CMS / website content pages

What it is

EmDash is the content management system (CMS) behind our newer, faster brand websites. It’s where the words and pictures on the site live — application pages, services, materials, blog posts, and product-category write-ups. It runs on Cloudflare, built into the site itself.

Two things are important to understand up front:

Content lives in EmDash. Products live in the PIM. The page copy, headings, FAQs, hero images and cross-links come from EmDash. The price, stock, variants, colours and dimensions on a product page come from the PIM (pim.hbplastics.com.au) — not the CMS. If you need to change a price, that’s the PIM, not here. See PIM dashboard.
Only the Astro sites use EmDash. Confirmed: Perspex Online (perspexonline.com.au) and P&M Plastics (pmplastics.com.au). Holland Plastics runs on a different, older system (Sanity), not EmDash.

flowchart LR
  A[EmDash CMS] -->|words + images| C[Website page]
  B[PIM] -->|price + stock + variants| C

💡 Who actually does this

Most new pages — especially bulk application pages, which is the whole reason we built this — are created by asking Claude/DH to do it. Claude writes the copy, creates the page, publishes it and generates the images in one go. You don’t have to hand-build those. This guide covers both: editing a page yourself, and asking for pages to be created.

How to edit an existing content page

Go to the site’s CMS admin at /_emdash/admin (for example www.perspexonline.com.au/_emdash/admin) and sign in.
Find the collection (Applications, Services, Materials, Blog Posts, Product Categories, Products) and open the page you want to change.
Edit the fields — title, description, body copy, FAQs, etc.
Save.
Publish so the change goes live (see the gotcha below — saving is not the same as publishing).

TODO: confirm the exact button labels and screen layout of the /_emdash/admin editor (no screenshots exist yet).

⚠️ Saving a draft is not the same as publishing

Every page has a status: Draft or Published. A new page starts as Draft and will not appear on the live site until you publish it. Editing a live page and saving may leave your change sitting as an unpublished draft — you have to publish for the public to see it.

How to get a new content page created (the bulk-author workflow)

The fastest and most reliable route is to ask Claude/DH. Say what you want, for example: “create an application page for medical device housings on Perspex Online” or “add 10 application pages for the marine group”. Claude will:

Write the page copy (in Australian English, on-brand, 500+ words).
Create the page in the right collection and publish it.
Generate and attach the images.
Run a speed check on the finished page.

This is the workflow that solves the old pain of authoring pages one-by-one in WooCommerce.

💡 What to hand over

Tell whoever’s creating it: the topic, the brand/site, which application group or category it belongs under, and any products or materials it should link to. The more specific, the better the page.

Images

Page images (hero, inline, gallery) are usually generated for the page as part of the create workflow above — you don’t need to supply them.
If you have a real product photo you want used instead, hand it over and ask for it to be uploaded and attached to the page.

TODO: confirm the staff-facing image-upload steps inside the /_emdash/admin editor.

When to use the CMS vs the PIM vs this wiki

CMS (EmDash) — page words and pictures: application pages, service pages, material pages, blog posts, category write-ups, page FAQs.
PIM — anything about the product itself: price, stock, variants, colours, thickness, SKUs, product images from the catalogue. Changing a price in the CMS won’t work — it isn’t stored there. See PIM dashboard.
This wiki (kb.hbplastics.com.au) — internal how-to guides for staff. It is not a customer-facing website; nothing you write here shows on the shop.

Gotchas

⚠️ Don’t compete brand-against-brand on keywords

Each brand owns a lane. Perspex Online owns acrylic / perspex; Plastic Online owns the other engineering plastics; P&M Plastics owns fabrication, tanks and local/geo pages. Don’t write a P&M page targeting a national “perspex cut to size” term, or a Perspex Online page chasing PVC — the group already ranks for those on the right brand’s site. If unsure which brand a page belongs on, ask DH.

New pages default to Draft. If a page you created isn’t showing on the live site, it’s almost always because it was never published.
Product price/stock isn’t in the CMS. Those come from the PIM. See above.
Links should use the plain (no trailing slash) form. For SEO, an internal link should be /materials/acrylic, not /materials/acrylic/. Getting this wrong creates duplicate/orphaned pages. Claude handles this automatically; if you’re pasting links by hand, drop the trailing slash.
No em dashes in page copy. Website content uses commas or full stops, not the long ”—” dash. (This is a content-writing rule for the sites, not for this wiki.)

Common questions

Where do I change a product’s price? — Not here. Prices live in the PIM dashboard, not the CMS.
I created a page but it’s not on the site — why? — It’s probably still a Draft. Publish it. See Saving a draft is not the same as publishing.
Which sites use this CMS? — Perspex Online and P&M Plastics (the Astro sites). Holland Plastics is on an older system.
Can I bulk-add lots of application pages? — Yes, that’s exactly what it’s for. Ask Claude/DH to create them in a batch.

Who to tell if it breaks

Tell Daniel, or flag it in #whats-new. If a published page shows the wrong price or stock, that’s a PIM issue, not the CMS — mention that so it goes to the right place.

Derived from: the perspex-online-cms-pages, pmplastics-cms-pages and astro-site-builder-hbplastics skills. If this looks wrong, the source changed — update the source and re-generate, don’t just patch this page.