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User guide

Welcome!

This guide describes how to get started using the web-site. The guide covers basic topics such as registering for an account, logging in, changing your account settings, and creating content.

The web-site is powered by Drupal, which is an open source platform and a content management system. Its goal is to help users compose and present web-site content such as articles, photos, and other content types. Therefore the web-site is a "dynamic" system due to the Drupal feature; rather than forcing users to specify a fixed, pre-declared arrangement of content, the web-site takes care of the details of how information is arranged and presented, and lets users focus on the actual content to be displayed.

Registering as a user

To add or edit content on the site, usually you have to first be registered as a user.

In some cases, on your request a site administrator will add you as a user. If so, he will send you a user name and password that you can use to log on.

Otherwise, look for a small form called “User login” at the lower right corner on the page of the site you want to register with. Click the link that says "Create new account".

Logging in

Before you can add or edit content, you usually need to log in. If you haven't already done so, register as a user (or request that site administrator registers you). Then look for a "User login" form. The form is at the lower corner on the right side of the page. Enter your user name and password and hit "submit".

Changing your account settings

Once you have registered with the website, you can change settings to control information about yourself and also your use the site and experience. To see what tweaks you can make to your account, log in and then click on my account on the top menu (or in the block which is titled with your user name). Click on the edit tab.

Account Settings. You can see a collection of the following settings.

Creating new content

Once you have logged-in, you are ready to start posting content. In your personal menu (at the right upper corner) you can find a link called create content. Click on this link and you will see a list of the types of content you can create. There are several contributed modules which can assist with more complex content creation within this framework, such as spell checking, image embedding, and file attachment uploading.

Comments on published content

Comments allow users to interact with the content on a site, to respond to an article, offer their own ideas, make additions, or supply a critique.

Alternative ways to enter content

The website's built-in form-based content editing approach is fine for many applications, but if you have a lot of text to create, or you wish to convert existing content, or if you are using a specialized content type such as a blog, it may be more convenient to use other approaches to enter content into the website.

Preparing content offline

Before posting directly to a site, you may want to start with a word processing program. Potential advantages include:

-Saving time online. This is a particular consideration if you are on dial-up.

-Access to spell-check and other editing features.

Depending on how much formatting you wish to do, you could also consider using an HTML editor.Here are the steps involved:

Editing and deleting content

To edit or delete existing content, log in and then bring up the page you wish to edit. Look on the page for an "edit" tab. Depending on your user permissions, you might see this on all pages or only on certain ones. For example, you should see the edit tab for those pages that you submitted.

Search

At the upper right corner of the site you can see a search box for entering your search terms and a button labeled "Search".

Like most search facilities, enter a word or words you want to search for and click the button.

The wild card * performs the usual function of searching for “everything that starts with”.

Multiple words are searched as A or B, i.e. it returns pages that have one or more of the words. There is no search only for pages that have both A and B.