Support Documentation

Our system is based on a customized version of the Drupal Content Management System, specially designed and configured to help community service oriented organizations manage themselves, their membership, fundraisers, events, promotion and more.

The following pages will be a series of tutorials and documentation to help the new user get used to using the system, and to get the most out of it.

In addition to this documentation section, there is also a message forum available to get help from other users or administrators.

Basic Information and Concepts

The basic idea behind the Club Management Services system is giving each organization their own web site, that is fully under the control of the org however, and by whomever, the org best sees fit. These tools are available with every package, and the documentation here will help explain how to manage your web site.

There are a few basic concepts the user will have to understand to effectively manage any web site. It may seem difficult at first, but once you do any given task a couple times, it will make sense and become quite easy. be sure to read these documents first to at least get the most basic of concepts understood before continuing on.

Understanding Content

"Content" by definition, is anything that is added to your web site. Whether it is a new page, book or story. Content is the key component to any web site; how it's used and how it's navigated is critical to using the system. Beyond that you will also be introduced to some key terminology that will help you better understand the rest of this documentation if you understand what that terminology means and is associated with, so pay attention!

Each piece of content has many options available to it, many of which will never need to be touched if you choose not to, but in the interest of complete information, we'll cover them anyway. So, when you click through any link under the "Create content" menu item you will see a list of the available content types, those being page, story or book page (each will be discussed later). Click in to which type you want to create and you will see a form with some basic common options (as well as some content type specific options we will discuss later). Those common options are:


Title - The title of the page, event, newsletter, etc...
Menu settings - Defining where in the menu hierarchy the content will appear, if anywhere.
Body - The content itself.
Revision information - You can create revisions of content as it changes if you choose to, which, if you have mistakes, will allow you to roll back to previous versions if you have access to revision control. This revision control can keep one or many version of content on hand to roll back to the previous, or any previous version, as long as you save it as a revision.
File attachments - Uploading images or other files that may needed for the content. These files can be any number of different file types from images to display in the page to document downloads to link directly to as described in the WYSIWYG section. Uploads are limited to 1 MB each, with any number of uploads per document.
Comment settings - Allows you to set if the content allows logged in visitors to leave comments on the content. Comments can be enabled or disabled with each piece of content that is created. Comments will be emailed to the site admin for moderating before being posted live to the site.
Authoring information - Keeps track of the author of the content by storing the username of the person making it. This allows for site content auditing, and is typically more useful in larger sites with more content contributors. In the typical small site with one or two people managing the content, it likely won't come in quite as useful.
Publishing options - Gives you options to publish, to move it to the front page or to sticky it at the top of lists for importance.

Set these options and any other content type specific options that may be present, fill out the title and body content as you desire, submit the form and you have just created you first piece of content. You are not finished yet, though, as it's not yet visible on your web site. In order to make it accessible you need to add it to one or more of your navigation menus unless you do so within this form.

Content Input Formats

Each content piece you create will have "input type" options available. Each of the input formats available by default will be explained below:

  • Filtered HTML is the default, it automates much of the HTML creation by automatically linking web addresses and email addresses, retaining line breaks by converting them to HTML line breaks, and allowing limited HTML to be manually added.
  • Full HTML allows the use of any HTML code your choose to use but will still automatically parse URL's and email addresses into links.
  • TinyMCE Rich Text is the option that will present you with the TinyMCE rich text editor, which is similar to a word processor to help you create the document you want without needing to know HTML at all.
  • FCK Editor Rich Text is the option that will present you with the FCK Editor, which, like TinyMCE, is similar to a word processor to help you create the document you want without needing to know HTML at all.

Each input format, whether rich text editor or not, has a set of rules they run under, whether or not to auto-link URL and email addresses, whether or not to retain line breaks and things like that. You can create any addition input formats if you choose, though I would have to work pretty hard to think of a reason another input type would be necessary.

Menus and Navigation

Most every piece of created content is referred to within the system as a "node" and are differentiated from each other by an ID number. If you look at the URL of most pages of this web site, you will see it looks something like http://www.manage-your-club.com/node/## with "##" being a number. You need to know this to add the content to a menu.

The site administrator will click in to "Administer > Site building > Menus" to get to the menu administration tools. When you open that page you will see three menu options; "Navigation", "Primary links" and "Secondary links". These are three different menus you can choose to put your content in. Any piece of content can be in any one, or any combination of these menus.

Clicking in to the menu, if there is content assigned to that menu, you will see a list of the structure of that menu. The picture to the right is an example of a "Navigation" menu you get by default. This structure allows you to drag and drop the order and hierarchy of the menu.

With most themes, the default locations are pretty predictable:

  • The "Navigation" menu is more often than not in the left side column of the template, and expands to display submenus when a parent menu item is selected, just like the menu system for this site works.

  • The "Primary links" menu is up in the header of the template, which this site also uses for some of the high level links. In the "_dropmenu" named themes, the primary links menu can be javascript dropdown menus like you see so commonly today.

  • The "Secondary links" menu is generally not used, but is an available "block" for use where ever the administrator sees fit.

Each menu item can be disabled without deleting the record. When disabled it won't be shown, but will still appear in menu administration. The "expanded" checkbox will apply to parent items in the menu, if checked, when a page loads, that menu and submenu will always be expanded.

Adding a Menu Item

In order to add a piece of content to a menu, as stated earlier, you need to know the ID number of that content, and that can be seen in the URL when viewing or editing that content. Once you have that ID, you click in to one of the menus in the menu administration tools and you will see the form to add the content.


In that form you enter the "path" which generally consists of the "node/##" with the ID number of the content replacing the "##". After that, enter the word or phrase you want to menu item to use in the menu link. You can enter a description if you want to, it's not required, then in the drop down menu you select where in the hierarchy of the navigation you want the link to appear. From there, make sure the "Enabled" checkbox is checked and submit the form, it will then be visible in the menu.

After the form submits you will be back to the menu list and you can order and place any menu items in the chosen menu however you wish.

