Terminology

Within dotCommunity and on the web in general there are a set of terms which have specific meanings.

This page lists the meanings of each of the terms used in this documentation.

Application - Within dotCommunity an application is a standalone set of web pages that provide a pre-configured set of functionality, for example the surveys or discussions applications. These applications provide an administration interface to allow configuration of the application but most of the layout and page ordering is fixed by the application itself.

Breadcrumb Trail - A list of links that represent your current location within the website. Usually the breadcrumb trail will generally indicate a "deeper" location of the site as you traverse it and the final entry will be your current page and so will not be a link. So for example a breadcrumb within discussions might be: "My Site > Discussions > Gadgets > Phones > Nokia > I Like my Nokia thread > create new post".

Content Management System (CMS) - Software that allows you to create and manage content you layout with a rich text editor.

dotCommunity Service - An entire installation of dotCommunity. This will include it's own independent set of sitewide and area administrators and it's own distinct set of created websites.

Main Navigation/Site Navigation - The main menu presented as part of the non-administration pages of your website. This includes links to your content and applications to allow visitors to your site to find the pages they are interested in. Also referred to as the main/site navigation menu.

Permission - The access rights that a user or group of users have within a website, application, or piece of free-form content. For more information on permissions refer to the Permissions section of the manual.

Slot - A region of a page controlled by the CMS that snippets of a web page can be placed within to increase the layout flexibility.