PEO is top-notch as far as its ticketing portion goes, but it’s also a pretty decent content management tool. Maybe you want to add some extra pages or maybe you even want to use PEO as the platform for your entire site and do all content management through the Administration Site. Doing this isn’t too difficult due to a tool we have called the screen loader.

Canned PEO screens have a lot of extra “stuff” that goes on in the background, so if you’ve ever added a screen to your site and it did not load or gave errors, it’s because this stuff is missing. To account for that, we use the screen loader. Here is how it works:

1. Create your my_new_screen.htm in an HTML editor and drop it into your site folder
2. On the Admin site, go to Site Design, Screens and create a new screen for your interface. Mine will be named My_Screen
3. Use the screen part location tool or drill into the screen to create a new screen part. The Type will be INCLUDE and the File will be my_new_screen.htm
4. Now when you want to link to this page, call it like this: http://tickets.mysite.org/public/load_screen.asp?screen=my_screen
5. If you’re linking to the custom screen from a non-PEO site, you will need to use the loader tool, as discussed in this post.  Your link will look like:  http://tickets.mysite.org/public/loader.asp?target=load_screen.asp?screen=my_screen

Now you have custom content on your PEO site without a lot of fuss (or paying a lot of money!). You don’t have to create your own ASP or HTML pages either. If you prefer, you can create a screen and then build HTML:Element screen parts for it using the designer in PEO. For this situation, there is no File Name for your screen or your screen parts, so just set this field to the same value as your Name field.

Have you created any custom screens? Do you use PEO as a platform for your entire site? Share your experiences in the comments.