The default location of these menus can vary from theme to theme, but generally the "Navigation" menu is considered the main navigation structure that exists by default in the left hand column. The "Primary links" is typically used as a horizontal menu across the top below the header, but is generally disabled by default, as is the "Secondary links" menu.

These menus, as well as many other components are called "blocks" and can also be moved most anywhere you want in the template. We will discuss blocks, and how to work with them later.

Content Types

Earlier in this documentation, referencing content it was mentioned that different types of content could have different options available in the form to support the needs of each content type. Here we will discuss what "content types" are and how to manage them.

The administrator should click through "Administer > Content management > Content types" and they will be presented with a list of all the different content types available to them. The exact content of the list will vary by what services/features you have purchased for use, but they will contain things like "Page", "Event", "Newsletter" and so on.

Clicking through each of these content types presents you with a form to configure default options for that type of content, names of fields, and more.

For example, you can set it to, by default, for any newly added event, to check the "promote to front page" checkbox, so any new event will be sent to the front page without having to find and check that checkbox with each event you add.

Common uses for these tools is to disable/enable the comments checkbox by default, set how the comments are ordered, enable/disable front page promotion by default and things like that. These tools, while it is important to know for advanced use the our Drupal based system, will typically be used very rarely, as once these options are set to your liking, you will not need to change them very often if at all.

Understanding Blocks

Clicking into "Administer > Site building > Blocks" will bring you to the block management tools for your site. A "block" is a feature such as a navigation bar, the user login form, a list of upcoming events, a small calendar, etc. What the block management tools do is give you a drag-n-drop style interface to move these block around your site, from column to column (in multi-column themes), into the header or footer or main content area.

After moving things around, click the submit button at the bottom to activate the moves.

You will learn through using these tools that some blocks are simple better suited for specific areas more than others. That is something you will simple learn by using. If you put something someplace and don't like it, you can move it again instantly.

User Management

There are, at the highest level, two kinds of users that will be visiting your web site, those being the anonymous user the the authenticated user. The difference between them is if they are logged in or not. Every user is an anonymous user until they log in, they are then an authenticated user. In order to log in they need to have an account with their user name and password.

Your web site has the ability to allow user accounts to be created in three different ways. If you click into "Administer > User management > User settings" you will be able to set it up with one of the following three options:

  • Only administrators can set up user accounts.
  • Visitors can create their own accounts.
  • Visitors can create account that require approval from an administrator.

That same control panel also allows you to set a few other user management options. The other options that are controlled and configured in this area are the content of the various emails that are sent to the user when various actions are taken on their account. Actions such as verifying the email address upon registrations, when a password is being recovered, when an account is deleted, blocked or is awaiting administrator approval.

You can enable or disable user signature support, which auto-appends signatures at the end of forum posts and such, or picture uploads for accounts.

This area also lets you input some text to go before the registration form to explain any rules of registration, the process of administrator approval or that sort of thing.

Managing Users

Once a user is authenticated, after logging in with their account credentials, they can be assigned roles and given a set, or multiple sets, of permissions within the web site. They can just be left a common, logged in user that can see all the private content, or be given more permissions to be able to add and manage content, manage users, add events to the calender, upload documents to the file repository and more. This will be discussed in more detail later.

Going to "Administer > User management > Users" will present you with a list of all the users current registered at your web site. The drop down menus above the list allow you to filter and order the results to make the list more manageable in the case of a site with a lot of users. Once you locate any specific user you can click their user name to view their profile, or click the edit link to edit the user.

When editing the user you will see a simple form that can edit username, email address and password. Also you can enable or disable the account, meaning, if you disable the account, the user can no longer log in with that account.

The most important aspect of this user management is the last option, which is assigning roles to the user. What roles are given to them determines what they can and can not do on the web site. In the next chapter we will discuss roles in more detail. The image to the right shows the most basic user management form.

Managing User Roles

Previously we discussed the two basic types of users that your site has; anonymous and authenticated. Authenticated users are split into different level of authority by assigning each of them roles. By default, when your account is first opened at Club Management Services or Charity Pages, you will have three available roles; anonymous user, authenticated user, and admin user.

Roles can be added, edited and deleted at "Administer > User management > Roles". From there you will get a list of the currently available roles and links to manage them, including links to edit the permissions for each role.

You can create and manage roles as you see fit, having as many, or as few as you need. There are some best practices to consider when designing your roles to best suit your needs.

  • The anonymous and authenticated roles are not able to be edited or deleted. These are roles for basic visitors and logged in visitors that have no authority to manage content. The authenticated user is much like the same role people have when they register at a message forum or chatroom. They are not admins, but the authentication gives them authority to participate.
  • You should have at least one admin role. Often times with small organizations, one person may manage all the web content so a single admin role, as provided upon setup, would be sufficient. For larger groups multiple roles may be necessary to give different people permissions to access different tools.
  • Only have one or two people that have permissions to manage users and high level site configurations.

Managing Role Permissions

Each role needs to have permissions assigned to them. These permissions will indicate what each role can access, and management of them can be found at "Administer > User management > Permissions". These permissions should be assigned with great care. Consider these things when assigning permissions.

  • The "anonymous" role is what is automatically assigned to any ol' visitor that happens upon your web site, just the common user. This role should only be allowed to access content nodes and contact forms but should never ever be given administrative (edit/delete/management) permissions to anything.
  • The "authenticated" role is automatically assigned to any member of the site once they login. No content administration permissions should be assigned to this user either outside of any typical "member" rights, such as the ability to add topics to the message forum or comment on articles/posts/other content that has comments enabled.
  • If you site has only one administrator, the existing "admin user" role should be sufficient for that administrator as that role has access to everything. If you have multiple administrators, you may want to create multiple admin roles to allow users access to their content management but not another's.
  • Keep in mind a single user can be assigned to many roles so you do not need multiple roles with duplicate permissions.

Keep in mind that for each module that is enabled, there are permissions that need to be assigned to the different roles. If you enable the contact form, you will need to go in and assign permissions for anonymous and authenticated roles to access the form so they can use it, and the admin user must be given permissions to administer the form's categories and recipients, for example. Such things will need to be set for any module you enable.

