Archive for July, 2010

Once you have an events listing added to your website, you can begin adding your own event articles. Find out how to add the events application to your College website

Adding a basic event

• Click the ‘Add new event‘ link at the top of the blank page. If you cannot see this button, you are either not logged in or you don’t have permission to edit the event.
• Enter the relevant details for your article into the form. For a description of each field on the main form, please see the table below, with guidance on best practice content:

Title *	Add a short title for your event – this appears on your main event listing and at the top of your event article.  This is restricted to 100 characters
Summary *	Add a short summary for your event – this appears on your main event listing and on the detailed article.  This could include whether the event is part of a series, who the speaker is or more about the topic.  This is restricted to 150 characters
Image	You can add an image.  The image crop tool will be integrated shortly.  In the meantime, it is recommended that images are 180×180 pixels.  If you do not add an image, a default generic icon will be added instead
Image alt	If you include an image, please include a short description of it as alt text for accessibility screen readers
Date *	Select when your event will take place
Time *	Add a start and end time using 24 hour clock
Campus *	Select which campus the event will take place at using the drop down menu.  If it is off campus, select “Other”. This will appear on your main event listing and the article.
Venue *	Here you can add in exactly where the event is taking place, e.g. “Pippard Lecture Theatre, Sherfield Building”
Event type *	All events need a “primary event category” as this appears in the main event listing, so select the most appropriate main category from the drop down menu. If you feel your event also matches other categories, you can add multiple secondary categories using the next drop down menu.  These secondary categories only appear on your event article page.
Research Seminar *	This will add your seminar to the central research semniar list: www.imperial.ac.uk/researchseminars. Tick this check box if you would like your semniar to appear in this list.
Audience *	Please select who your target audience is.  You can select multiple audiences, or select “Open to all” if anyone can attend.
Related Faculty	If you want to, select a related Faculty.  You can select multiple options.
Ticket	Please select the most appropriate option from the drop down menu
Organiser/Contact *	All events must have at least one organiser/contact if any users have questions about the event.  If your event organiser is College staff or student, please select “Add College person” and search for them.  You can add an external contact by clicking on “Add external contact” and adding their name and email address.
Speaker	If your event has speakers, you can include them and links to their personal websites in this field.  Again, you can select College staff or add external speakers.  When searching for a College staff member, if you click on the tick box by their name, you will automatically include a link to their personal web page in your event article.  If you add a website name and URL for an external speaker, they too will have it linked to automatically

• Click ‘Create event‘ and the article will be created. This may take a little while. DO NOT navigate away while this is happening.
• You will see the new event showing the summary information at the top and with two ‘Edit content’ areas ready for you to add further information about the news or event with the Content Editor in the usual way.
  • It is recommended that the left hand, narrow content area is used for lists, e.g. a “See also” section e.g. linking to your department, centre, research group etc. This looks best if you use a Heading 3 and then a bulleted list of links.
  • The main content area in the wider part of the page can be used to provide further detail about the event, e.g. the programme, abstract, speaker biography etc. When editing this content area, you can add text, pictures and links as for any other content item to give further information about the event. Please note, given the narrower content area, it is recommended that if you are adding pictures using the image crop tool, you do not use any widths wider than 253 pixels.
• Once an event passes the date when it took place, the article will be removed from the display on your main news or events page. However it will remain in the archive forever and can be seen by searching the system or using a search engine.

Adding enhanced information to your event

It is possible to add enhanced information to your event article, including related media, event status flags, live feed notifications and website links. To access this functionality, click on “Edit article” at the top of your event, and then click on “Additional” in the blue bar at the top of the form. You can also reach this functionality by clicking on “Next” at the bottom of the basic form.

• If the event you are promoting has its own existing website, you can include a link to it from your article page by completing Website name and Website URL. If you would like to send users straight to the special event website rather than to an article page, select the tick box.
• If you are planning on live streaming your event, include the URL of the live stream location in the “Live broadcast” field to highlight this on your event. This link will appear ONLY during the event.
• In “Related materials“, you can add links to videos, slideshows, documents, podcasts and XML. This allows you to include paper agendas, powerpoint slides and event archive material after the event has taken place.
  • Click on “add” and select the type of material you wish to include.
  • If you select “Document”, you will be directed to either upload a new document to your Sharepoint document store, or find an existing document. Once you’ve identified the correct document, check that you are happy with the “Display name” provided automatically
  • For podcasts, slideshows and videos, you will need to ensure the content you wish to highlight is already on an existing website. Add the URL of where the media is located, and a display name to describe the content. Then click on “add a media link and exit”
  • If you add any related material, it will appear automatically in your event article page, and as an icon on your event listing.
• If your event is sponsored, you can add the sponsor name on this form
• You can set the publish date in the future if you do not want your new event added to your feed until a particular date
• If your event is full, cancelled or has a waiting list, you can select an “Event status”. This will add a notification to your main event listing, and also highlight this fact on your detailed event page.
• As default, all events are enabled to be “pulled” which means other College events listings can pull in details of your event. If you do not want this to be possible, de-select this option.
• If your event is full, cancelled or has a waiting list, you can select an “Event status”. This will add a notification to your main event listing, and also highlight this fact on your detailed event page.

