Information Technology
Adding new pages to the website
Luki's tutorial
As I've designed the template engine and ACL (access control list) running on this site, here are some pointers how to add new pages. This is the only manual there is as we are not using an off-the-shelf package. If you have additional questions, please find me. I will be glad to show you how I've designed things to work.
Basics
To be able to create, edit and delete pages that you have privileges for, you must first log in. There is a login button on the bottom left of most pages. Log in with your MBI username and password (same as you use the Linux or Windows logons and for email). Watch out for typos, 3 strikes and your out for a while. Your session remains active until you log out (you will find the logout button on the bottom left as well) or close your browser completely.
Once logged in, you will see an Edit link on the top right of the pages you have privileges to edit. If you are unsure how can edit a particular page, go to it and see the footer. On the left it lists the people who can edit the page (Contact: Cascio, Holton, ...). You can only see this if you are logged in. You may have access to specific sections of the site, just a single page, or a whole lot more. See me with privileges questions (for now).
The Editor
I have added a fancy WYSIWYG editor to make your page editing easier. You can either edit the page in Rich Text mode using the provided tool bar to adjust the formatting, or you can edit the HTML source if you so choose. See the Source button on the toolbar. The editor is quite nice, it will let you specify colors, bold/italic/underline, create links and tables, insert images, upload new images to the server for use, etc. You can even cut & paste your content from Word. Play with it. Try the right mouse click for context-sensitive menus. Yes, it has a spell checker too (see toolbar). If you want to find out more, see the FCKeditor website: http://www.fckeditor.net/.
A specific example
Let's say you are Mikey and have privileges to edit the Local > Software page. Go to that page and click the Edit button. You can make changes to the page to your desire. Click the Save button to save your version. What you see in editing mode is close but not always 100%. You can preview your changes using the Preview button on the toolbar, or just save the page and close the editor to see the real thing.
Now, let's say you want to make a new page for a new program, for example Local > Software > Coot. You first make a link to that page in the main Local > Software index. Click the Insert Link button on the toolbar, in the windows that pops up choose Protocol other, and enter coot into the URL. Just coot. You can edit the text displayed for link when you close the Insert Link window. Of course if you want to make a link to an external site or an absolute link to some other page on our website, enter the complete URL or absolute URL, respectively, and select the protocol (i.e. http).
Once you save the page you got a link that currently goes to a non-existing page. That's OK. Click on the link, and it will bring up a an empty page (well, it says that the page does not exist). On that page, click the Edit button and enter your content about Coot. Once you hit save, you got a new page for Coot. Of course you can keep building this hierarchy that way.
Caveats
- Changing the main page title (the text in black on the very top of the content area) isn't obvious. If the auto-determined doesn't suit you, here's how you do it. In Source mode, add the following tag to the top
<? $page[title] = "YOUR PAGE TITLE"; ?> - Currently there is no way for you to add new items to the menu on the left. This needs to be done by the admin. We do not anticipate that this will be very frequent since you can add your own links to the main page content. However, if it becomes and issue we will need to figure something out. And if you have a suggestion how to make it work, that's even better! In the meantime, just email me to add a link for you.
- There is one backup of a page made when the page is saved, but we do not have a version control system. I am actually thinking of implementing this to track changes and be able to "roll back" if necessary. It's on the To Do list.
- I'm sure there was something else, but I forgot. Keep in mind that I'm doing this in my "spare" time...