Getting Started

OK, so you got set up with your new Club Management Services Drupal powered web space. Now what do you do. We have taken some care to get you started with some standard user roles and permissions that will allow you to get started as quickly as possible. We could do more automatically, but, rather, we feel giving you this tutorial to help you get your web site up and running will take a few minutes of your time, and help you understand a little bit about how our system works at the same time.

There are a few common steps that we have already done. You should have the two default user roles, those being anonymous and authenticated, plus an added "admin user" roles, to which the first user was assigned by us. This admin role has full authority to control all content and admin authority on all modules that are currently enabled in your web site.

Additionally, we have set up a default front page for your web site, which is very likely, the way you found your way to this tutorial.

Beyond that there are some things we will walk you through to get your web site set up and customized to your liking. We will walk your through setting up your web site information, choosing and customizing a theme, setting up a contact form, customizing the front page, adding additional users and adding more pages and modules.

Customizing Basic Site Information

One of the most basic tasks you'll need to do right away is set the most basic of information used globally on your web site such as your name, slogan (which can be used or not) email address of the admin of the site, mission statement and footer messages.

Click through "Administer > Site configuration > Site information" and you will be presented with a basic form for all this information.

  • Name: The name of this website that is displayed in the header of every page.
  • E-mail address: The From address in automated e-mails sent during registration and new password requests, and other notifications.
  • Slogan: Your site's motto, tag line, or catchphrase (often displayed alongside the title of the site depending on the chosen theme and it's options that are used).
  • Mission: Your site's mission or focus statement (can prominently displayed on the front page if you choose to show it in the theme).
  • Footer message: Used for copyright messages, disclaimers and various other things like that.

Enter that information and click the "Save configuration" button to complete the process.

Defining the Theme of your Web Site

It's quite likely one of the first things you will want to do when logging in to your new web site is set the look of the site to your preferences, upload your organization's logo, define your mission statement and that sort of thing. Fortunately, it's quite easy within our Drupal based system.

The original owner of this web site will be automatically set up to have permissions to manage the web site's "theme". By clicking "Administer > Site Building > Themes" you will be brought to a list of available themes you can choose to apply to your web site. Many of the available themes also have additional options within within them to set color schemes, logo's, icons, and more. Not all themes have the same options, however.

Click the radio button in the "default" column of the theme list to select the theme you wish to use and click the "save configuration" button at the bottom of the page to change to the selected theme.

When the page reloads you should see your site in this newly selected theme. At that point, scroll to that theme and click the "configure" link to the right of the radio button and you will be brought to any options available to that theme. This often includes setting color choices, uploading a logo and icon and selecting what information displays and doesn't display. Some themes will have all these options, some will have fewer.

We have a collection of logos available for a few well known organization in our document downloads for those people that may not have their own graphics. If we do not have one for your organization, let us know in the forum, we will certainly add it to the collection.

Tips for Best Theming Results

There are some commonly accepted (or at least acknowledged) best practices in designing a usable, attractive web site. In addition to those best practices, there are also a few guidelines that will help create the most attractive web sites within the Drupal system, as any templated system does have a few limitations.

When choosing colors to use on your web site, understand that it is generally accepted that dark text on a lighter background is easier on the eyes and can promote people actually staying on your site longer and reading more. light text on a dark background increases eye fatigue and usually shortens and stay of many visitors, particularly visitors with eye problems.

A general rule of thumb when working with a logo to upload to your theme is to have the logo a maximum height of about 80 pixels. While you can upload any size image you want, and the theme will generally move to accommodate it, if it's 80 pixels or less, most themes want be pushed out of their optimum most attractive layout.

Some themes work better than other with the site slogan. Some slogans are wrapped under the site name, some are right after the title. So try it and see how your slogan fits in your chosen theme.

We have found the Wabi theme to be the most useful and most flexible and recommend trying it if it suits you.

Customizing The Front Page

The default front page of your new site is set up as basic instructions to get started in building the new web site for your organization. Any page, or other content, that a user has admin permissions of, will load with a row of buttons up next to the page title. The exact number of buttons, and they names they have will vary depending on the content type, but the first two will always be "view" and "edit".

So, if you are a content (or "Node") administrator, and you are logged in to the site, those buttons will be at the top of the front page. If you click on the edit button you will be sent to the form used to edit the content of the page. A previous chapter of this help documentation will cover exactly what the basic content form consists of and explain what each bit of the form is for, so as not to duplicate the information here.

By dropping open the "input format" section, just underneath the body content text field, you can have the option to load one of the WYSIWYG rich text editors if you wish to use one of them to create your content.

When completed, you can click the "save" or "preview" buttons at the bottom of the page to save the changes and return to the page, or, to preview the content before it is saved to the database and have a chance to edit it further before visitors see the changes.

Setting Up a Contact Form

Every web site will need a form on their web site by which visitors can send inquiries. The basics of enabling and setting permissions for the contact form can be read in the contact form module documentation section, we will concentrate here more on configuring the form.

Clicking through "Administer > Site building > Contact form" will bring you to the form configuration page. the default page lists out the categories that are currently configured. In the case of a new web site install there will be no categories in the list, the first thing you need to do is add one.

Click the "Add category" tab at the top and you will be taken to the form to the right. Here you enter the name of the category, a list of the email address of the people that should receive the inquiry, and autoreply message that is sent immediately back to the visitor, if you want one. The "weight" of the category determines the order in which the categories appear in a drop down select menu on the form page. Lastly, you select whether or not this category is preselected upon load of the content form.

These categories, if more than one, as mentioned above, end up being a select menu on the contact form. Typical use of the categories is to have one category for, say, a membership inquiry, another for a message to the president of the org, maybe another for even sponsorship or donation information, and the like. Each of these categories can be sent to different people, the people to best manage the type of inquiry.

The remainder of the option of the contact form are well covered in our aforementioned contact form module documentation.

