Getting started

This article covers signing in, what your role lets you do, and what each part of the admin is for.

Signing in

Go to https://cms.columbusrealtors.com/admin and sign in with the email address and password you were given.

That address is not your public website address with /admin on the end — the CMS is a separate system on its own address. Bookmark it the first time you sign in.

If you don't have a login, or you've forgotten your password, use Forgot password on the sign-in screen or contact your association's CMS administrator.

Roles

Every user has one role: Admin, Editor, Author or Viewer. It determines what you can see and change.

There is no approval step before content goes live. Anyone who can edit can publish. Saving and publishing are the same permission — if you can change a page, you can put that change live. The CMS has no draft-for-review workflow.

For everyday content — pages, news, events, documents, FAQ — the pattern is:

Two things work differently and are worth knowing:

• User accounts are Admin-only. Adding someone, changing their role, or removing them requires the Admin role.
• The media library is not role-controlled. Anyone who can sign in can upload, replace and delete files there, whatever their role. Treat deletion from Media as something any user can do, and see Images and files.

Some collections are more restricted than the table above — committees in particular are Admin-managed on most sites. If you can open something but not change it, that's your role, and your administrator can tell you which one you have.

Finding your way around

The left-hand menu groups collections into sections. Which collections you see depends on the modules your association has — no two association sites carry exactly the same set, so don't expect this help centre to describe an item you can't find. If it isn't in your menu, your site doesn't have it.

Two things are on every site:

• Pages — the pages of your website
• Media — images and files used in your content

Everything else is module-dependent. Typically you'll also have some combination of news, events, a document library, committees and an FAQ, and — depending on the association — property listings, member or agent records, housing reports, or an education calendar.

The grouping follows the same idea everywhere:

• Content — day-to-day publishing. Most of your work happens here.
• Settings and supporting lists — categories, event types and user accounts. You'll use these when setting something up rather than day to day.
• System — sync logs and, on some sites, submitted enquiries. Useful for checking whether a sync ran.

Making your first change

A safe way to get familiar:

1. Open Pages.
2. Click a page you're comfortable experimenting with.
3. Change something small — a paragraph of text.
4. Use Preview to see how it looks.
5. Save it as a draft rather than publishing.

Your change is stored and nothing is public until you publish. See Pages and the page builder.

Two things that surprise people

Some fields can't be edited. If a field is greyed out, it's synced from another system and the CMS rebuilds it on a schedule. That's normal, not a fault — correct it in the system it comes from. If your site syncs data, What's synced and what you can edit covers this in full.

Your changes aren't live until you publish. Saving a draft is not the same as publishing.

Getting help

Use the help button inside the admin to search this help centre or start a conversation. It knows which page you're on, so you don't need to explain where you are.

Related

• Pages and the page builder
• What's synced and what you can edit (if your site syncs data)