Q&A

The Documentation & Training page has good information on the major and common features available in Brightspot. The Quick Start tutorial linked on the Documentation and Training page can be a good start for you to become familiar with Brightspot. The features guides are updated and made as comprehensive as possible, so they should be the first place you check if you have a question. Experimenting with your website is also a big part when it comes to improving familiarity.

See the Help and Training feature guide for more information.

Unfortunately, there isn't a built-in feature in Brightspot to leave notes just for a website. The best way to do this would be to create a page in Brightspot that you will use only for notes and delete the URL on the page so that users cannot view it from the live site.

You can delete the URL by unchecking the box that creates a default URL or permalink on the right side of the page. Or if the URL has already been generated, click on the minus sign and hit publish to delete the URL.

However, within the Rich Text module, there is an option to leave comments that won't display on the actual published page. See the Rich Text Feature guide for more information.

Follow the instructions on this page to set up a shortcut key to open the web page you are currently on in the Brightspot editor, if the page belongs to a Brightspot site.

Please see BYU's Branding Guide website for information.

To maintain design consistency across all BYU sites, this setting has been disabled.

Brightspot hasn't specified a storage limit. As far as editors are concerned, there isn't a storage limit.

The Brightspot Upload widget on the Dashboard allows editors to upload multiple files or a folder. Follow the steps below to bulk upload from the dashboard.

1. Navigate to the "Upload" area on the dashboard.
2. Click on “select” which opens a popup window.
3. Choose whether to upload files or a folder.
4. Select the desired file(s) or folder.
5. Alternatively, editors can drag and drop files/folders into the widget to upload.
6. Input the desired information for the uploaded items and click the "Upload" button

See the Bulk Upload feature guide for more information.

Any content item's title can be changed by editing the title field in the content item's editor page to input the desired title.

When publishing an attachment within Brightspot, the title field automatically populates based on the file name of the uploaded document. This can also be changed by editing the title field. Once you publish the attachment, the new name will be visible as the page title and reflected in the URL.

To delete content from Brightspot, find and open the item and select the three dots on the upper right-hand side of the page. This will drop down a menu. Select the “Archive” option. After the item has reloaded, open the drop down menu again and select “Delete Permanently.” The item will then be permanently deleted from Brightspot.

This is likely because the page was archived by someone accidentally. You should first search for that page after adjusting the global filters in the Brightspot search page to include "Archived" items under status. If the page was archived, you can restore it by clicking on the "Restore" button on the upper right-hand corner within that page's editor.

If that page still cannot be found after searching for archived items, contact websites@byu.edu and they can look into the bigger database for it. If they cannot find it, then the page was likely deleted permanently from Brightspot and cannot be recovered.

To find published pages within a site, enter the name of the published page in the central search bar on top of any Brightspot editor page. Use the filters shown in the screenshot on the left side to narrow the search results.

Sometimes, it might be faster to use content type, published date, and status filters to find a content item rather than searching for it in Brightspot search. Adding a space after the keywords also helps with the search occasionally.

Content items can be copied within Brightspot by selecting the three dots on the upper right-hand corner of the page next to the green “Publish” button. Then, select the “Copy xxx” option on the dropdown menu. This can be done for any page, article, section, etc. within the Brightspot site you have access to. Be sure to rename the copied item after creating it.

To copy a website, you must first be an admin of that website. Then, follow the steps below to make a copy of your site. See the screenshot below for reference.

1. Open the main tab under Sites & Settings and set the toggle to “Allow Site Copy.”
2. Select the three dots in the top right-hand corner and select “Copy This Site.”
3. Adjust the site title, URL, and any site settings as needed. Remember that this feature copies the site setup, but individual pages and content may need to be copied, shared, or recreated in the new site. 

After editing the site, please fill out the Website Launch form linked on this website's homepage to make the site live.

If you are not an admin of the site you would like to copy from, please fill out the Website Creation form also linked on this website's homepage. This will forward a request to the team that creates websites in Brightspot.

BYU Websites Homepage

Robots.txt tags can be added to specific sections, pages, images, or any other object inside the site to prevent web crawlers from accessing specific information (such as Google’s algorithms that cause certain websites and images to appear in search results). Information on how Google handles robots.txt files can be
found here.

Follow the steps below to add robots.txt tags to a content item.

1. Navigate to the page or other object you want to add it to.
2. Go to the SEO tab.
3. Scroll down to the Robots section.
4. Click on the dropdown and select any tags you want added to the object (multiple can be added) 

Brightspot's default styling automatically adjusts for device differences. A mobile preview can be generated by switching the mode from Desktop to Mobile in the preview panel. The preview panel can be unhid by clicking on the "eye" icon in the Brightspot editor header.

Note that some content might be missing in the mobile view compared to the desktop view. This is an error from the Brightspot vendor's side, and they are looking into eliminating the possibility. Not many pages experience this error. If the user searches the web page, they can still pull up the information they are looking for. The information might just not be displayed from the beginning.

Unfortunately, Brightspot recognizes tabbed content to be on the same web page. Buttons can only be linked or directed to a webpage, rather than a piece of text on the webpage. Hence, tabbed content cannot be redirected to, unless they are the first tab on the webpage.

A workaround would be to use a navigation panel to separate different tabbed content into pages, use a navigation header to set up anchors on the page, or set up a Book module on the page.

Yes! You can manually change any content item's publish date

1. Click on the three dots on the top right when editing an article.
2. Click on Tools.
3. Scroll down to the "Advanced edits" section and choose a New Publish Date.
4. Save.

The common integrations are listed below.

• Photoshelter (for BYU Photos) 
• Brightcove for videos
• Google ReCaptcha for forms
• Google Analytics

Please see the platform guide on the developer portal for more information distinguishing between Brightspot and Mendix. Note that Brightspot doesn't provide a database connection to Mendix.

It is preferred that users host their websites on a byu.edu domain, but if absolutely necessary a Brightspot site can be configured to be hosted on an external domain. If you believe that this is necessary for your website, contact websites@byu.edu for assistance.

Please contact Reclaim Hosting for information regarding websites that weren't migrated over to Brightspot but were once hosted using the BYU server or domains. Their information can be found on the internet.