Setting your preferences

You can customize some aspects of the site and change your personal information in your preferences. To set your preferences, log in, and click the preferences link in your "personal bar" (the bar below the top row of tabs, with your name on it). From there, you can change your password or user id, manage your Mars Society membership (if you have one), or manage your preferences for this web site.

Password and user id

The password change procedure should be self-explanatory. You can also change your login name. Note that your login name is different from your user id, which will always remain the same. You will not see that user id very often however, most often as part of URLs.

Personal Preferences

Your personal preferences refer to customization of your interactions with this web site and other automated mail or web actions. The personal information here (full name, location, biography, home page, portrait, is used to identify you to others visiting the site, especially if you author content. Members can get to your biographical information by using the members tab and other ways. Note tha the full name and location fields are independent from the name and address fields in our membership database.

If you change your language preference, you will notice that many of the menus, headers, etc. will be in your own language. The Plone tool used to build this web site is translated into a large number of languages. All of the customizations we have made have however not been translated, so those will remain in English. Documents can also be in multiple languages, but we have not used that feature so far. If you are interested to help in translating our web site in your language, let us know!

You can select either Kupu or Basic HTML as you main field editor for document editing. This only applies if you want to author documents. Kupu is a Javascript visual editor that works in the Internat Explorer and Mozilla/Firefox browsers. If you do not select Kupu, or do not use one of those browsers, you will have a more standard text field to edit your content.

Enable external editing is a rather advanced feature that I recommend you leave unchecked for now. Nothing bad will happen if you check it though (it makes a pen icon appear as one of your document tools, but nothing useful will happen if you click the icon if you have not installed the appropriate software on your computer.

Listed in searches determines if others can find you by searching in the memebrs tab. Even if you do not check this box, if you author content, people will have a link to your biography at the bottom of any content you produce.

Allow emails from: -- In your biographical page, you have the option to allow visitors to send messages to your email address. Your email address itself is never revealed; the email is sent through a form. This setting allows you to set who can send you emails that way. We encourage chapter contacts, task force members, etc, to allow all visitors to send them messages.

Allow editing of short names is only applicabe if you author content. Every content requires a title, which is meant to be human readable. The "short name" is just a tag that identifies your document and is part of its web address. If you do not want to bother with coming up with short names, uncheck this box and the system will generate not so human readable ones (which is fine). If you check the box, you will be able to set shorter and more readable short names, but will have to deal with the name restrictions, duplicate names, etc., on your own.

We encourage you to upload a portrait. The Mars Society community will feel more personal if we all know what we look like! The recommende 75 wide by 100 pixel tall size is not necessary, but if your picture does not have about that aspect ratio, if may not look quite right.