CMS turns Redmine into a site engine: a public Site made of Pages that are rendered through Liquid and edited in the Redmine admin area. The same few building blocks (Pages, Layouts, Snippets, Parts, Files and Menus) are enough for very different sites. This article shows which kinds of sites you can build and what each one uses.
Kinds of sites
| Site | How it is built |
|---|---|
| Marketing or product site | A Landing page as the Site home, Pages in a tree (about, products, pricing), one Layout with the menu and the footer in Snippets. The sample site is exactly this: a small shop with a catalog, a blog and a checkout page. |
| Blog or news | Pages with Tags, a Date and Page fields (author, lead, picture). A list Page reads them through the pages drop and filters by tag, see Recommendations for a site structure. Long lists are split with the paginate block. |
| Help center or documentation | A tree of Pages: a section Page and an article Page under it, shown in an article Layout. The RedmineUP help center is built this way. A Helpdesk plugin can also show such Pages as articles in its widget, see CMS Pages as Helpdesk widget articles. |
| Campaign landing pages | One Page with its own Layout, a Page date and, when needed, a Visibility rule. Use the Preview to check it before you make it Active. |
| Multilingual site | Switch on Localization in the settings. Pages of one language form their own tree (in the sample site Spanish pages live under a root Page with the slug es), and one template serves both languages through site.language. See Build a multilingual site. |
| Files that are not HTML | A Layout has a content type, so a Page can be a stylesheet, a script, sitemap.xml, robots.txt or llms.txt. A Route serves such a Page at a fixed path. |
| Intranet or customer portal inside Redmine | Page Visibility (everyone, any logged-in user, or a group), project tabs that show a Page, action layouts that wrap Redmine screens in a CMS Layout, Redmine hooks for banners and styles, Menus in the top menu. |
What every kind of site uses
- Pages form a tree. The address of a Page is built from its slug and the slugs of its parents.
- Layouts are the frame around a Page. A Layout can have any content type.
- Snippets and Parts hold reusable blocks of content. Snippets are shared by the whole Site, a Part belongs to one Page. See Snippet or part.
- Assets (site files) and page attachments, Global variables and Page fields hold the data that templates read.
- Menus, a Landing page, an Error page and Routes connect the Site with the rest of Redmine.
Where to go next
- Create your first site: the first Layout and Page in ten minutes.
- How a page is built: what happens between the address and the HTML.
- Try the sample site: a ready site you can open and take apart.