Overview

The web pages are made up a combination of elements that work together to create a clean, well organized and easily manageable page. The information in this section is intended to give publishers a better understanding of how the page system works and why we use it. For instructions on how to edit the various elements of the web page system, please refere to the Contribute Online Assistance pages.

The layout of the pages is based on YUI CSS (Yahoo User Interface Cascading Style Sheets) Grid system (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/). The foundational styles for each page are located at the root directory. Web publishers will be unable to change basic styles, such as Headers or the general layout of the page.

To accommodate additional styles on pages, each web directory also contains local css files. At each Section directory level (ex. /som/, /sod/, /hr/, etc…), there is a section.css file that pertains to all pages in the entire section.At each subsection directory level (ex. /surgery/, /periodontics/, /benefits/), there is a local.css file. Thus, it is necessary to import the root css files and the section and local css files into each page (example below).

Example for Human Resource Benefits home page at www.mcg.edu/hr/benefits/

<link href="/css/template_20080429/screen.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen">
<link href="../css/section.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen">
<link href="css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen">

The Page System

The page system is comprised several files that work together within a given web directory. Thus, the functionality of each page is based on the interaction of the following elements:

1. css folder: contains local css file (local.css)
2. xml folder: contains xml files that populate page crumbs and section/contact information (crumbs.xml & sectinfo.xml)
3. images folder: contains image files used displayed on pages
4. documents folder: contains non-html files that are link to from web pages
5. menu.html: file that lists the navigation links listed on left side of web page; located at the same directory level of pages that use it

Each page uses php-based server-side include (SSI) files, to call xml and menu.html files so that data from these files is displayed on the web page. This enabled publisher to update menu links, crumbs and section information on multiple pages by editing single files.