CMS Training Manual

Version 1.0

For the new EZ Content Management System built for the OneWorld Network

Contents List

  • Introduction to the new OneWorld
  • The new site organisation
  • Navigation and sections
  • Search
  • Interactive features
  • Introduction to the new CMS
  1. Logging in
  2. Logging out
  3. The icon-menu across the top of the page
  4. Status information
  5. Where and what are the help functions
  6. What happens if you find a bug
  7. What happens if you need help from support
  • Introduction to the Article Module
  • How to add / edit / manipulate articles
  • How to add / edit / manipulate pages and categories
  • Images, Media and Other Functions

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW ONEWORLD

The new CMS system will come with a new public facing site: new in design, with new features and functionality that the network have been demanding for some time now.

It is important to know the changes on the public facing site, so you can understand how the CMS has been built to match the new site structure. It will help you to understand where you will be adding new content, under what categories, and to what pages within the new CMS

Consider all sites as EDITIONS. An edition is a specific grouping of pages created for an audience from a particular geographic or thematic interest. This is including the site, which is essentially a “global” edition (representing the needs of an audience interested in all geographical and thematic areas). For this purpose, it also includes CHANNELS (thematic mini-portals).

So all Editions have been built to follow a set of basic principles:

Users can be looking for content and connection (interactivity), so both are of equal status

Users can be either searching (with a clear idea of an end-point) or browsing (unclear idea of an end-point)

At any one time, we can assume a user has a defining – but not necessarily singular – characteristic for their purpose of use for our content or connection

Because of these principles, we have therefore made some significant changes to the new site. These affect the (i)Content Organisation, the (ii)Navigation, the (iii)Search and the (iv)Interactive Features.

(i)Content Organisation

Content on each Edition has been organised into four main sections – CURRENT, IN-DEPTH, PARTNERS, and GET INVOLVED. Inside these sections

Current: Users visiting the current section will find all OneWorld content that is new or topical – what is “current” – regardless of its thematic or geographical root. It is its timeliness that is most important to users. Sections include News, Special Reports, Campaigns, Action, Editor’s Letter, Opinion, Analysis, Focus etc

In-Depth: Users visiting this section will find the resource of OneWorld’s extensive depth of content across thematic and geographic classifications, regardless of its timeliness. Sections are the themes and countries databases, guides, channels, think tanks etc

Partners: Users visiting this section will find the full breadth of information about OneWorld as an online partner network. It offers users easy access to all relevant information that we keep about partners, and offers partners a “home” on OneWorld where they can interact (user-to-partner, and partner-to-partner). It also houses the joining instructions, partner tour etc

Get Involved: Users visiting this section will find all the methods by which OneWorld offers the user the opportunity to become involved with partners, to participate in campaigns, to interact with other users, and the civil society movement in general. It is a place to create communities of interest, and where users will find the relevant service or information for their enquiry. This information includes jobs, volunteers, member section, support centres, shop etc

There are also other stand-alone sections, such as the About Us, Editions and Events sections, which allow users to focus on finding out about those particular content groups. The About Us section tells the user all about the organisation behind that particular Edition. The Editions section showcases all of the OneWorld Editions in the network with their latest content, so users can easily see the wealth of different languages and different perspectives available to them through this one global site.

(ii)Navigation

In the old site all of the navigation was set together in the long, inflexible left-hand menu. In the new site, each Edition has been organised to place its global navigation (which area of the site you are visiting) along the top of the page. The global navigation on all sites consists of five major sections: Current, in-depth, partners, get involved, editions. As seen here:

Each edition has also been organised to have its local navigation (the content that appears in that area) along the traditional left-hand of the page. So for example here, within the Current section, the left-hand menu shows all the content available in that section (such as news, special reports).

The site also now has a crumb-trail. This is the “expanding tree” of content or “crumbtrail” that appears below the main header of the page and above the content:

The navigation is created automatically by the new CMS from files in the system called CATEGORIES. So, for example, each of the main sections – Current, In-depth, Partners, Get Involved - is a category, into which sub-categories (for example, news, special reports, campaigns) are placed. Inside these sub-categories, editors add ARTICLES – basically stories or documents.