Adding Modules and Managing Access Permissions

All web sites that are set up through Club Management Services are originally given to the client as a very basic install. If you buy a standard or advanced package, you have many more modules available, but they are not enabled, it is up to each client to enable the modules they want to use.

Descriptions and usage documentation for the available modules is available here, however, it would seem the "getting started" section would be well served having a higher level overview of how they are enabled and used.

Enabling Modules

Your list of available modules is available at "Administer > Site building > Modules". Each module has a checkbox next to it, if the checkbox is checked, it's currently enabled, if it's not, it's disabled. To enable a module simply check the checkbox and submit the form.

Take note that some modules have dependencies which make it require other modules to be enabled to support it and make it work, these dependencies must be enabled as well. If you forget to enable a dendency, upon submission, the system will prompt you to the error and ask you if you want to enable the required dependencies, just say yes and continue.

Access Permissions

Once the module is enabled, only half the job is done. From there you must go to "Administer > User management > Permissions" and enable one or many times, many different permission levels for each module.

Some of the more complex modules have multi level of permissions, you must be sure to give the proper permissions to the proper roles.

Never, ever give any administration, editing or deleting rights to the anonymous role, only access, and sometimes maybe not even that. The authenticated role should only have edit or delete permissions in places like message forums, never to node content or administration pages. The supplied admin user role and other roles that you create you are best left to determine who has what authority within your web site.

Modules

Drupal, being an open source application, has a large user base that contributes a lot of additional functionality to it. Functional addons are referred to as "Modules" and there are a lot of them. While not even close to all of them are implemented her, but there are a few and it's quite likely more will be added over time.

As time permits, small information articles and tutorials for many of the bigger, and possibly more difficult to use modules, will be added here.

Modules are enabled and disabled at "Administer > Site building > Modules". On that page you will see a long list of all the modules available in your system with a checkbox next to them. If the checkbox is checked, it's enabled, if not, it's not. Beneath the name and short description of each module there are two lists, one of which modules require the module to support it, and one of which modules are required to support it.

If you want to enable a module, take note of any required modules listed underneath the module name. Those modules will need to be checked as well. Not all modules have required support module, but some do. if you try to enable one without one of the support modules, Drupal will generally tell you that and ask you if you want to enable it.

Be aware, particularly with the users of the advanced packages, that some modules do not really do anything in and of themselves, they are simply support mechanisms for other modules.

Album Photos

Album Photos is a module that will allow you to upload photos into categorized groups for easy chronological display. You can configure sizes of thumbnails and full sizes of photos to be displayed.

Album Photos is available in the standard and advanced packages.

To begin using the Album Photos module you must do three things:

  • Enable the module
  • Configure albums and photos
  • Enable the menu item

Enable the module

Go to "Administer > Site building > Modules" and check the checkbox for the "album photos" and "photos swfu" modules. This module only has the "Upload" module (which is part of the "core" modules) as a dependency so you must also make sure that module is enabled for the enabling of album photos to work.

Scroll to the bottom of the modules page and click the "Save Configuration" button to submit the form and enable the module.

Configure albums and photos

This bit of the module is actually a lot more convoluted than most, it's confusing but once you do it a few times it will become much easier to manage.

Go to "Administer > Site configuration > Photos upload" to set up basic parameters for the album photos module to operate with. Such options include the path to save the photos (leaving the default is recommended), setting whether or not people can comment on them, whether or not to compress the upload, whether or not to rename them, how to resize thumbnails, previews and full size views of the photos, how to order and display them and more that should be pretty self-explanatory.

After global configurations are set, go to "Administer > Create content > Album" to create a new album in which to upload photos into.

At this point it starts getting unconventional. Go to the menu management at "Administer > Site building > Menus > Navigation" and enable the link to Album photos. After that is enabled, browse to the album photos pages. From there you will see links at the top, if logged in as an admin of the module, to manage images. At that point you can upload, delete, set titles and descriptions, and so on, for any photo uploaded into any given album.

CiviCRM

CiviCRM is a customer relationship management tool to track fundraising efforts, and communication with current and past donors.

CiviCRM is available only in the advanced package.

CiviCRM is the tool used in our system to help manage donations, fundraisers, keeping up with contributors and so on.

e have installed the full CiviCRM package, the CiviCRM root package, CiviCONTRIBUTE, CiviEVENT, CiviMEMBER and CiviMAIL. We do our best to stay as current as possible and as complete as possible.

In an effort to not duplicate information, and not get out of date, we will simply link our users to the existing CiviCRM documentation, found at their web site.

Before anything else, you need to make sure the CiviCRM module is enabled at "Administer > Site building > Modules". After you have verified that the module is enabled, go to "Administer > User management > Permissions" and provide proper access permission to individual roles.

CiviCRM Help Documentation

Contact Form

The contact form is a module to enable to allow a contact form to appear on your web site that allows visitors to send email inquiries to site administrators without having to display the email address of said administrators publicly on the web site.

Contact form is available in all packages.

To begin using the Mass Contact Form you must do three things:

  • Enable the module
  • Configure the settings and recipients
  • Enable the menu item

Enable the module

Go to "Administer > Site building > Modules" and check the checkbox for the "Contact" module. This module has no other dependencies, so no other modules need to be enabled in order for it to work.

Scroll to the bottom of the modules page and click the "Save Configuration" button to submit the form and enable the module.

Configure the settings and recipients

Go to "Administer > Site building > Contact form" and you will be presented with the form configuration options.

First, click the "settings" button. The Additional information text field is the text that will appear above the contact form. It can contain additional contact info, mailing address, office address, requirements of contact or anything else you can think of. Secondly, you can control how often a user can submit a contact through the form. Lastly, for settings, you can enable or disable contact forms for each user on their personal profile. Likewise, they have the option to enable or disable it themselves.

Next, click on the "Add category" button. For each category you add, a new set of recipients must be added. if you have more than one category added, a drop down select menu will appear to the user when using the form to select which category his or her inquiry falls under and the results of the form will be sent to those recipients. You can also set up an autoresponder as well as chose the weight in the list of categories (to determine order of the drop down select menu) and whether that category should be preselected or not.

