If you have access to the Portal Administration menu, then clicking on its icon will allow you to edit portal-wide settings, alter individual site settings, add new sites, and edit templates.
The following Portal Administration options are available:
- Site Listing - a list from which you can add, edit, and delete sites.
- Keywords on each site - a page showing the keywords and supply chain fields for each site. Allows you to quickly see who has not filled in the relevant fields, if it matters on your portal.
- Templates - a list of templates specific to your portal. From here you can add, remove, and edit page templates.
- List all external links - a list of all external links made from every page on the portal. This is useful if you want to oversee what other web sites your portal's sites are linking to.
- Portal files - files which influence the look and feel of your portal, including the ability to add a disclaimer to the bottom of every page of every site.
- Portal settings - where you can update some of the global settings of your portal.
- Send email to all site administrators - if you need to send an email to all site administrators for any reason, this option provides the facility to do so.
- Regenerate all pages on this portal - rebuilds all pages on this portal. Useful if you have just changed the portal disclaimer, for instance, and want to ensure that all pages are up to date.
Site Listing
From the Site Listing page, new sites can be added with Add new site, sites can be deleted by clicking the Delete link next to them in the listing, and their settings can be modified with the Edit link.
All of the settings available to this site's administrator can be edited here - for information about those, please see the page on Site Administration.
The extra settings which can be changed from here are as follows:
- Type - whether this site is "normal" or a "free trial". Free Trial accounts are automatically removed after a set number of days; see Portal Settings for more information. This setting may not be available on all portals.
- Renewal Cost - how much to charge the owner of this site for renewal when renewal becomes due. This setting may not be available on all portals.
- Expiry Date - when this site will be deleted, expressed as a date and time in the form YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. If it is 0000-00-00 then this site will never be automatically deleted. If you renew a site, remember to change this date! This setting may not be available on all portals.
- Directory Name - this should be a short name, all lower case, containing only letters and numbers - no spaces are allowed. This is how the site will be viewed if it does not have its own domain. For instance if your portal is at www.yourportal.co.uk and the site alias is companyname, the site will be viewable by going to www.yourportal.co.uk/companyname. This field must be filled in and should be the first thing you update when creating a new site.
- Site Domain - if this site has been tied to a domain, put the domain name here, eg www.companyname.co.uk.
- E-Commerce Available - if your portal is E-Commerce enabled, you can use this drop-down box to select whether this site should have the E-Commerce facility switched on or not.
- Forums Available - if your portal has Discussion Forums enabled, you can use this drop-down box to select whether this site should have the Discussion Forums facility switched on or not.
- Mailing Lists Available - if your portal has Mailing Lists enabled, you can use this drop-down box to select whether this site should have the Mailing Lists facility switched on or not.
- Databases Available - if your portal has Databases enabled, you can use this drop-down box to select whether this site should have the Databases facility switched on or not.
- Disclaimer Override - if there is a portal-wide disclaimer set, entering HTML into this box will replace the portal-wide disclaimer with the HTML given here, for this site only.
Templates
The template listing gives a list of templates specific to your portal. If all you have are the global templates, then nothing will appear in this list; you may add new templates by clicking on Add new template.
Clicking Edit next to a template name brings up the template editing page, from which you can edit the following:
- Template name - the name of the template, as it will appear in the drop-down list used to select a template for a page or site.
- Site - usually --Any--. If you set this to a specific site, then only that site will be able to use or see this template. This can be useful if you have custom templates for specific sites.
- Secondary sites - if a template is tied to a particular site using the above setting, but you also want to make it available to one or two other sites, you can select those sites here.
To store any changes you have made, click on the Store Changes button.
The most important part of adding a new template is to upload the files for that template. Clicking on the Edit files associated with template button allows this to be done.
New files should be packaged together in a compressed folder (Zip file) and uploaded using the Upload button. The special file names are listed on the page.
Within the main template file - template.html - some special keywords need to be present. Again, these are listed on the page. The same keywords should also appear in the blind-reader-friendly version of the template - templateb.html.
Any images referred to by template.html should be uploaded as well, and within the HTML file they must be referred to as TEMPLATE/file.jpg. For example, if the image "test.gif" is being used as part of the template, it should be referred to as < IMG SRC="TEMPLATE/test.gif" > within template.html.
An example of a basic template.html is as follows:
<html>
<head>
<title>PAGETITLE</title>
<meta NAME="keywords" CONTENT="KEYWORDS">
<meta NAME="description" CONTENT="DESCRIPTION">
</head>
<body>
<a HREF="TEXTONLY">Text Only Version</a>
<h1>SITENAME</h1>
<h2>PAGETITLE</h2>
<table BORDER="0">
<tr>
<td>{{AREA1}}</td>
<td>{{AREA2}}</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
By convention, {{AREA1}} is for navigation and {{AREA2}} is the main content area. If you stick to this convention when designing new templates then users should be able to switch the template their pages are using without any problems.
Portal files
This section works in a similar way to the uploading of template files, except that instead of a single "template.html" there are two files - header.html and footer.html.
These two files are used when generating all of the administration pages a user sees when they are logged in to the portal. The "header.html" part comes before the main content, so it should contain the <HTML> and <HEAD> tags and so on, and the "footer.html" part comes after the main content, so it should contain the </ BODY> and </ HTML> tags, at the very least.
If a file called disclaimer.html is uploaded, the contents of that file will be automatically inserted into the bottom of every web page on every site on the portal when each page is regenerated. This can be used to add a disclaimer or a banner which cannot be removed to all pages created on the portal.
Other files which can be uploaded are listed on the upload page; they are all optional. For instance you can change any of the editing icons by uploading replacements.</HTML></HEAD>
Portal settings
The following settings can be altered about a portal:
- Portal Name - the name of the portal, as displayed to the user while they are editing their pages.
- Trial Account - how many days a free trial (guest) account can be valid for. If you have allowed people to sign up for a guest account (using the Admin: Guest form element), their accounts will be deleted after this many days.
- Trial Removal - if a user signs up for a free trial account but does not log in within this many days of signing up, their account is deleted. This cuts down on the number of accounts left lying around due to invalid email addresses and so on.
- Support System - if this is set to "Yes", then users will see the "Support" main menu option, allowing them to raise support issues to be dealt with by portal administrators. Set this to "No" if the support system is to be disabled for your portal.
- Manual URL - if the Support System is enabled, and this box is filled in, then when a user clicks on "Support" the page they are shown will have "To view the manual, click here:" at the top with a copy of this link. For instance a good value for this field would be http://www.siteeditor.co.uk/manual/ to link to this manual.
- Terms of use - this is the HTML for the terms of use of this portal. Please use only simple P, H1, H2, B, etc tags - OL and UL tags will not work correctly in the text-only version that gets generated from this HTML and send by email to new users who sign up for a free trial. Enter a full HTML page, i.e. with HTML, HEAD, TITLE, and BODY tags, but try not to use tables or other complicated markup - use P, H*, B and I for markup and use CSS to determine how it looks on-screen.
Click on the Store Changes button to store any changes you have made and return to the main Portal Administration menu.
