the original file will be stored as well. All other document types remain in their original format.

Webspaces

A Webspace is the place where the actual website structure and content will be created. Within a Webspace one single content-structure can be created but by using e.g. multiple languages and sub-domains an unlimited number of websites that share the same structure can be created. Furthermore an unlimited number of webspaces can be managed in one Sulu installation.

Confused? Maybe this example helps:

ACME Inc. has a website www.acme.com that needs to be published in English, German and French. The easy way to do this is to let the user choose their desired language and stay on the same domain displaying the required content using sub-domains such as e.g. www.acme.com/de. For the user or a search engine this would mean 1 website with 3 languages sharing the same content structure.

Now lets assume that ACME Inc. wants to dedicate each language to its correspondent market by using top-level-domains. This would of course be more marketing oriented and search engine friendly. The English content would be published in www.acme.com, the German in www.acme.de and the French in www.acme.fr. Let’s go even fufther and say each website’s design should be a little different, maybe with a different header color. The user and the search engine would now have 3 separate websites, each with 1 language and individual design but all with the same content-structure.

Any of this scenarios can be created with Sulu using one Webspace.

Got it? Great! (Don’t worry if not, we go a lot deeper into this later.)

Settings

As the title implies this module gives you access to all internal adjustments of Sulu. One very important section is Permissions where you can create user roles with access right which then can be applied to a user in the Contacts module. This gives you complete control over the access rights of your website administrators. In addition you can manage meta information such as categories or tags that are used in other modules.