Select your site. Each company account can have an unlimited numbers of sites. Each site has its own keywords, data, templates, and pages.

Import your Data: Click on Data, then click on Add.

You can either upload a .txt file or copy and paste your data in the textarea labeled "Content". Either way, your data needs to indicate individual columns, and it must be line-break delimited to indicate individual records.

Also, please note that you should place your column names in the top row (delimited the same way as your data). Each column name can only contain alpha-numeric characters, underscores, and hyphens. Spaces are concatenated.

Click "Go" and wait. If all goes well, you should receive a confirmation message. If not, the Error message will do its best to tell you what went wrong. If you're having trouble importing your data, please contact us.

If your data has imported successfully, you should be able to Preview your data by clicking the Preview link. Please do so to make sure it looks like SPB understands your data.
Next, if there are any relationships that you wish to leverage (e.g. abstracting categories from a products table), you can either add them as new data sets, or you can create them and populate them using the table you just defined an imported.

You might choose to upload separate tables and then define their relationships separately if you have additional content to supplement what could otherwise be abstracted automatically for you. For example, let's say that you have a products table and a categories table for your store. If your categories table contains a column for Category Name as well as a column for Category Description, then it would be preferable to upload both tables separately. On the other hand, if your categories table only contains the Category ID and Category Name, you might choose to create the Categories table from the Products Table in SPB by including a column for Category in your Products text file.

There are 3 ways 2 tables can be related to one another in SPB. These relationships are called One-To-Many, Many-to-Many, and Many-to-One.

A One-To-Many Relationship is defined to be "a relationship between two tables in which each [record] in the first table may be related to one or more [records] in the second table but each [record] in the second table may be related to one and only one [record] in the first table." An example of this would be a store where each Product only has 1 Category.

In SPB, a One-To-Many Relationship is defined to exist between 2 tables wherein 1 table contains a column that holds a foreign key that can refer to one and only one record in the other table.

A Many-To-One Relationship defines the same relationship as a One-To-Many except that it refers to the table that can have multiple instances of its primary keys references in the other table's foreign key column. That is to say, in the previous example the Categories table would be said to have a Many-To-One Relationship with the Products table.

In SPB, a Many-To-Many Relationship is said to exist between 2 tables when multiple records of one table can be joined to multiple records of the other. This is done through the use of a junction table which contains 2 columns. These 2 columns are foreign keys that refer to the primary keys of the 2 connected data tables. For example, a store could have products with multiple categories.

Importing/Creating Relationships

When you upload your data, you can do so with separate files for each data set, or you can create data sets from abstracting relationships using SPB. To manually indicate a relationship between two tables, you will need to select each table, and create the relationship. You only need to define these relationships if you wish to use them in your static pages. To indicate a relationship for a table you have selected, go to Data, select your Table, and then click "Add". If this is a many-to-many relationship, you will need to know the name of the Junction table - and if you're doing this manually you will also need to upload the Junction table. You will also need to know the primary and foreign keys of the related tables.

Alternatively, you can create a relationship by abstracting data from a particular column in a table. This is a particularly useful function to help you find all the non-standard relationships that can be used to get to your content (like price or SKU).

AlphaPoint™

One great way to get to your data is to use an alphabetical trail (similar to a library). AlphaPoint™ is unique in that it populated first letter columns based on the number of results you wish grouped on each page. Let's say, for example, that you have 1000 products with names that are not evenly distributed across each letter of the alphabet (e.g. 200 products that start with 'A' and 20 products that start with 'Z'). If you use our AlphaPoint™ system to populate a first letters column that can be used to get to your products, you might get a column populated with records such as 'Aa-Ac' for some products that start with 'A' and 'X-Z' for products that start with letters towards the end of the alphabet. This assures that you don't waste any valuable real estate with link pages that don't contain any or enough links as possible.

Please note that once you use AlphaPoint™, several new columns are created in your table.

SPB builds page sets that follow the order of the columns you indicate in order to create page sets from data in your table(s). Each column that you indicate is used as a level in the page set. To see your data, select the table and then click 'Preview'. The top line should contain a list of all your columns.

Now you need to plan your page sets. How many will you have, and what columns will you use for each one? Go to Page Sets, and add a set for each group of records you wish to use. Sometimes you might use the same table for multiple page sets - this is at your discretion. We advise splitting your data into quantifiable relationships so that you can use multiple paths to get to the same core set of pages.

For each page set, you will need to indicate its table, select a template (you can add the page set and then return to plug in the template), provide a name for your reference, indicate the root url, indicate a folder name (a name will be automatically created if you don't), and indicate if the last level should be at the top level of the page set.

You will also need to add a level for each column that you wish to use in each page set. Keep in mind the pages are created in order of the columns you indicate. For example, let's say you create a first_letters_vc column for your products (product_vc). You might create a page set with 2 levels (which are indicated using the column names). The first level would be first_letters_vc, and the second level would be product_vc. If you would like the product_vc page to be created at the top level of your set of pages, check 'Last Level Top'.

You indicate replaceable copy in each template. Each level of a page set has its own template, and in each of those templates you can indicate any and all column names that are present for that particular level and all levels prior. If the template is being used for the last level of a page set, you can use all column names, and a page is created for an iteration of each record, and all columns are replaceable.

For templates that indicate data sets (i.e. the first letters template or a categories template), relationships or data sets are indicated using tags that define the data. For example, on your first_letters_vc template, you would indicate mark-up for a linked list of products with a tag called . All content inside this tag is looped for every product instance (for each specific first_letters_vc group). Inside a tag, you can use the following replaceable content:
<current_column_name>
<number_of_records>indicate number of records here</number_of_records>
<a href="current_directory">anchor text</a>
</current_column_name>

Other replaceable words include: current_directory : replaced with the directory name that is created.
current_home_by_level: for use in links and images to get to the root.
current_keyword_meta_description_mem : replaced by keyword content.
current_keyword_meta_keywords_mem : replaced by keyword content.
current_keyword_content_mem : replaced by keyword content.
current_keyword_title_vc: replaced by keyword content.
current_keyword_vc : replaced by keyword content.
current_column_urlencoded : replaced by the column's record (for use in urls). current_keyword_contents_mem: replaced by UniKey™ Copy

Once you have indicated your data, plugged in your templates, keywords/content, and indicated your page sets...you're ready to start generation! If any of your page sets show relationships between their respective data sets, then you must Click process for each relevant page set. Once the page sets are processed, click preview for each one. Take a look at what is created. If it works, click create! Then download your zip file.