Enable the menu item

Go to "Administer > Site building > Menus > Navigation" and, after enabling the Contact module, you will see a contact menu item. Enable it by checking the checkbox and dragging it wherever in the hierarchy you wish it to be placed. Then submit the menu configuration.

Events Calendar

The event calendar is exactly what it sounds like. A nice calendar tool with which to schedule and promote events, meetings and more.

Events Calendar is available in all packages.

A key piece of content for most any organization of any kind is the good ol' events calendar. Being able to post times and locations for your meetings and events is a great tool to keep everyone in the organization informed, and using it to promote your fund raising events to the general public. Within our system it is quite easy to manage.

Much like adding any other content to the site, it begins by clicking the "Create content" link, and then clicking on the type of content you want to add. In this case it's an "event".

The resulting form looks like the same form for adding any other kind of content with the exception of it having a date field with which to select the day and time for the event.

Enter the needed information, submit the form and the event will appear on your calender.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a traffic analysis and reporting tool for web sites. It will tell you how much traffic you have, which pages are visited, where visitors come from, what country they are from and much, much more.

Google Analytics is available in all packages.

We have implemented a module to make it much easier to add Google Analytics into your web site. Not only is it easy to do, it also adds some functionality to Google Analytics that isn't in the native JavaScript implementation of the service that you will hopefully find interesting and effective.

Before using this tool, you must do is go to Google Analytics and register for an account. Once you get your account and set up your domain, your domain will be assigned an account number for each domain you register, each account number will begin with "UA-". You will need that number later on.

To set it up, go to "Administer > Site configuration > Google Analytics". The account number mentioned previously that begins with "UA-" needs to be inserted into the very first form field you see in the Google Analytics.

The other options can be used with the default settings, you could just submit the configuration now, however, I will discuss the other options briefly, as the module itself explains much of it as well.

Additional Settings

This module allows the options of tracking visitors or not by default, and whether or not to let individual visitors set whether they want to be tracked or not. It also allows tracking by roles and has a filter to opt out certain pages from tracking. By default, the module wisely filters out administration pages, user pages and adding and editing content pages from being tracked, which is good since those are pages you know are administrators and likely are not really worth keeping numbers on.

Google Analytics can also segment visitors by reporting by individual aspects of users, in addition to IP, also roles or other information. You can also choose to track exit links, mailto links, download links and even what types of downloads to track.

For further details refer to the module itself, it is pretty well documented within the configuration form.

LM PayPal

LM PayPal is a module that allows the administrator to set up a variety of payment types for access to nodes or payable upgrades to different user roles as a subscription service.

Like any module, the first step to using it is to go to "Administer > Site building > Modules" and enable to module. LM PayPal has four components to it, the core "LM PayPal" which is needed by all the others, then components to enable donations, paying for access to node and subscription services. You can enable all four, or, just the ones you really plan to use. No external modules are needed to support this module, they are completely self contained.

Following enabling the module, the administrator has to go to user permissions at "Administer > User management > Permissions" and give the appropriate access and administration permissions to the proper users. If necessary create a new role for such administration permissions and assign these permissions to a user

Access for the administration tools of LM PayPal is found at "Administer > Site configuration > LM PayPal". From here you have complete control over configuring LM PayPal to work with your account and setting up product and service purchases to offer for sale at your web site.

The following pages will detail how to use each service as time permits to write them, likewise, there is help documentation within the module itself that you can use for further help.

Note: Once this module is enabled, some LM PayPal links appear in the navigation menu. It is advisable to turn these menu link off until complete configuration of the module has been completed and it's ready for use. These can be disabled by going to "Administer > Site building > Menus > Navigation" and unchecking the "Enabled" checkbox for each of those menu items.

IPN Settings

This is the initial step to take to get the module working for you. Here you supple the email address of your web site's PayPal account, along with other configurations.

As you can see in the image to the right, it's a simple bit of information, and the defaults are an acceptable use of the module, meaning all you have to do is enter the account's email address, submit the configuration and move on. However, in the interest of more complete information, we will explain the others.

  • The LM PayPal Host is simply the URL that all payment requests are sent to. The default is for production use. If you are testing your system, use "www.sandbox.paypal.com".
  • LM PayPal Max Age IPNS sets how long (in hours) messages stay logged before being deleted.
  • LM PayPal Obey Test IPNS forces the system to respond to messages from test submissions as though they are real to test workflow of the entire process.
  • LM PayPal Debug will force debug messages while processing LM PAyPal requests. Typically will never be enabled unless you are having problems.

Mass Contact Mailing Lists

Mass Contact is a way by which you can email certain groups of members. If you only need to email web site administrators, make a group of them, if you need to email only a specific committee, set up a group for them.

Mass Contact is available in the standard and advanced packages.

An available tool with our standard and advanced packages is a tool called "Mass Contact". With it you can create mailing lists that will only email specific members that are assigned specific roles. The Mass Contact administrator can create and configure as many mailing lists as necessary to efficiently manage their internal communications.

The administrator clicks on "Administer > Site building > Mass contact form" to view the administration options. From this point the administrator has full control over the lists, creating new lists, controlling how Mass Contact behaves and composing and sending email communications.

Managing Category Lists

The front page of the Mass Contact administration tools is simply a list of available mailing lists. Upon your first visit it will obviously be empty since no lists are yet configured.

The administrator can have as many categories as necessary, however, be aware there is really no reason to have more categories than you have roles. When you create mass mailings, you can assign the mailing to be sent to one or many available lists.

With that being said, if you have a single category for each role, you can assign any given communication to be sent to a single role of user, or any selection of roles. Therefore, having one category for each role would give you the easiest flexibility in distribution. You are allowed to do it any way you see fit.

Adding Categories

This is a simple form to use in order to populate the categories list.

All the form requires is a name for the category, and selecting which role/roles are assigned to receive emails sent to that category. You also have the option to set any one category as a default selection option.

