Jump directly to: your personal folder ~ content types ~ step by step example ~ standard fields ~ formatted fields ~ publishing states ~ newsletters

You might also benefit from reading the Hints for reviewers help.

Your personal folder

If you are allowed to add content to the site then you have your own folder on the site in which to add them (if you are a member of one or more groups you can also add content to the group folder). The easiest way to access it is to click on the my folder link on the top tab bar of the site.  In general, anywhere you are allowed to add content will have an inner tab bar with the drop down add item, among other things.

Your folder listing should look familiar if you are used to browse files on your own computer. Each file or folder title (not its "short name") is listed on its own line along with its size, modified date, and its publishing state (more on that later). If you think you are at the right place but do not see that listing, then try to click on the contents tab. If you do not see a contents tab, then you probably do not have permission to access the contents of that folder. You can change the order of items in any folder using the order column, or, in some browsers, by simply dragging it up or down with the mouse. The order will be reflected in the view listing of the folder contents.

Content types

Before you add content you should have an idea of the types of contents available. You should also have an idea of why you want to add the content for. The main reasons are as follows:

To publish it to the site at large

You may want to announce an event to the general public or the membership, or news about your chapter's activities, etc.

To publish it within your group

This is usually as simple as adding the content to your group's (e.g chapter, task force) folder.

For your own use or to share with specific other members

As long as it is Mars Society related we even allow you to store personal documents on the site. You can keep these documents private from most other members but not from managers. Managers will generally respect your privacy but if you stored a large amount of data they will have a look to check that it is Mars related

The most important content types are:

News articles

All published and non-expired news articles show up on the front page and the news article tab of the site, and the most recent ones show up in the news portlet, so this is the content type to promote your or your group's achievements or other Mars Society news. These articles are meant for news relating directly to the affairs of the Mars Society, not general Mars or space related news. You can easily add an image to the item by using the provided edit fields for the image and caption. More images can be added, but that must be done manually by creating the images first (see "documents, files, and images" types below), and then adding them manually to the body of the news article.

Newsletters

Newsletters are the same as News Articles in every way, except that they have a special workflow that allows to email the item to subscribers. Besides the criteria for news articles (Mars Society affairs only), newsletters should be of sufficient importance to warrant pushing the information to our subscribers. Newsletters are described in more details below.

Events

The published events that are closest to happen will show in the upcoming events portlet of the site and all other events can be easily accessed by clicking the More... link at the bottom of the portlet. Events have special field to store when and where, contact information, etc.

Links

Published links are meant to be links to entire Mars related web sites of interest. When published, they will automatically show in the "External Exits" box at the bottom of the left column.

Documents (pages), files, and images

Are other useful content types that you can create, but they will not show up automatically at convenient places like the News Articles tab or the upcoming events portlet. They can however all be reached through the search engine, or through other links.  You can of course provide your own direct links to your documents in news articles or in your or your group's front page, which is usually itself of the document type. You can also make a home page for yourself and set a link to it as your homepage in your preferences.

Step by step example of adding an event

Before getting into the details of all your options, let's go through a simple example of adding an event announcement.

First go to your folder as described above. Then go to the add item pulldown menu at the right of the inner tabs bar, and select event.

In the form you are presented, you have to at least fill out the title and event starts and event ends fields (these fields are marked as required by an icon next to them; the dates fields are pre-filled with default values anyway). It is a good idea to fill out some of the other fields as required. Note that for events none of the fields allow you to apply special formatting, like HTML, but you can add a link to a web page for your event which could be a document on this site). The Title and Description fields are metadata that is common to all content types, and we will describe those in more detail later. Once you are done entering the information, click the save button.

Once you save, you will be presented with what your event will look like when displayed. If you made mistakes or don't like what you see, you can make changes by selecting the edit tab, making your changes, and clicking save again.

At this point, the state of your event is visible (as shown on the right of the tab bar: ). What that means is that Mars Society members will be able to view your event if they find a link to it or if they find it through the search engine, but that your event will no show up on the list of upcoming events. In the visible state, non Mars Society members will not be able to see your event at all.

Assuming that you want your event to be seen by everyone, you will need to request for it to be published. You need to go through this process because we want to keep some control on what is published on the site (we do not want to allow you to announce your garage sale, unless it is to benefit the Society!). You simply do that by clicking on the state menu (which currently shows visible), and selecting submit publicly (we will explain what the other options are later). As soon as you do that you will notice that the state menu now shows state: pending . This means that the reviewers of the site will now be notified of your request and that you should soon see your event on the front page of the Mars Society site! A reviewer may reject your request, but if they do so they will provide you with an explanation. If you want to pass on some comments about your submission to the reviewer, click on "advanced..." instead in the state pulldown. You will find a comment field there, as well as the same selection of states to choose from.

We will now go into more details into some of the actions we went through in this example.

Standard fields

Although there are some inconsistencies in the current version of the product we use, most content types have some fields in common, which are explained here.

