Site Administration Tools

Links to the tools used to edit and update the site:

These are explained below:

Editing the front page

The main page consists of five sections embedded in a template - this means that both content and appearance may be varied independently:

  • MainText - the main text.
  • MenuBar - this is the main site navigation menu (the orange buttons).
  • Footer - the page footer.
  • RightBar - the news index.

The menu bar and the footer appear across the entire site and are least likely to ever need changing (the menu bar can only have six items on it and one has to be marked-up differently: changing either of these two things would Break the Site).

The news index should only ever need changing at the end of the year, to add the links to the previous year's news (or if we add another RSS feed).

Modifications to the shortcuts box may be needed from time to time as external links change or we need to point site users at particular pages.

News page editing and creation

To update a news item, navigate to it and simply click on the "edit entry" link. Be careful to change only the content and not the surrounding template.

To create a new News item, click here for a News item but do not edit the resulting page. Instead, follow the instructions in the comment field and edit the text in the location bar to the appropriate date and title, and press enter. This will then take you to a blank template which you can fill in.

It is important when you add a News item that is the first item of a month or year, that you make the appropriate changes to the news sidebar page and to the home page news bar (which is to say, add the month just gone to the list of months in the first, or the year just ended to the list of years at the bottom of both).

Control bar edit (the grey control buttons)

The appearance of these buttons is determined by your level of access to the various parts of the site. Consequently, the textual markup which governs how the buttons are displayed is mixed with logical markup which governs whether they are displayed. Adding new buttons, or altering the text on existing ones, should only be done extremely carefully and on the test server.

Other admin tools

The first of these is useful for checking for orphan pages or links with nothing at the end of them: very useful when pages are being moved from one group to another (such as from Team to Documents) or from the test server (which almost by definition does not mirror the main site in terms of page creation).

Finally, looking at the list of all recent changes gives an overview of who's been doing what and where: if you wish to see what change was made to a page listed here, navigate to that page and click on the grey "history" button.