This default selection option just sets the Mass Contact composition form to default to selecting that category/categories. If you send the majority of your communications to a single category, this can make it easy to get composed and sent as the category is already selected. If you are composing an email for another category or set of categories, simply deselect the default and select the needed category/categories.

When setting a category as the default selected option, there is also a checkbox to deselect all the others from default in case you are changing the default to a new category, as opposed to adding another to the default selected option(s).

Settings

This is how you want Mass Contact to behave. You have the option of setting the following data and/or behaviors:

  • Information to display over the Mass Contact form that can contain instructions, requirements, ofr similar information you must give to all Mass Contact users.
  • From names and email addresses that the Mass Contact messages are said to be sent from.
  • Automatic prepend and append messages for all messages sent through the system. These can be used for unsubscribe information, copyright info, required messaging from the organization and the like.
  • What character set to send as.
  • Max number of recipients before splitting messages.
  • Whether or not to allow recipients to opt-out.
  • Whether or not to BCC recipients.
  • Whether or not to include the category in the subject line.
  • Whether to send as HTML be default.
  • Whether to save the communication as a content node for later publishing on the web site.
  • Whether or not communication composers to override a few of the above settings such as from name and email, HTML default sending, node savings and the like.

Once the settings are entered and at least one category is added, you are ready to start using Mass Contact. However, you can set up as many categories as you need.

How you categorize and use Mass Contact is complete dictated by you, the size of your group, the number and sensitivity of the messages and much more. Some information being sent to content admins can be seen by system admins, but system admin messages you may not want seen by anyone else, for example. Be very careful what you share with who, most especially in very large organizations where roles are very distributed.

Sending Email

Before sending any email through this system a few things need to be done. First, you need to go to the navigation menu at "Administer > Menus > Navigation" and enable the "Mass contact" menu item, and drag it to wherever you want it in the hierarchy of the menu. Personally, we recommend putting it in the "Create content" menu as a submenu item.

After that is completed, you need to make sure that the users you want to be able to send to any given category have permissions to do so. Each category that is created has it's own access permission. This can seem somewhat overkill to a small group user, but in larger organization this is a very powerful feature.

After those tasks are completed, any user with permission to access any category can go to "Administer > Create content > Mass contact" and send email to one or many of the categories that said user has permissions to send to.

Add your name and email address, if you are allowed to override the admin settings, enter the subject, compose the message, select the input type for the content and select one or more categories of users you wish to send the message to.

Based on the permissions of any given user and the configuration of the Mass Contact module any message may have other options, such as "from" name and email overrides, whether or not to send as text or HTML, uploading files, save the message as a node of content and more.

Message Forums

Message forums are simply conversations that take place in the web site. It allows people to post a topic, or replies to a topic at their convenience in the forum and the conversation develops like any other conversation would. Sometimes topics stray, sometimes they stay on course, but in the end it's a great tool for interactive conversation.

Message forums are available in all packages.

Message forums within Drupal are very easy to implement. First, the module relies on two other modules. When enabling the forum module you must also enable taxonomy and comment modules. You don't need to know anything about the support modules, you just need to make sure they are enabled.

After that is done, simply navigate to "Administer > Content management > Forum" to set up the forum. When setting it up you will find two available components, those being the container and the forum. A container is simply a way to group forums of a similar theme. The forum is exactly what it sounds like, it's a forum to put within each container, however, forums do not need to be in a container, they can reside outside of a container.

Once your forum hierarchy is completed, you can also tweak the forum settings, which are very basic. The available settings consist of setting the default order of posts, meaning oldest to newest or newest to oldest, how many topics are displayed on each page before paginating them, and how many posts it takes to mark a forum as a "hot topic".

Meta Tags

The Meta Tags feature is the Drupal module called "Nodewords". This is a very powerful module for search engine optimization (SEO). It allows the site administrator to verify their web site ownership to web site management tools offered by Google, Yahoo and Bing, as well as customize meta tags like descriptions and keywords. Combined with the XML sitemap module, the admin has a very powerful SEO combination.

Meta Tags is available only in the advanced package.

To enable the meta tags module, you must browse to "Administer > Site building > Modules". From there scroll down to the "Meta Tags" group and check all five checkboxes. This module has no external dependencies, so the module is completely self supporting.

From there go to "Administer > User management > Permissions" and give the appropriate roles access to manage and tags. When doing so, remember, the permissions use the name "nodewords" not meta tags.

Configuring and Default Values

After permissions are set up, have a permitted administrator go to "Administer > Content management > Meta tags" defaults to the "setting" page of the configuration. This is for entering the basic configuration info for the modules. For common search engine optimization tactics be most concerned with the verification code meta tags and the description and keyword tags. Most of the other options can be left at default, but feel to play around at will.

Clicking the "Default and specific meta tags" button will bring you to a page that allows you to edit meta information for specific pages. What is entered on the default values page will be what shows up in the respective meta tags if no page-specific value is entered (which will be explained in a minute).

If you enable the verification code tags in the settings page, you can click on the "Front page" button and enter your verification keys for Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer. This will help you verify ownership of the site with these search engines and register the site in their tools.

Within this section you can also set up special meta tags for error pages and other different page types that you may want to take special care of.

Page/Content Specific Values

What you have done above is set up how Meta Tags behaves, and what the default, global values for your web sites meta tags. However, this is not the end of the game. Very often, with the major search engines they do not want to see duplicated content within meta description and keywords tags. Though, obviously tags such as copyright and things like that will naturally be the same.

When you create a new piece of content, page, book, book page or any other node of content, content authors that have the permissions will be allowed to set customized meta tags specifically for that page, allowing powerful search engine optimization capabilities. So when you create a new node of content, be aware of this and create your meta tags with care.

Mollum Anti-Spam

Mollum provides a service that allows web sites to send visitor information to their database to compare them against known spammers, in order the help prevent your database from being clutters with bogus user registrations and forums, contact forms and more from being filled with garbage content.

Mollum is available in all packages.

One problem with any CMS that accepts user generated content via message forums, user registrations, article comments, contact forms or any number of other ways, is spam. There are so many automated crawlers that just follow links, find forms, inject data, leave comments to spam URL's all over and so much more it gets hard to control.

