Libguides v1 Essentials for Beginners

Published on : April 27, 2026

Libguides is one of the most user friendly and easy accessible CMS (Content Management System) that is used by many online libraries all over the world. The main feature for which it is popular is that it reuses code, multilingual and the best of the best feature of Libguides is that it is responsive. Through Libguides one can manage anything, like any subject, topics or anything.

Using Libguides is not a hard work, but for beginners it may be a time consuming matter. So in spite of having Libguides documentation today I’m going to share something about managing pages easily using libguides CMS .

Dashboard Information:

After login to Libguides you will see the dashboard and those options below.

Figure 1

And also a navmenu like below.

Figure 2

For creating a Libguides page click on the Create Guide option. (Others we will discuss later)

Figure 3

Guide Page & Layout Manage:

If you want to assign the pages to a group then select from the Group Assignment dropdown menu. You can also copy content/layout from other pages (if there are other pages) .After creating the page you will see a page. If you want to add some content to the page you have to create a box and have to give a name to it. Or you can use a previously created box for use from the same popup menu. For that, you have to select a guide from the dropdown and select the particular box of the particular guide. If you select the copy button you will be able to change its style (particularly its style).otherwise, the main style of the box will appear in all the pages that you have reused .Which is a beneficial feature of Libguides.

Figure 4

By clicking the Add/Reorder button you can add or reorder your component that you have created in a box. You can add those items as content from below.

Figure 5

Now there must be a question that how to keep the contents in a layout. Don’t worry, there is a great option for creating page layout and ordering boxes and contents. The PAGE menu is for managing your page and LAYOUT menu is for managing the layout of the page.

Figure 6

Now there is an important part of creating a page. You may not like the custom look of the boxes. Because they are so old types and not so smashing. So, you have to write your own CSS for the pages. For that reason you can rely on the menus below. For the Guides custom JS/CSS you can pick the menu below. But according to me using external link for CSS/JS is the best practice, because you cannot add more than 2000 word in the Guide Custom JS/CSS menu. For seeing the page that you have created you can use the EYE icon on the menu. And somehow if you don’t want to Publish the page you can simply select the Unpublished button.

Figure 7

For adding another page or copy the same page content and layout. Click on the plus icon on the right side of the Home page that you have previously created.

Figure 8

Now we will learn a little bit further about Libguides main features. Like other CMS Libguides also have widget and APIs to show data from the database. Libguides also has a well management for assets and image and other guide options.

Now we will discuss about the nav menu that contains all most every feature of Libguides.

In the Content menu there are several options like Guides (for displaying all the guides list), Assets (all the links in the total guide) , Image Manger (to upload and manage all the images)

Figure 9

The Tools menu has almost all the things handy. Like creating widgets, exporting data to different websites etc.

Figure 10

From the Admin menu you will be able to add and manage more groups, accounts, Tags to your system. You can also write your CSS and JS here. But I recommend you not to do so. Because this changed CSS will affect your whole system. So, it is better not to write CSS / JS here.

Figure 11

Creating a Widget:

For creating a widget go to the Tools > Widgets menu go there. In the widget page there is a tabbed menu for creating different kinds of widgets like Tags, Guides, Search Box etc. In each tab there a lot of customization on the left side to create widgets. You have to select the parameters and according to your setting, an Embed code will be generate in the right side of the box and also a preview of the widgets just in the bottom of it. Just copy the code and paste it in the guide page where you want to show the widgets in the rich text editor. You can change the CSS of the Widgets if you want to. Below there is a screen shot of the widget page.

Figure 12

Look and Feel:

For changing the look of the guide page header, footer, language and page layout you have to go to the Admin > Look and Feel and from there you can easily change them. You can add a banner to the system or can add html for the header.

Figure 13

Links & Social Icon:

Go to the Content > Assets in the dashboard and you will find all the links there also created by you and other guides. Now press the Icons tab and you will find something like the screenshot. For adding an icon in the click on the change icon give a description of that icon and place link there. Now you can call the icons from any of your created boxes in the guide pages.

Figure 14