Deleting an event

Many CMS sites publish news and announcements.  The recommended way to do this is to use the College News & Events application which gives you a simple way to add new articles. It allows you to ‘pull’ news and events from other CMS sites into your news or events feed if you think the article or event would interest your readers. Using this application to publish your news and events also means that other news and events feed owners are able to pull your articles into their feeds and so give them a wider audience!

You can see an example of a news page here. Note that the ‘tabs’ for News and Events below the banner are not part of the News & Events application but have been added by the site editor.

One of the benefits of using the College News & Events application is that you can delegate the ability to post articles to a ‘comms’ group in your department or section who do not need to have full editing permission over your whole site. They also need to know only the basics of site editing as they will not be creating pages manually themselves. The application allows the ‘comms’ person to input information about the required new article which is taken and used to:

• add an item in the News & Events application database containing summary information about the article
• create a new page in the ‘newsandeventspggrp’ page group which contains a content item ready for the ‘comms’ person to edit with the content editor.

If your department/section uses an events booking /administration system, it may be possible to integrate this with the College Events application. However, the basic College Events application is just for advertising events. Contact your Faculty Web Officer, or if non-Faculty put a request into the Service Desk, to enquire about this possibility. Currently, only the Business School has an event administration system integrated with the College Events application.

To try out the News application, follow these steps:

1. Create a hidden page in your site called, for example, ‘news’ to display the respective news feed.
2. Put a request into the Service Desk for a news feeds to be set up for your site. Include the URLs of the pages you created in step 1.
3. The BS Web Support team will set up a news feeds for your site in the ‘newsandeventspggrp’ page group and add them to the pages you created in step 1.
4. To add new articles to your news feed
5. You can customise the way that the news or events appear on your main News or Events page by clicking on the ‘Edit properties’ link e.g
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   and setting the required properties in the properties form e.g.
   The properties you can change relate to the way the articles are displayed e.g. with or without coloured background, showing the article main picture or not, and which item should be considered the ‘Lead’ article.
   Be careful not to change the ‘Assign to feed’ setting or you will pick up news or events for another site rather than yours!
   Once you have completed setting properties, click the ‘save’ button to register your changes. If necessary use Clear Cache on your main news or events page to see the effects of the changes to the properties.

Visitor statistics

Initially, site visitor statistics were available through software called ‘Awestats’ but this placed a considerable workload on our developers and has been discontinued.

The current way to get site visitor statistics uses Google Analytics. Instructions for setting up a Google Analytics profile for your site are available on line.  Contact Peter Gillings in Communications to arrange for your permissions to be activated. 

The statistics which are collected will tell you:

• how many unique visitors you had and how many visits
• how long they spent in your site and which pages they viewed
• which countries and which computer addresses they came from (you may well find that you and other site editors were the heaviest users of your site!)
• what search terms were used to give links to your site
• what web browsers and operating systems (O/S) your visitors used. This can help you assess the impact of browser/OS related issues e.g if you have some fancy formatting on a page which does not work in Internet Explorer version 6 youcan see how many users are actually impacted and get an idea of how serious a problem this is for you!

Editor statistics

A record is kept of all the edits made to all CMS websites. This can be useful to check who made a particular change when there are multiple editors, or to check the dates and pages on which edits were made. Statistics are also available for edits to PWPs (Professional Web Pages). Only site owners (who are members of the imperial-admin group) are able to view editor stats.

Note: These statistics are available to Site Managers and other authorised parties. They detail and summarise the editing of individual websites on the Oracle Portal Application and are dynamically updated so they are always up to date. The data started being logged from the 21st October 2005.

All new pages created in a directory (i.e. from a single parent page) will inherit the permissions of the parent page automatically. The permissions of a new page can, however, be changed when it is created or at some later time. It is also possible to change the permissions on a number of pages at once.

You can set the access permissions of a new subpage when creating the page (see Adding New Pages). When creating a new page the last page of the wizard is the Control Access page. Permissions are set in the Grant Access section. Permissions can be granted to groups using the browse groups button.

This will display the groups browser. To find the group you can search for the group in the browser by entering, for example, “e-dep-bioeng” in the search box – this will display all groups belonging to Bioengineering. Other groups derived from the College Directory can be found by setting “All” instead of “Local” in the search dropdown. See also Group Naming Conventions. The group “imperial-users” contains everyone with a College network login.

