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.

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.