CCPOPS - Concord Carlisle Patrons Of Performing Students

CivicSpace site adminstrators can control what kinds of markup or formatting can be used in creating content on the site by specifying input formats. Some site administrators might wish to require only HTML coded text, or plain text without any HTML format. In configuring the input formats, administrators can select from filters which limit users to a list of allowable HTML tags or add in custom formatting like automatic line breaks.

NOTE: If you install additional 3rd party input filter modules, in addition to turning the modules on, you'll need to enable them through the input format configuration.

The Settings page, accessible at administer > settings, contains many general configuration settings for your CivicSpace site. Here you can modify some of the information you entered in the configuration wizard during initial site setup:

• Name. The name of your CivicSpace site, displayed at the top of every page and also optionally as part of your theme in the header
• E-mail address. The email address used as the "From" address for all emails sent out by your site, including for new user registration, forgotten password requests, and subscription notifications.
• Slogan. A short descriptive phrase about your site, which is optionally displayed as part of your theme; required to be included in the CivicSpace directory. The slogan will also appear in the description for the site's RSS feeds.
• Mission. Brief introduction to the purpose or goals of your site. Optionally displayed in a special style above the first post on your front page. Also required for the directory feature.
• Footer message. Message that is optionally displayed at the bottom of pages as part of the theme. The default message contains a copyright notice which you can add to or modify.

Other default settings include

The text of this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (2.0). Permission to copy, modify, or redistribute this guide is only granted if this license is included and the CivicSpace Site Configuration Guide is attributed.

Content for this guide was produced by CivicSpace and was based on DrupalEd documentation. Thanks to Bryght for permission to draw on some of their How To's in constructing this guide.

CivicSpace provides a number of ways to find out who has been visiting the site and who has been posting content:

• User list page. A table of users with their last access to the site.
• CivicSpace logs provide userful statistics and system-generated messages:
  • Recent hits. Logs of access to individual site pages. Provides information such as username, IP address, and referring page.
  • Referrer logs. Site referers for both internal and external links.

There are quite a few other modules listed on the module configuration page which have not so far been mentioned. In this section, you'll find descriptions of some of them. Some are currently running; others are turned off. You can also load other contributed modules by downloading them from drupal.org and installing them yourself. Make sure that they are for Drupal 4.6 or they may not work.

Always remember that whenever you enable a module, you should check any permissions the module might have associated with it in order for users to have access to the module. When working with permission settings, it is often useful to create a test user and grant them the role for the permissions you are enabling. Then login as that user and verify that you have indeed granted the permissions.

CivicSpace has a permission system which places users into roles/groups of users. A visitor who is not logged in is an anonymous user and a newly registered user is an authenticated user. An additional role has been added to this installation, an admin user which is given full access on the site. In the original account setup, the root super user account which was created first is not affected by the CivicSpace permission system; this user always has access to everything.

Some configuration tips:

• Registration. The default registration permission settings on this site allows anyone to register. The user settings page will allow you to change whether users can register on their own, require administrator approval, or not at all. The email sent to users can also be changed here, as well as the registration page information guidelines that users see when registering.

CivicSpace page layout is very similar to many other websites: a header, a footer, a main content column down the center, and block columns down the side with links and other information. Blocks, then, are the small boxes of links, etc., you see in the left and/or right hand columns.

As an administrator, you can choose which blocks appear in the left or right and in what order (using weights) in the block administration section. You can create and edit custom blocks such as the Sample Block which uses HTML. There are also some other blocks included with the distribution which have not been enabled. Try them.

The CivicSpace Site Configuration Guide has been created using the CivicSpace collaborative book. The collaborative book feature is well suited for creating multi-page hypertexts such as a site resource guides.

• When creating a new book page, choose the Parent page to place the new page into the table of contents link structure (Note: you can always edit an existing page and use the Parent setting to reposition a book page within the text).
• Book pages also have other navigation elements for moving through the text, such as the previous, up and next elements visible at the bottom of this page
• From any location in a book, the user can choose the printer-friendly version link at the bottom of the page. CivicSpace will then generate a version of the book containing the current page and all it's children.

To control the ordering of book pages in the table of contents structure, visit the book configuration section. For example, look at the CivicSpace Site Configuration Guide configuration page. There you can easily view all the pages in this text, as well as order them. Notice the weight menu beside each page listing. CivicSpace normally orders pages on the same "level" within the text alphabetically. You can override that ordering by giving pages which should be higher up lighter weights--negative numbers--or lower down heavier weights--positive numbers.

To create a new book, simply make the Parent "root."

Last, a blog post, forum post, story, or static page can also be added into a book. Choose the administer link for a given post or page, then use the Edit book outline button available at the bottom of the page to add it into an existing book.

This site configuration comes with two pre-defined forum areas in the Forums section: General and Site help. To add, delete, or modify existing forums, use the categories configuration section and modify or create new "terms":

• To add a term, choose the "add term" link in the row of the table marked forums. You need only give a term a name to make it functional.
• To delete or change the name of a term, choose the "edit term" link beside the term.
• Terms can also have text associated with them which will appear below the term, or forum, on the main Forums page. Simply edit the term and add your text to the Description text field

When CivicSpace displays the forums, it does so in alphabetical order for terms with the same weight. To change the ordering, edit a term and use the Weight feature. Lower numbers (negative) rise to the top. Higher numbers (positive) fall to the bottom of the display.

Many content management systems and weblog application provide a means to categorize content. However, CivicSpace's taxonomy system allows the site administrator to create multiple sets of categories which can be applied to any, selective, or all node types.

Using terminology from information science, a category set is called a vocabulary, and an individual category within a vocabulary, a term. CivicSpace forums use categories to create separate forum areas for discussion.

For additional information about CivicSpace's taxonomy system, read more about it in the Drupal handbook.