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Registering Your User Name Before you can have any access privileges to the Web site, you must first register a user name and password. Since the same process is used by the general public, go to The Appalachian Online Web site and create an account by following the link on the front page. Getting Started The PHP program used by The Appalachian Online is Mambo. The Mambo administration page is best viewed in Firefox. While other programs, such as Internet Explorer or Safari, will work, the best results are available with Firefox. Firefox is available in your program dock at the bottom of the screen.To access the administrator interface, click here. In order to enter this area, you must be assigned as an administrator or super administrator. The only super administrators are the graduate assistant and the adviser. After registering your user name and password following the directions above, a super administrator will assign administrator permissions to your account. Administrator privileges must be protected closely for security purposes. DO NOT give your user name or password to ANYONE , even the editor. They will be assigned their own privileges at a super administrator's discretion. Type in the user name and password you created. You will be directed to the following screen. The administrator screen has many options, most of which will not be used. The top navigation bar contains most of the items you will use. Home: This button will return you to the first screen. Site: This menu contains several configuration options. DO NOT change anything in any of the menu options under site. Doing so will corrupt the coding of the Web site. Menu: This menu lists all of the menus used on the Web site. You will not need to access any of these because they have already been set up for you. Content: The content menu contains options for adding and managing all content on the Web site. Remember from the terminology that there are content items (stories and photos) and static content items (announcements and staff lists). The only options under this menu that you will use on a regular basis are "ALL CONTENT ITEMS" and "STATIC CONTENT MANAGER." If you want to add a new category, it would be accessed from this menu. However, it is not advised that you add any new categories unless you are sure they are permanent. It is not possible to delete a category once it is created and content is assigned to it.
This menu houses the majority of the features for your Web site. DO NOT uninstall any of the features. Banners control the advertisements at the bottom of the page. Events control the calendar events. File XPlorer allows you to upload images and SWFs. PDF File Management allows you to upload the front page PDFs. Polls and story comments allow you to edit or moderate polls and comments from registered users. We will not be using contacts, syndicate or Web links.
Open File XPlorer from the components menu or Media Manager from the administration panel. Select images à stories. Select the year.
Select the folder you just created and select all of the files within it by clicking the box to the left of the name category header. You can upload up to 10 files at a time using the FileXplorer. You can only upload one at a time using Media Manager, but you will see a thumbnail with each image. Inside the current month's folder, click the upload icon. On this new screen, click browse... and select each file you intend to use. The chief photographer will edit the images for the Web and save them in a central location. Photos should be saved at 500 pixels wide. Mambo will automatically size the photos for the application. If FileXPlorer is not working correctly, or if you would like to see each image you upload, use the Media Manager on the Home screen.
Front Page Thumbnails The file should be named pdfthumb.jpg . It MUST be in lower case letters or the site will reject the file. The file will be saved in images -- pdfthumbs. Open FileXPlorer-- images-- pdfthumb. Select the old pdfthumb.jpg file and delete it. Then upload the new file. Uploading PDFs Select the PDF folder and drag the file into the window. In the admin window of Mambo, open the components menu -- PDF File Management -- Manage PDFs. Name the PDF something easily identifiable, since the file name will appear in the downloads section. Follow these steps for the other fields:
Click save at the top of the screen. Publish the PDF by clicking the link under the published column twice. It will toggle from pending, current and not published. Test to be sure it was published by going to The Appalachian Online and clicking the PDF thumbnail on the left side of the screen. If the file appears in the list, you were successful.
