Getting started
Introduction
PageTree lets you build complete pages from reusable blocks, right in the October CMS back-office. The live preview is rendered inside your theme layout.
What PageTree is for
PageTree is built for two audiences:
- content editors, who create, organize and publish pages without touching any code;
- developers, who stay in control of the output: a block is a PHP class, a YAML form and a Twig template.
To try the editor without installing anything, start a free demo.
Core principles
Pages stored in the database
A PageTree page is stored in the database. It does not create any CMS page file in your theme. The plugin resolves the requested URL from the page slug and serves the page directly.
Blocks
The content of a page is a list of blocks: title, text, image, gallery, banner, section with columns, and more. Each block has its own form. You can add, move, duplicate, hide, copy and paste blocks, including from one page to another.
The block library grows in three ways:
- the built-in blocks shipped with PageTree;
- the October CMS components of your plugins, usable as blocks;
- blocks added by developers, in PHP or from the back-office.
A preview inside your theme
Each page uses a layout from your theme. The editor preview renders the page in this layout, with your styles. It offers three screen widths and can be opened in a separate window. See Preview.
A tree built from slugs
The URL of a page is its slug: the page with the slug services/audit is served at /services/audit. In the editor, pages are grouped by URL level: /services/audit appears under /services. There is no parent/child relation to manage: the tree follows the URLs. See Tree and URLs.
Main features
- Visual editor built into the October CMS Editor, with a searchable block library and drag and drop.
- Column layouts (Section block) or free CSS Grid layouts (Grid Container block).
- SEO: meta title and description with a search result preview, Open Graph, Twitter/X card, canonical URL, robots, sitemap exclusion, hreflang and JSON-LD.
- History: every save of the blocks is kept as a version, per language; preview a previous version and save it to restore it.
- Editing on the website: editors edit texts in place and move, hide or delete blocks directly on the public page, then save everything at once.
- Publishing: active or not, published or not, scheduled publication date.
- Translated titles, slugs, blocks and SEO fields when RainLab.Translate is installed.
What PageTree does not replace
PageTree adds a page type to October CMS. It builds on the rest of the CMS and replaces none of it.
| Part | With PageTree |
|---|---|
| The theme: layouts, partials, CSS, header, footer | Stays in your theme. Every PageTree page is rendered in a layout of the active theme. See Theme and layouts. |
| The CMS pages of the theme | Keep working. If a visible PageTree page has the same URL as a CMS page, the PageTree page is served. |
| Tailor, the blog and other plugins | Keep their own pages. Their components can be placed on a page as blocks, and a custom block can list Tailor entries. |
| Menus | Are still handled by your theme or a menu plugin. PageTree pages can be picked in the page finder, under the Block Pages type. |
| The media library | Block images and files are picked from the October CMS media library. |
| Administrators and their permissions | Are still managed by October CMS. PageTree adds two permissions. |
| Translations and multisite | Provided by RainLab.Translate and October CMS multisite, which PageTree builds on. |
| The sitemap | PageTree does not generate one. It only records, page by page, whether a page should be left out of it. |
License
PageTree is a paid plugin, sold on the October CMS marketplace and installed through a project of your octobercms.com account. A license covers one project, so one website. See Installation.
To discover it without installing anything, start the free demo: a backend and a website just for you.