Title and Description fields

The two most common fields are the Title and Description. Most content types, including folders, have these two fields, and they are used quite a bit in the site. The Title of a document is used wherever a short reference or list of items is required, such as in the upcoming events or news articles portlets. The Description is used when a more detailed list of items is presented, and usually at the top of the full view for an item. For example, descriptions are shown as part of the listing returned by searches, as the default view of folder contents (see for example the main page of the site help you are reading right now; it is simply the default listing of the site help folder content), and in other views, such as the news articles tab. It is therefore recommended that you always take the time to enter a meaningful description for your items. The description field is however unformatted. Don't try to insert HTML tags or even line breaks, as the result will be rendered as a single paragraph anyway. One reason for this behavior is that the Description field is part of the Dublin core, one of the many standards that this site is attempting to follow. Another reason is that not allowing formatting encourages you to keep it short and to the point; the description field is not meant to carry the bulk of your content.

Dublin Core Metadata

Somewhat less consistently than for the title and description fields, most content types also contains other metadata that attempts to follow the Dublin core standards. These other common fields are usually found on the properties tab of the item rather than its edit tab. Two of those that have a direct effect on the behavior of your content are the keywords and effective and expiration dates.

The managers of this site have already set up some keywords that you can select for your contents, and we may add more as we review the contents being submitted. Keywords can be used as part of the advanced search mechanism for the site, and they are also used to select the documents that show up in the related portlet on the left side (actually this portlet is not activated at the moment).

The effective and expiration dates are used by some document types as part of the publishing system. For example, news items, even if they are published, will not appear under the news articles tab unless they are both effective and not expired.

Formatted fields

Some content types, like documents and news articles, have a field that allows complex formatting. You have many options in how to write the contents of those fields.

By default, and if you have a compatible browser, you will get a javascript WYSIWYG HTML editor called Kupu. If you disable this option in your preferences, you will get three options you can select from for those fields: Structured Text, HTML, and Plain Text.

If you don't know HTML and do not want to learn structured text, select plain text. If you are familiar with HTML you can check that option and enter, paste, or upload HTML content in the field (upload using the field below the main one). Structured text is a format that is easy to read even in source form (unlike HTML), and can easily produce nice results. It is often a good choice if you want to write something quickly on the spot. You can find a short primer to structured text here.

The Kupu editor option requires you to change a setting in your member preferences. Click on preferences on the top tabs bar and then select the Personal Preferences link. There, select or unselect Kupu as your choice for the content editor, and click save. (Tip: the little html link at the top of the Kupu window allows you to switch back and forth between the formatted content and the raw HTML code.)

Be aware that for reasons of security and of consistency of look, some filtering of HTML takes place, so you may notice that the precise HTML you enter is either lost or not displayed as you would expect. For example, script and font tags are removed. See here for a full explanation of the filtering taking place. If you feel that you have a good reason to need a filtered feature, contact the Webmaster.

Webdav

Webdav has not been enable for this site so far.

Publishing states

As mentioned in the step by step example above, the contents you add start by default in the visible state and you have to submit them to the reviewers if you want to publish them.  This section describes the possible states and transitions (or workflow) in more detail.

Possible states

Visible

This is the default state of new documents. visible documents can be read by Mars Society members only. They will be returned by site searches (but only to Mars Society members). They are not accessible in any way to non-Society members.

Private

Private documents are by default only visible to you and no one else. They will not be returned by site searches (unless you are the one searching). You can however provide access to specific members or groups by using the sharing tab (explained in more detail ...).

Pending_internally

As a contributor, you put one of your documents in that state to request that it be published to the society (below) by one of the reviewer. Unless you have special permission, you cannot put one of your document in the published state yourself.

Published_to_society

The only difference between this state and the visible state is that for document types that are collected in special pages and/or portlets, such as news articles or events, they do not show up in these special locations unless they are published. Since this is meant to be a cooperative site for Society members, that basically means that other members are allowed to see your unpublished drafts in the visible state (if they find them through the search engine for example). If you do not want any one to see something, then just make it private.

Pending_externally

Similarly to pending_internally, you put one of your document in that state to indicate to reviewers that you would like to publish that content to non Mars Society members. The reviewer will decide whether to publish to members of the portal only, or to all visitors (the next two states).

Published_to_portal

Content in this state is visible only to people who have a login name for this site and have logged in. Since anyone can make themselves an account, this is pretty much the same as being published to the public at large, but the reviewers may decide to limit some content that way as an incentive for visitors to get an account for example.

Published

Content in this state is viewable by every visitor to the site, even if they do not log in.

Newsletters

Newsletters have variants of the publish to all, publish to portal, and publish to Society state actions, which also queue the items for publication to subscribers by email. There are two new state actions, "Test email to yourself" and "Test email to reviewers". These two actions can be used while still working on a draft, prior to publication. The former action sends an email version of the article to you only, which you can use to check if the formatting is acceptable (a lot of the web site formatting is lost in email messages), and the latter action sends an email of the newsletter to a group of Mars Society reviewers. When using the "Test email to reviewers" action, it is preferable to do it through the "Advanced..." option at the bottom, in order to include a comment, using the provided field, as to the reason for the newsletter, etc. That comment will be included at the top of the email. Once a newsletter is published (in one of the three possible publish states), it will immediately be viewable on the Web site at the same places as a news item, but it will also be queued for emailing. Site managers can see the queue and actually send the newsletter, as well as decide to group multiple queued newsletters in the same email.