Help with the Website | Edge Training

Here you will find descriptions of how to perform common administration tasks on the website:

Using the E-mail

Go to http://www.edgetraining.co.za/webmail/ and log in using your e-mail address as the user name (e.g. graham@edgetraining.co.za) and your password. You can then manage your e-mails over the web.

You can also access your e-mail using Outlook Express by creating a new account and using mail.edgetraining.co.za as the POP3 server, and your usual ISP SMTP server (may be smtp.mweb.co.za, or some such).

Logging in as Administrator

On the home page, click the "Login" button in the top right of the screen. Enter the user name as "Administrator", the password and click "Login". There should now be a menu on the right entitled "Administrator", with the entries like "create content", "my account" and "administer".

Pages

Creating a new page

While logged in, click the "create content" menu item, then click "static page". Only some of the fields have to be filled in:

Leave the "Author", "Authored On" and "Options" fields as they are.
Enter a descriptive title under "Title". This is also the page heading, it appears in large text above the page itself.
You don't generally need the path alias. If it is a page about the company something of the form "about/thepagetitle" might do. A new course would be aliased to "courses/coolnewcourse".
Select the category in which the page falls, such as "Corporate Training" or "Learning Resources"
Write the text of the node. You can paste text in from Word if necessary. The buttons at the top of the editor behave mostly the same as Microsoft Word.
Ignore the "Link name" and "Link description" - they are not used.
Leave the "Type" of the page as "HTML".
Preview the page, so you can check that it looks ok and make changes if it doesn't. When you are satisfied, click submit.

Using the built-in editor

As said, most of the buttons are the same as in Microsoft Word, but there are a few extra features:

The icon shows the HTML source of the page, if the formatting doesn't look right, knowlege of HTML is sometimes necessary to fix it.
The icon lets you edit the page in full screen mode in a new window clicking it again closes the window and brings you back to the normal editor.

Editing a page or an image

When you are viewing a page or image while logged in as Administrator, there will be an "administer" link at the bottom, clicking on it brings up the original editing page from which you can edit the title, text, and for images even upload a different image in place of the old one.

Linking to a page by title

When editing one of the pages, you can link to another page using its title. For example, the text [ [Contact Us|contact page]] without the space after the first bracket produces a link to the contact page. The part before the "|" is the title of the page you want to link to, and the part after is the text you want to show up in the link. Be careful to get the title right, because if more than one page has the same title or no pages do, you get taken instead to a page of search results for those words.

Images

Creating an image

Before anything else, remember to shrink the image down to the size you want to see it as on the website. After clicking "create content", then "image", the steps are similar to creating a story:

Choose a suitable title for the image, which also shows up as its caption in the photo album.
Ignore the path alias, its not needed here.
Choose the album it is to appear in, such as "FNB" (try not to leave it simply on "Corporate")
Click "browse" and select the image file off your hard drive.
The description shows up only in the images own page in the album, and can be a short story about the events surrounding it, but you don't have to fill it in.
Click preview to see if the image looks ok, and click submit when you are satisfied.

Using an image in your page

When you are writing a page, you can link to an image by its node ID. When you are viewing an image in its album, the location bar at the top of your browser will show something like "http://www.edgetraining.co.za/node/view/92" - 92 is the node ID of the image.

Then, in your page you can write [ [image:92]], and the text will be replaced with the image in the preview and the final article. When you do this, leave out the space after the first bracket. I put the space in to stop the text being replaced by the image.

There are more options though: the full syntax is

Using "image" puts the picture in your article, using "thumb" puts a thumbnail linking to the image in its gallery, and "link" looks like "image" but also has a link to the gallery like "thumb".

After the compulsory node_id is optional choice of alignment option - using [ [image:92,right]] will right-align the image, you can experiment with the other options.

After the alignment we have hspace, vspace and border - which determine the horizontal and vertical offset of the image from the text, and the width of the border around the image in pixels.

As an example, the [ [thumb:92,right,30,0,20]] after this sentence produces a right-aligned thumbnail link to the Edge Training logo with 30 pixels horizontal and 0 pixels vertical offset and a 20 pixel border:

Unfortunately you can't use the options to to center the image. For that effect, you have to center the text in the editor. When you preview, the image will also be centered. It would look like this while you're editing:

[ [thumb:92]]

Creating a new album

The image albums are created from a taxonomy vocabulary tree.

As administrator, select "administer", then "taxonomy".
Under the operations for the "Images" vocabulary select "Add term".
The "Title" of of the term is the name of the new album, the description is not compulsory, but does show up under the name to describe the album.
For the "Parents", if the album is for a new company you have done a training program with, select "Corporate Training" as the parent. Similarly, select "Schools Training" if the album is for a school.

Uploading to the new album

It is possible to create a new album at once instead of uploading the files one by one.

Using an FTP program such as FileZilla, log into ftp.edgetraining.co.za and upload all the images to the "website/upload" directory.
Select "Administer", then "Images" then "Directory Upload: Fast" from the menu.
Leave the "Directory to scan" as "upload"
Check the box "Delete images after insert" (to clear the upload directory for your when its finished)
Select a gallery to upload to, possibly using the link to create a new gallery with the taxonomy interface.

Using a picture as a link to a page

Using the icon in the editor, you can, use the URL of the page to put a hyperlink to around an [ [image:123]] image text, so that the text becomes an image which takes you to another page when you click on it. The URL of a page is its address, which you can get by copy-pasting it out of the browser address bar while viewing the page you want to link to. This is what I did for the table of badges on the "Corporate Training" page.

Creating and editing Blocks

Blocks are the bits of quotes and adverts and menus that appear down the left and right of the page.

Using the menu, select "Administer", then "Configuration", then "Blocks".
Checking a box in the "enabled" column allows that block to be displayed. Without it the block is never shown.
The "custom" column is not used here, it allows a logged-in user to choose which blocks he/she wants to see.
The weight determines how far up the column block appears. Low weight "float up", high ones "sink down".
The region is the side it appears on - left, right or both.
The "path" determines which pages an enabled block appears on. The syntax can be quite complex, even unpredictable. It is best to use the existing examples and simply add or remove words - don't try to change the punctuation.
"Edit" links allow you to edit the content in each block. Beware that this is HTML. If you want to say, edit some quotes, just copy the way it was done in the other quotes blocks.
To add a new block, select "new block" from the menu. The "Title" is what appears above the block when it is displayed. The "Description" is what shows up on the "Blocks" administration page. The content is what is shown.

More complicated things

Some changes require knowledge of HTML - for that you should rather contact me to help out. There is also documentation in the administration menu, and if you have time you can try the different options and look at all the menus to see what they do.