We have tried a few options to control spam on our Drupal platform, and the best we have found at stopping spam without getting in the way of legitimate users is also free, it's called "Mollum".

Mollum is a pretty impressive package that also requires an API from the Mollum spam control application. Once entered a plethora of options are available to select how spam is controlled with just about ever form on the site, with CAPTCHA and/or content scanning options, or, no protection at all.

In addition, Mollum provides some impressive reporting in the reports section of the administration pages to allow full monitoring of the effectiveness of the system.

Registering and being assigned API keys to activate the module on our platform is completely free of charge, and is very effective at not only protecting your web site from spam user registration and user input, but also protects the entire Club management Services system from bogus traffic and interference. It is highly recommended to enable this module.

Simplenews

Simplenews is our chosen module which will allow clubs to have email newsletters available for subscription on their web site. Simplenews allows the user to subscribe via a double opt in, double opt out system. The web site can have one or many newsletters available for visitors to subscribe to.

Simplenews is available in the standard and advanced packages.

You can get to the Simplenews administration by clicking through "Administer > Site configuration > Simplenews". Once you click in to that menu there are four submenu items that are available for the administration and use of the Simplenews newsletter management system.

Content Management

By going to Administer > Content management" you can see the front end content process of newsletters.

These tools provide the ability to search through previously sent, and queued up newsletters with the "Sent issues" and "Draft issues" pages. These lists have the ability to list all the newsletters, list them by individual newsletters or view orphaned newsletters.

In addition to viewing the newsletters archives, the content administrator can also search through the subscriber list that can be filtered with provided tools that can filter by newsletter that the subscriber subscribed to as well as by email address to find specific subscribers. The content administrator also has the ability to activate, deactivate and delete individual users and groups of users, as well as edit the subscripers subscription list.

Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, there is also the page in which you create your newsletter categories.

Administration

General

Newsletter

Subscription

The subscription page of Simplenews administration is the simple management of the automated emails that get sent when users subscribe, unsubscribe and other related actions. Each of these email templates also has a list of variables that can be inserted in the email template, and, when sending, those variables will be replaced with site, newsletter and user specific information for that newsletter.


Variable Replaced With
!site The name of the web site
!uri The URL/URI of the web site
!mailto Email address of the subscriber
!date Date of request
!newsletter_name Name of the Newsletter
!confirm_subscribe_url URL/URI to validate subscription
!confirm_unsubscribe_url URL/URI to validate unsubscription

On the whole the preselected email templates are perfectly suitable for most any situation, however, if you choose to customize them to your own liking it is easy enough.


There are templates for when a user subscribes, providing with with a link to validate the subscription, when the user unsubscribes, with a link to validate that, for a user that subscribes but the systems finds that email address already is subscribed, and for an unsubscribe request for whom a subscription is not found.

Send mail

The Send mail administration tools are pretty basic and really, didn't be messed with in the vast majority of situations. Quite honestly, the average user of our system is best off simply not messing with these settings, but we will, in the interest of full disclosure, tell you about them.

These tools set whether or not to use a crontab to schedule tasks (which has to be set by us, the admins of the system), how to throttle the crontab, whether or not to log sends and when to expire the messages in the spool after successfully sending the message.

If much of that means nothing to you, you are likely best off not messing with the settings.

Private Content

Keep some content only available to logged in members, while leaving the rest public. Any member driven organization finds this feature very handy from time to time.

private Content is available in the standard and advanced packages.

Some modules, like WebFM, for example, have their own security options built into them. For standard page content, event content and the like we have implemented a simply way to make content private, only visible by authenticated visitors.

The image below shows the simple checkbox the content administrator can check to keep that content private.

be aware, "private" means it's visible to all users that can log in. So any user with an account can view it after login. If you are trying to secure information for only current members of your club in good standing, make sure you keep tabs on your user accounts and disable members as their membership expires.

RSS Feed Aggregator

RSS is the common acronym for new feed syndication. The exact acronym remain in debate, but in the end, RSS is an XML feed of recent headlines from a given publisher. The Aggregator allows you, the web site owner, to consume these RSS feeds and display the headlines of that site on your web site. Such as the headlines from your parent organization, if they publish such RSS feeds.

RSS Feed Aggregator is available in all packages.

To begin using the RSS Feed Aggregator you must do three things:

  • Enable the module
  • Set up the RSS feeds to be aggregated
  • Enable the menu item

Enable the module

Go to "Administer > Site building > Modules" and check the checkbox for the "Aggregator" module. This module has no other dependencies, so no other modules need to be enabled in order for it to work.

Scroll to the bottom of the modules page and click the "Save Configuration" button to submit the form and enable the module.

Set up the RSS feeds to be aggregated

Go to "Administer > Content management > Feed aggregator" to get to the configuration tool. From here you can click on the "settings" button to get to the global settings. These settings will allow you to dictate the tags that are allowed from feeds, how long to keep the feed history and more.

After those global settings are set (of which often the default is just fine) you can set up feeds and assign categories to organize the feeds. Adding a feed just consists of entering the URL of the feed, giving it a title and setting how often you want it to update. I'd personally suggest not more than once an hour, since that is how often the job will run on our end anyway, so setting it to more often would be moot.

Enable the menu item

Go to "Administer > Site building > Menus > Navigation" and, after enabling the Aggregator module, you will see a Aggregator menu item. Enable it by checking the checkbox and dragging it wherever in the hierarchy you wish it to be placed. Then submit the menu configuration.

WYSIWYG Editors

WYSIWYG editors make creating HTML formatted content easy, by doing it for you. As easy to use as any word processor, you type the content, break paragraphs, create tables or bullet pointed lists and the editors create the HTML code for you.

WYSIWYG Editors are available in all packages.

Our services give users the choice of inputting content a few different ways. We have the ability of accepting input with plain text input that can recognize HTML for those users that know HTML, or, we have two "WYSIWYG" (what you see is what you get) editors. These editors work much like Microsoft Word or other text editors, and creates the HTML behind the scenes.

