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Help for Site Users

Sun, 2006-10-15 16:05 — carlp

A guide for site users and contributors.

Security and Access Control

Registered users can't do anything more than unregistered users, except read and post comments to existing material on the site. A person has to e-mail me (or have me notice them and know them) to get validated and promoted. That user then can become a "Power User" (effectively, a WetLeather Family Member) in order to have permission to access the Roster, create recipes and content pages, blog entries, etc. There are certain types of content that only Site Administrators (me and Marc) get to create, currently including Featured Member Bikes and Quotes of the Month.

Forgot Password or Login Name

You can always recover your account using only the e-mail address, or only the username. It will generate a new password and e-mail a one-time to your e-mail address, then require you to change it again when you login. If you can remember your e-mail address, you can get logged-in. If you can't remember your e-mail address, guess! Try several variations, it doesn't hurt. Incorrect guesses are not logged.

Please recall that micapeak.com's mailing lists and wetleather.com's community website are separate entities and not integrated. They share share nothing except people - no data.

Your MAILING LIST SUBSCRIPTION and its options and controls are kept at micapeak.com. To make changes, go to http://www.micapeak.com/mailman/listinfo/wetleather and give your e-mail address right under where it says "Current Subscribers:" Watch this screen capture video:
http://www.screencast.com/t/qkNkq4MAO

Your subscribed e-mail address is always required to login to micapeak.com's mailing list maintenance pages, as used in the above procedure to make changes to your mailing list subscription.

Your login for the WetLeather.com site and Roster is almost certainly NOT your e-mail address. If you didn't create it yourself, I assigned a login ID to you initially using only the name part (before the @ sign) in your primary e-mail address at the time I created the site's current user database in Drupal.

Your ROSTER ENTRY, as well as recipes, stories, blogs, QOTM, Featured Member Bike and so on are all kept at wetleather.com  To update your Roster entry and/or access many other fine features, go to http://www.wetleather.com
This video illustrates a Roster change: http://www.screencast.com/t/Bz5o3GVNb

This video illustrates the way you might change your wetleather.com site user ID, or password or picture, etc. ttp://www.screencast.com/t/Qvz6A68lXpF

IF YOU REMEMBER NOTHING ELSE, PLEASE REMEMBER THIS:
micapeak.com for the mailing list subscription stuff
wetleather.com for all other wetleather stuff
gpndg.com for Gather information

Reading and perusing the site

Front page

By default, things like Blog Entries and Forum postings get promoted to the front page list, where they sort of "age off" as they get older. Some content is "sticky" on the front page and appears at the top, currently including "RIP Liegh Ann", "Featured Member Bike" and "Quote of the Month". The remainder of the front page is in "header plus teaser" form, the newest 30 or so contributions in Blogs, Forums, Images, Polls categories. New Pages may or may not get promoted to the front page, it's a choice of the author and/or me.

RSS feeds

There's a feed icon at the bottom of the left sidebar on the front page titled "Syndicate". It produces quite a nice feed (at least when viewed by IE7's feed-reader) that replicates the front page (although strictly in date order) and includes its own table of contents by category. RSS feeds are also avaialble for each forum topic (and blogs, and maybe several other things) via the little RSS icon at the end of the content in the center section, lower left. "Title plus teaser" format.

Menus

The menus in the left sidebar are intended to be self-explanatory. There are multiple "tables of contents" from different viewpoints, indexing the same material. A given piece of content may appear in mroe than one table/index. Featured Content shows direct links to some of the more useful/popular/requested sub-sections of the site - including a "Table of Contents by Topic", which shows all content on the site, indexed by the Topic assigned to each piece.

Appropriate content

I don't want the website to supplant the mailing list. I continue to post most of what I have to say to the mailing list. I would like the website to continue to contain three or four types of content that are not well served by the mailing list as it is. The website already served many of these, but Drupal makes it possible and easy for people other than me and Marc to contribute. And since I'm a lazy bastard and Marc has many other projects including Micapeak.com, this will hopefully improve the usefulness of the WetLeather Community website.

  • pictures
  • illustrated articles
  • Reference material of some at least semi-durable value
  • personal lives, journal, blog

If the mailing list is the Cocktail Party (and the Communtity Bulleting Board), the website is maybe part Library - the pages and reference sections - and part family bulletin board? I hope this website change is, among other benefits in making my contribution easier, an outlet for material that people would like to share but don't feel it's of wide enough interest to post to the mailing list (other than perhaps a "note: look here: " URL).

It's going to be an interesting question for authors - some material would obviously be appropriate either way or both ways (copy/paste and a tabbed browser make it pretty easy and quite fast to post something both ways at the same time. There are also mail-to-forum gateways (both ways) and such, but I don't really want to go there. I'd like to see what evolves.

As Martin said: It's like moving a library. They build new buildings with more shelves
so they can pull interesting stuff out of the stacks.

Posting ("Creating Content")

Basics

Posts/Articles can be short, don't have to be any longer than e-mails. Pages you write don't have to use anything but plain text, though there's a WYSIWYG on-web active editor that allows you to upload photos and place them in your page (or blog, or whatever) interactively and with preview. It's not a tremendously full-featured HTML editor, but it certainly does the basic typographic stuff like lists. It's got a decent balance of features and ease-of-use, and the price was right (free). The little camera icon at the top right of the editor controls allows uploading and inserting pictures.

Creating a page is as easy as writing an e-mail. There are a couple of styles set up for reposts of e-mail, which I can tell you how to use; you have to beat up the WYSIWYG editor a bit to use them at the moment.

Which Content Type?

After you login, at the top left under your user name you'll see a menu that includes "create content". This is where you start to post something new. The types are:

blog entry
A blog is a regularly updated journal or diary made up of individual posts shown in reversed chronological order. A blog is tightly coupled to the author so each user will have his or her 'own' blog. Post stuff here that is of a personal nature, or closely associated with you, as opposed to group or general reference.
event
An event is a page of information with a start and end date, thus appearing in the events calendar. This type is not yet well organized as it applies to WetLeather.
forum topic
Create a new topic for discussion in the forums. New topics can be created for discussion of certain stuff - though everyone is strongly encouraged to use the WetLeather mailing list for discussions, rather than the website forums.
image
An image (with thumbnail). This can be used for publishing photographs or screenshots, but it's almost always preferable to create a page or blog entry, and insert the photos there.
page
A traditional static content page that will be visible to the general public.
poll
A poll is a multiple-choice question which visitors can vote on. Available to the general public.

Sections and Topics

Each piece of content belongs to at least two classification "vocabularies": Section and Topic. Sections are very general types that apply to big chunks of the site: "Base Pages", "Reference", "Features", etc. If in doubt, your new content should be submitted with a Section of "Posts".

Topics are a separate system of classification by the subject matter. Examples include "Food - opinions", "Humor", "Motorcycle Stories", and so on. Your new content can belong to more than one Topic.

Referring to your content

Practically verything has a URL in the form of "node/[0-9]+" and those are durable URLs. There's a facility to assign more-readable URL aliases to them, so a lot of the base pages and "old standard" features have the same URLs they most recently had before Drupal. I could also give content authors the ability to create their own "friendly" URLs for content, but I'm not really hot on that idea. I probably could be persuaded.