Open the content manager by selecting content à all content. This will display a list of all the stories on the Web site, even the archived stories that are no longer visible without searching. DO NOT delete any of these stories or they will be deleted from the archives. The content manager screen shows the title (headline), whether it is published, whether it shows at the top of the front page, its order of importance, public/registered access rights, section, category, author and date uploaded. This screen can be used to edit the properties of a story. For instance, you will choose two or three stories to be "front page" stories. A green check mark signifies that the story is located on the front page. WHEN UPLOADING NEW FRONT PAGE STORIES, BE SURE TO REMOVE ARCHIVED STORIES FROM THE FRONT PAGE. The settings for the Web site allow stories to be categorized, but if the story is a front page story, the headline will not appear in the category list at the bottom of the page. All other stories will be published under their category head at the bottom of the front page. Ordering the stories allow you to choose the most important stories to go first. To reorder stories, click the blue arrows under the reorder column. It is important to upload the least important stories first, since Mambo automatically orders the stories according to the most recently uploaded. When you first upload a story, it will appear at the bottom of this list with a pending symbol under the published column. Click the icon until it shows the published symbol. The story is now available to the public. To upload a new story, click the new icon at the top of the screen. Enter the following information:
With the new content window open, click the images tab on the right. Choose the sub-folder for the current month. Select the image you wish to assign to the story and click "add." This assigns the image to the story. The thumbnail of the image should appear twice: once in the gallery images and once in the content images. The editing options at the bottom of the images pane do not work. In order to apply captions and photo credits to a photo, you must make a table in the story where you wish to place the photo. To do this, click the "insert table" button above either the intro text box or the main text box. Inserting a table into the intro text makes a thumbnail on the front page. Inserting the table into the main text allows the photo to be seen only after clicking to read the entire story. Tables for photos have one column and two rows. Leave the remaining options clear except the alignment option. Photos are best aligned on the right to prevent breaking up the reader's attention. When you have finished, click insert. The text will wrap around the table. Drag the photo thumbnail from the content images section into the top half of the new table. You can size the image to be larger or smaller. A good size for consistency is 115 pixels wide . When readers click this image, they will see the full-size image. In the bottom portion of the table, type in the caption and photo credit information. Captions are the same style as body text, but are bold . Create a link to the full-size image. Click the image, then "edit image" (box with tree). Remove the two ".." after ".edu" and copy the URL. Be sure the border is set to 0. Close the edit window. Click the link button and copy the URL address into the link. To delete a table, click the circle with an x through it in the center of the table. To undo any action, click control-Z. When you have finished, click the save icon at the top of the screen. You return to the content management screen. Either upload the remaining stories, or find the current story and publish it. Once a photo has been uploaded to the site, it can be used repeatedly. This is handy for mugshots and other regularly published file photos. Uploading Standalones
The poll component is fairly self-explanatory. It can be accessed through the components menu. All polls created are listed in the poll manager. You can unpublish or publish polls from this screen. Keeping a poll published means it is available for users to view the results, even if another poll has taken its place on the screen. To create a new poll, click the "new" icon at the top of the screen. Create a title for your poll. The title is simply the question being posed. Create options for the poll. These are the responses available to the respondent. Select which section on which you want the poll show. To select multiple sections, hold the apple button. Save the poll and publish it.
Calendar events are also fairly self-explanatory. They can be accessed through the components menu under events. The events manager handles all calendar events. You can simply supply a subject (title), or you can add additional information or links in the description. This information will be available if the reader clicks the title of the calendar event. Dates and times are entered in the "publishing" tab. When you have finished entering a calendar event, click the save icon at the top of the screen. Be sure the event is published in the events manager. Try to avoid setting up recurring events, such as publication dates. Events Categories
An interesting feature of The Appalachian Online is the ability for registered users to post comments at the end of stories. The comments are not published until an administrator publishes them. To access the story comments, go into components--story comments--view comments. To read the entire post, click the author's name. Once you have decided that the comment is clean and able to be published, click either the save or cancel button at the top of the screen. Then publish the comment using the publish icon column. Story comments must not contain any profanity or obscenity. Use the same standards as the print newspaper's letters to the editor. If you have any qualms, do not publish the comment.
Banners are the small horizontal advertisements at the bottom of the Web site. Appalachian State University computing policy restricts our ability to make a profit off of anything on our Web site, so our banners are purely community service or house ad-oriented. To create a new banner ad, use the banner ad template in the production server. In PhotoShop, go to File à Save for Web... Save the ad to the desktop with a unique name. All banner ads must be assigned to a specific client. For house ads, the client would be The Appalachian or The Rhododendron . Other clients might include ACT or the Equity Office. Creating a Banner Client Uploading & Assigning Banners Create a unique banner name, one that will easily describe the banner you are uploading. Select the client from the drop down list beside client name. Since we are not selling impressions, leave the impressions purchased at unlimited. Upload the banner file by clicking the upload icon at the top of the screen. A pop-up window will appear. Browse for your file and click upload. Close the pop-up window. The file you just uploaded should appear in the drop down menu for banner URL. When selected, a file preview will appear at the bottom of the screen. You can set the banner to direct users to another Web page by typing in the URL of the client in the Click URL text box.
The paper version of The Appalachian is printed biweekly. That does not mean that the Online Editor must only update the Web site twice a week. Here is an anticipated maintenance schedule: Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Why won't the image appear on the Web site? Why does an image have a blue line around it? The story has been published but where is it? A story has a lock on it in the content manager. What is that? I can't find the story I just uploaded in the content manager. The calendar event doesn't have its background color. When I go back into a calendar event for movies (they have quotation marks around the title) the title disappears.
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