You can type all your content in the window, and with the toolbar option you have every option you need to stylize and format text most any way you want, but there are a few key things to learn.

You have both editors available as two unique input types with each content editing form. "TinyMCE Rich Text" and "FCK Editor Rich Text" input types will load the respective editors. Each editor has different options available by default, and you may grow to prefer one over the other.

If you go to "Administer > Site configuration > WYSIWYG" and click on the "edit" link next to either of those editors you can also customize which buttons will appear in the toolbars and much more regarding the behavior and features available with either of the editors.

Inserting Images

If you want to insert images into your content, you first have to attach them to your site by uploading them in the "file attachments" section of the content creation forms.

After they are attached, they all appear in a list as demonstrated in the image below. The red outlined area of the image below is the URL for that image. You need to highlight that by clicking and holding the mouse button at the beginning or end of the URL and dragging the mouse to the other end. Then you right click and select "copy" (or press Ctrl > C). Then click the "insert image" button in the toolbar and paste (Ctrl > V or right click and select "paste") that URL into the image form field.

Linking to Files

If some of your attached files are documents for download, not images, you select and copy the URL the same way as above, click the "insert link" button (usually a button of chain links) and paste the URL into the hyperlink URL.

WebFM File Repository

WebFM is a very handy, and flexible file management system that will allow your organization to share images, PDF documents, Word documents, Spreadsheets and much more. Files can be split between what can be shared publicly or privately so the same repository can share, say, event fliers with the general public, and membership rosters just within the organization.

WebFM is available in the standard and advanced packages.

WebFM, short for "Web File Manager" is the file management application within our service. Within this application module you can upload and store any sort of file; Microsoft Office document, image, mp3, video or anything, in an organized and easily managed interface.

Any user with permissions to administer WebFM content can click through "Administer > Site configuration" and from there can see the WebFM administration options. Those options are Web File Manager, WebFM Mp3 Player and WebFM image. Each of those tools has their own unique purpose that we will discuss individually.

WebFM Visitor Interface

The WebFM visitor interface works just like any standard file browsing application. The standard anonymous or non-administrator simply sees a root directory, and via a series of clicks can navigate through the folder structure of the web site and view the files within each folder. By clicking on any of the files you can download or preview the file, depending on the file type and the file type's association on the visitors computer.

If a WebFM administrator visits the interface there will also be available options to upload new files to the directories, create new directories and move files and folders around via the drag-n-drop style interface of WebFM.

Web File Manager

This part of the administration tools for WebFM is the most basic part of running the system. You define the root directory of your repository, which is generally predefined for you upon purchase of our service, as well as many other things.

The default file permissions are just fine left completely alone if you only want file owners and admins to see them. If you want anonymous or authenticated users to see the files you need to set the permissions to allow for public access, and check the checkbox for the type of access you want to allow the user that are not admins or file owners.

In the sections to set different root directories, max file sizes, total upload amount per user and acceptable file types for each of three user types. Those three user types are anonymous visitor, authenticated visitor and WebFM admin visitor. By setting a root directory for each permission level you can control which files are available for which type of users. This can be very handy for membership based sites so you can have some files downloadable by the public and some only for logged in members, for example.

File sizes can also be limited by the host and the connection speed of the user, so if you set the file size really high and it does work for any specific user, you may be attempting to override your host, or, uploading files that are too big for your connection speed.

WebFM Mp3 Player

WebFM has full support for the WordPress MP3 player, and we have intergrated it into this system as well. With this tool, you can play any uploaded mp3 file right from the folder the file is found in.

The administration control for the WebFM MP3 player the administrator a few different options for the player.

  • Whether of not the mp3 audio plays automatically upon player load or if the visit will have to click the play buttont
  • Whether or not to loop the audio for continuous play.
  • The initial volume of the player in by a number from 0 to 100
  • The buffering time, in seconds, that the audio will download before playback starts
  • The width of the player itself.

With these options you have a great deal of control over the look and the behavior of your mp3 player.

WebFM image

The WebFM image tools allows you to set up to four different sizes that any uploaded image can be resized to. The thumbnail option is required, and is there by default though it's dimensions can be changed, three additional sizes can be added.

For each additional resizing option that is added, another resizing is added to the right-click menu when right clicking on the image file name. When a user clicks one of the resizing options, WebFM actually will create another version of the chosen file with the resize option name prepended to the file.

The exact contents of the right click menu depends on the role of the logged in user. Administrators will see options to delete and rename the file and to add meta data to the file, such as a description of it. The common visitor will just see the options to download the file.

XML Sitemap

This module creates, based on setting provided by the user, an XML formatted site map according to the standards set by sitemaps.org. This sitemap is useful for submitting to the webmaster site management tools provided by search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo to help manage web site listings and help get better rankings.

XML sitemap is available only in the advanced package.

To enable this module, like any other, go to "Administer > Site building > Modules" and scroll to the bottom of the page and click all five associated check boxes. Also, a dependency for this module is the "Taxonomy" module which is higher in the list in the "core" set of modules, that must be enabled too.

After the module is enabled, it must be followed by the routine step of going to the user permissions at "Administer > User management > Permissions" and giving one or more roles access to configure the module.

The permitted users can now go to "Administer > Site configuration > XML sitemap" and see all the tools and configuration options available within it.

The front page is basic configuration options setting up how the sitemap is built. Most of those options are perfectly acceptable to use as is. The only things you may want to change is to set the frequency with which your front page changes. On some sites it's constant, on some it never changes, so set your based on the average of how often it changes.

The next set of tools are search engine submission options to autosubmit the site map to search engines. If you are running an active forum, or other such interactive features, I would highly recommend not submitting every time content changes. Even with a standard web site I wouldn't recommend it, but if you want to the option is there. Submitting too often never helps.

Lastly, there are tools to handle the sitemap manually. These tools allow for manual submissions, as opposed to the aforementioned automated submissions and the ability to delete cached files to rebuild the sitemap completely.