So, as you will see, the CMS that you will be working on is arranged in the same way as this new public site. With content split into major sections (or categories) and content (sub-categories and articles) placed within them.

The navigation has been split out in this way for a number of reasons:

  • It allows the user to access any of the major sections from any other point in the site
  • It means we can use better information architecture, such as colour coding, to let people know which sections they are in
  • It means that the left-hand menus can be more user-friendly and flexible

There is also a right-hand column where editors can add additional content or promotions to their site. For example, direct links to email digests or discussion forums or new jobs, new partners etc. You will see within the CMS that these right-hand columns are also set up as categories, into which you can put sub-categories and articles.

(iii)Search

Because the search is such an important tool to the user, and OneWorld has invested so much in both this new CMS system’s search function and in the Verity spider function, we have emphasised the search function along the top of every page. This follows from the basic principle that a proportion of users may not be browsing our site but are looking for something specific.

(iv)Interactive and Community Features

The new CMS will offer from the start the option to use the following Interactive and Community Features:

  • Poll
  • Quiz
  • Discussion Forum
  • User Comments
  • Member Profiles
  • Email Alerts

It is down to the centres and the network to manage these interactive features intelligently to help foster community on OneWorld and its Editions. Full training for these will follow.

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW CMS

The EZ CMS system was considered to be the most flexible CMS system available to us for the right cost, and with its use of GPL licences (meaning we can own and share the code and build the site ourselves from when it is delivered) and suitability for our current Sun servers, OneWorld signed the deal to

The basic EZ CMS Version 2.2, which we are using, provided us with nearly all of the MUST HAVE functionality that was being asked for in the CMS Specification agreed by the Centre Directors.

The EZ CMS is built around three key features:

Modules

A module is a set of functions that all relate to a particular editorial, partnership or commercial task. For example, there is an Article module that brings together all of the functions concerned with finding, adding, editing, expiring, modifying, deleting and placing articles, or stories (or what in the old CDB3 we called documents).

Categories

A category is a specific place within the EZ system, like a file or folder, which holds certain information relevant to our tasks as carried out in the modules. EZ call everything categories – so to them, a site, a page within a site, a topic, a region, and a target audience – these are all categories. For example, both OneWorld US and OneWorld.net Special Reports are both categories. We have tried to reformulate these categories into easily understood groupings for you, but it may take a little while to get to grips with these Category types.

Articles

An article is simply a document. It can be an off-site article (i.e. our traditional partner highlight, that links off to a partner site) or an on-site article (such as an original piece of copy, an editorial or a yahoo news syndication story). Articles can have images, multimedia, links, polls or forms attached to them. Nearly the whole process of adding a new article is done on a single HTML page form.

On top of this, we have also asked EZ to make considerable changes according to our guidelines to the following modules:

  • Article Module
  • Partnership Module
  • Image Module
  • Jobs Database
  • Events Calendar
  • News Syndication

This is to make sure that the modules do everything we want them to, in the way that they should.

So how do I get started?

Logging in

1.How to login

Step1Go to

Step2Login with your username and password.

Step1Go to

Image 1.0.1

Step2Login with your username and password, you will then be taken to

the welcome page:

Image 1.0.2

Troubleshooting:

Your username and password will be given to you by the Technical Team.

If you do not have a login and a password please email OneWorld Technical Support () with your name, job title, department, centre name and contact details.

If you get an error message instead of the login screen, check first if your Internet browser is working (try to access another web site for example

If your Internet browser and the connection is OK then email the Technical Support Team () including in your email: name, the time, what web browser are you using, with which web site did you tested your web browser to see if it is working OK, when was the last time you managed to login successfully, and anything else that you think that may be relevant. Without all these details the Support Team will not be able to assist you immediately as more information will be needed and time will be wasted during the exchange of more email messages.

If you cannot login, make sure that the Cups Lock is not switched on and that you remember the correct password, i.e. have not change it recently.

If you have forgotten your password please email the Technical Support Team () stating your full name and the username you are using and you will receive a new password.

