This page goes through how EmberForgery works as a piece of software and the ideas that went behind building it to give you an in depth look of how everything works.
EmberForgery is a comprehensive Content Management System and Website Builder. It takes a different approach to website design and development to make the process simpler and easier for all people to build, manage, and own their website.
On top of this, we also have FlareFinder.net (you will learn more about this later), the Searh Engine of the FlareNetwork that specifically displays content from websites made in EmberForgery. All websites made in EmberForgery are called a Flaresite.
Considering all of this, plus many more features to come, we perfer to call EmberForgery a Website Engine rather than a 'website builder.'
As expereinced web-developers ourselvs, we noticed that there are a large number of people that use traditional website builders that still end up hiring web-developers. We believe a website builder should be used so you don't have to hire a developer. We want to simplify the process of building, hosting, and maintaining a website that you can call your own. We do this by focusing on all the development tasks while you get to create amazing content that drives traffic to your website.
Learn about the foundations of website design and devlopment, the differences between the two, what makes a website high quality and how it impacts things like S.E.O and website accessibility. Most importantly, why you won't need to hire a web agency for a Flaresite. This will give you insight into the decisions we make about Flaresites.
What to expect within the dashboard.
There are a total of 6 page available in the EmberForgery Dashboard. Each page will have sub-sections with additional options. Depending on your subscription tier, you will have access to fewer pages.
Main Pages include:
There are several tabs on each page that logically organize data as it relates to the main page you are on. Here's an example of what you will see on the main Dashboard page.
The main page tabs represent different types of content that can appear within a specific page. All main pages have at least two tabs for several different reasons. Many pages come with their own settings tab, but each page also has it's own unique features that need to be separated out from the rest of the options.
Soft tabs add extra panels to a main tab. Each soft tab is represents a subset of options from the main page tabs.
In this example we ate in the Settings Main Page, on the Account Main Tab, in the Personal Soft Tab. So the order goes: Main page > Main tab > Soft tab.
Learn about the status indicator on your EmberForgery Dashboard Sidebar
This status is indicated by the red bar that says "Offline" at the bottom of the sidebar. This means your web-server is not online and needs to be ignited within your Settings.
Indicated by an orange bar that says, "Unsaved Changes," this status indicates that your web-server is online and you've added content to your website, however content will not be shown live to end-users until you specifically publish all changes (view more information on this below).
This status will show a green bar that says, "Online." This means your web-server is up and running and has all of your most recent changes live on the website.
Understand the flow of creating, saving, and publishing content to your Flaresite.
One of the more confusing aspects of the Content Creation flow is understanding when your content is saved as a published, but you have not yet published changes to your flaresite.
When you create a piece of content and save the status as "Published" what this does is it tells EmberForgery that you want this piece of content available to all of your users, however, the status of your content differs from the status of your Flaresite.
After saving a piece of content as "Published" status, you will notice that your Flaresite status will change from "Online" to "Unsaved Changes." This means that your data is saved, but technically everything is a "draft" until you explicitly say you want all of your changes published to your live Flaresite for end-users to see.
Here's the general flow:
We've intentionally made the flow like this to ensure you are always aware of the content on your website and you don't publish any unfinished content.