To select a group in the groups browser click the radio button next to the group name and click the Select button. The groups browser will close and add the group to the Privilege list under Change Access.In the example shown above, “E-DEP-BIOENG-M” refers to the Department of Bioengineering; “MMHOLL” is an individual user. Both have permission to manage the site. Note that if the page had been made visible to the “imperial-users” group,  or was visible to the public, it would not normally be necessary to apply any further view permissions.

You can grant access permission to an individual user by using the browse users button in the Grant Access section.

This will display the user browser. Enter the surname or email address of the user in the search box to find a user, then select them from the list. As with groups, that user will now be added to the Privilege list and their permission level set.

Clicking the red cross in the Change Access area next to a group or user will remove the set privilege of that group or user.

In the Change Access area you can select which the different permissions levels or privileges you wish to to grant that group over this page (and any subpages of the page that may be added later.) See Setting Permissions for information on the different permission settings.

To change the permissions on a page, browse to the page in the website and click the Access link at the bottom of the page. If you do not see the Access link then you either are not logged in or do not have manage permissions (see Obtaining Permissions).

You will now see the Access tab of the Page Properties.

Set the permissions for groups or individuals using the methods described above for new pages.

If you think you should be able to edit a certain page in the website and would like to obtain the permissions to do so contact one of the following:

• the site owner – you may find their details in the Access section
• the Faculty Web Officer
• the Service Desk should be able to give you the name of the site owner.
• if the site owner has left and you are taking over ownership of the site contact the Service Desk to request set up of your permissions.

The number of groups is too large for the full list to be displayed, so you will need to specify the first few characters of the group name to limit the number of results which are returned.

Some examples of group names are:

• a-dep-ict-services-m: Managers of the Services section of the ICT site (never delete this group from your site, otherwise ICT will be unable to log in and help you if you get stuck!)

• b-res-entrepreneur-admin: People with permission to administer navigation settings for the Business School/ Entrepreneurship research group site

• e-engineering-m: Managers of the Faculty of Engineering

• p-physicalsciences-all: All staff working in the Physical Sciences Faculty office

The first letter identifies the Faculty or type of operating unit:

• a: Administrative divisions and central departments e.g ICT, Library
• b: Business School
• c: Cross-faculty or non-faculty Centres
• e: Engineering faculty, departments and research groups
• g: Graduate Schools
• h: Humanities
• n: Natural Sciences faculty, departments and research groups
• m: Medicine faculty, departments and research groups

Before the creation of the Natural Sciences faculty, there were two other faculties. Some groups exist which were created at that time i.e. those starting:

• l: Life Sciences faculty, departments and research groups
• p: Physical Sciences faculty, departments and research groups

The second part is sometimes used to denote the type of site:

• dep: for departmental sites
• res: for research group sites

In other cases it is the site name

Subsequent parts of the name identify sections within the site which need different permissions.

The final part of the name is often used to show the type of permission the group will be assigned:

• m: People with Manage permission
• v: People with View permission
• admin: People with permission to configure the navigation settings e.g. hiding pages

How to upload a document into SharePoint and link to it from your Web page

This is now a two part procedure. If the file is not yet in your SharePoint workspace you will need to load it first. Only when it is loaded into SharePoint can you link to it from your webpage.

a) How to Load a file into your SharePoint workspace

To upload a file into SharePoint, click the Documents icon on the Editor toolbar.

This will display the Workspaces Wizard.

Click on the Upload a file option

Your specified site within the SharePoint Workspace Collection will open and if you are already logged in inside the network and are a member of the site’s contributor or owner group, you will be automatically logged in.  If you’re outside the network, use your usual College username and password.)

When logged in you will see your workspace site with an Internal and Public library listed on the left. The Public library is for content viewable to the greater public, and the Internal library is for restricted read content.  Any documents placed in the Internal library will require a College login to view.

Select the Upload from tool bar (you must be signed in – see upper right hand corner of the screenshot below)

and the Upload screen shows:

Browse for the file you want to upload and then click OK

The file will then be in SharePoint Workspace and you can then link to it from your web page.

b) How to link to a file in SharePoint workspace

When the file is in SharePoint, select the text on your web page which you wish to use to create the hyperlink.

Select the Documents icon on the Editor toolbar.

This will display the Workspaces Wizard.
Choose your site name from the list in the box next to ‘Select a website’ and a map of your workspace will appear

e.g.

Locate the file you wish to link to and click ‘Return page link‘ text against it.

Click Submit to save your changes and see the page in View mode.

Note: if you open a document to have a look at the contents, and then wish to go back to the SharePoint collection, right click on the mouse button, and choose “Back”

In SharePoint use the Breadcrumb trail to navigate through the site.

Raise a request through the Service Desk asking for the Web Support team to reinstate your permissions.

No, raise a request through the Service Desk asking for the Web Support team to create the groups you need. You will be set up as the Group Owner so you can add owners and members to the groups. You  can assign the group’s permission to different pages in your site.