Menu Icons

You will see across the top of the page when you are logged in a list of icons representing different modules within the system. The menu icons along the top of the page will remain visible to you at all times while logged in, regardless of what section you are working in. They allow quick access to the relevant modules within the CMS system that you will want to use. Here is a brief outline of what these modules are – however, depending on what we keep, and what access rights/permissions you have, you may only see a selection of these icons:

/

ARTICLE

/ This icon represents the Articlemodule – it gives you access to all of the Article module’s functions, such as add/edit an article, add/edit a page etc, and brings up the Article menu left-hand menu
/ TRADE / This icon represents the Trade module – this module is not in use in the first release of the OW CMS, but it is a key function that could be used in the future for creating e-commerce initiatives
/ FORUM / This icon represents the Forum module – this basically allows editors to create discussion forums on the site.
/ LINKS / The Links module – this allows editors to add additional links to their stories for more info etc other than the direct partner link… an example of where this is used now is in Yahoo syndication
/ POLL / The Vote / Poll module – this allows editors to create polls which can then be added to the relevant site (US, UK etc)
/ ADVERTS / The Adverts module – the EZ system allows very easy insertion and rotation of adverts. We are using this to also rotate the graphics along the bottom of the page to promote our other sites, channels
/ NEWS FEEDS / The News Feed module – this module allows system administrators to set up both incoming and outgoing RSS and other feeds
/ BUGS / The Bugs module – this is for all users of the system to report bugs to the support staff and EZ. We are not sure yet if, in the long-term, we will be using this bug tracker or normal support systems
/ PARTNER
DATABASE / The Partner Database module – this is where Partnership Managers can add, edit, manage and complete all partnership record tasks. It is where all the public-facing information about our partners is kept
/ TO DO / A To Do list for users
/ CALENDAR / This will be the module that allows access to the Events Calendar function – where users can add events to their calendar for public-site presentation
/ FILE MANAGER / A File Manager module to help manage the location of files within the system. We may not be using this module, so the icon may be removed for the first release
/ IMAGE CATALOGUE / The Image Catalogue – this is where all images will be stored within their respective categories. Images must be uploaded to the image catalogue before they can be used on the site
/ MEDIA CATALOGUE / The Media Catalogue for audio and video clips – this is where all multimedia will be stored within their respective categories
/ ADDRESSES / This is an address tool, used mainly by us for the setting up of the regions / country list used to classify articles. Editors will not be expected to use this module
/ FORMS / This module allows the editors to add forms to their pages, such as the name/email form on the front-page of the US Edition. The form will do all the registration of the user to the correct address list for the digest, mail etc
/ BULKMAIL / Bulkmail is the module the EZ use to control bulk email sending to registered users, for example those signed up to news alerts or weekly digests
/ MESSAGE / This is a simple message module where you can leave messages for the other users of the CMS. It is a method where, for example, you can alert other editors in the system to a new article, or a bug
/ QUIZ / The Quiz module allows you to go further than a simple poll by creating a whole quiz to add to a specific section of your site.
/ STATISTICS / The statistics module provides very basic, top level statistics for the whole ow.net site. It is not very specific, so we shall also be continuing to use webtrends. However, as a second reliable figure of top-line stats it will be very useful for corroboration
/ URL TRANSLATOR / This module will be used mainly by system administrators to convert “unfriendly” long or non-explicit URLs into “friendly”, explicit URLS. For example, when a new special report is added the system will produce this as but the system can then “translate” this to read if we decide this is what we want to do. Editors will not have access to this to begin with until we agree guidelines on URL translations
/ SITE MANAGER / This is for system administrators only to administer the framework and structure of both the back-end Admin tool and the front-end Admin tool.
/ USER GROUPS / The User Groups module is to allow System Administrators and those editors with permission to create user groups. A user group is a selection of users (such as editors) with specific permissions. For example, some journalists may be allowed to write and edit, but not publish articles
/ EXIT / LOGOUT / This is the logout icon. It will log you out of the system, at BOTH THE FRONT END AND BACK END. So, if you are logged into as a user it will log you out
JOBS / JOBS / The icon is not yet decided, but this module will provide those users with permissions to access the jobs database

What does the status info across the top mean?

This is simple information to let you know:

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VERSION