Interest Groups facilities

BASIC FUNCTIONALITY

Interest Groups have now a more important role in the site. They are accessible (from all the pages) in the left sidebar and in the main menu. Click on “Interest Groups” in the main menu (this is the third top level option of the menu, not the menu that unfolds when setting the cursor on this option).

You will see a list of IG’s. The information shown for each group is an icon representing the contents of the group, the name and a brief summary of the group interests. You can modify any of these, so don’t worry if you don’t like what I used for this preview. The list also shows the last activity in the group, and the number of members (both items are currently meaningless).

In this list you can select to see “All Groups” or “My Groups” (those that you have joined). As you haven’t login yet, you are looking at how the site shows to anonymous visitors and you cannot see the “My Groups” option. You can also sort the list alphabetically, by creation date by popularity (number of members) or by activity (last info posted). You can do the same in the IG’s bar to the left, where the default behaviour is to sort groups by activity. Finally you can also search the groups.

Click on “SIG-01 Macromolecular Crystallography”. In this preview, this SIG shows the bare-bone configuration that an IG page has in the site. Contents (from top to bottom) are

The name of the IG
A larger scale view of the icon
Information on the Group Admins (typically the IG coorditnator and webmaster)
The date of the last activity in the group
A submenu with the following entries:
- “About SIG-01” is the page below. The minimum contents of this page (after the ECA rules) is: “Scope and Objectives”, “IG Officers” and “Documents”. I’ve filled the last two sections for you in all IG’s. The section on “Scope and Objectives” is marked as “[TODO]” (to be done) in some IG’s. In the case of SIG-01 and some others, I copied it from the IG webpage for the preview of the site. This information should be edited by the IG coordinator/webmaster, including the “IG Officers” section if it is outdated.
- “Forum” is a message board, where the members of the group can post messages or comment on other’s messages. Since you are not logged, you are not allowed to post, but you can still see the message threads (currently empty). This forum is more important that it may seem; ECA IG rules state that an IG must have a mailing list, and the Forum for a group doubles a mailing list server sending all messages and comments to registered members of the group. So the Forum can be your “free mailing list”. More on this later…
- “Members” shows a list of the members of the group (along with the number of members next to the menu entry).
- “RSS” is a link to an automatically generated RSS News Feed for the group. In addition to spreading all the messages by email, you can also export them as RSS news feeds. This link allows you to check the news of a group on a newreader or, probably more interesting, to automatically import the messages to an external website.

The “preview setup” for SIG-01 shows the minimal IG functionality implemented in the new site. An example of the next step is the page of “GIG-02 Senior Crystallographers”. Look for it in the left bar and open the page. The structure is the same, but there are more contents in the “About GIG-02” page. I copied these contents from the GIG-02 webpage to show how you can add more information on the IG pages.

Obviously, you cannot pack more and more information on a single page and at some moment you’ll want to organize your content in a set of pages. You can see how this looks in the page of “GIG-01 Young Crystallographers”. Here only the “Scope”, “Officers” and “Documents” sections are present in the “About” page, but the menu shows five different pages entitled “About GIG-01”, “Events”, “Resources”, “Photo Competition” and “Links”, that basically mimics the structure of the current GIG-01 external site.

The “preview” sub-site for GIG-01 is about the maximum level of content you can expect from the current IG facilities of the ECA site. Adding lots of entries to the sub-menu will make the page too heavy for visitors and adding non-static content (forms, applets…) is difficult or impossible. If this is what you need for your IG webpage, it is already setup and working and you only need to edit the information. If this is not enough you need one of the next options.

HOW TO EDIT CONTENT

The next step as an IG coordinator is to edit the contents. You should do it even if you choose to use an external server, because the group icon, abstract and the “Scope and Objectives” and “Officers” sections should be reviewed and updated.

To be able to edit content, you must log as a group administrator. Credentials for your group (login/password for the coordinator and the webmaster should be in your email inbos). Login as either the group coordinator or webmaster and you’ll be ready to customize the site.

When you are logged as coordinator or webmaster, three new elements are shown in the IG page that were not shown when you visit the page as an anonymous internet connection:

A “Join Group” or “Leave Group” button between the group abstract and the group menu. This is the mechanisms for a user being added or removed from a group. Each logged user (i.e. each ECA member) can join or leave a group just by clicking a button. If you entered your own group you will not see that button, because you are the owner and you can neither join (you are already there) nor leave your group. Enter a different group if you can test this functionality. Click the button to become a member, then check that you are listed in “Members” and, finally, leave the group. By the way, the login/password provided are for IG coordinators/webmasters. These accounts will belong to different people as the coordination of IGs changes. It is not a good idea to become member of groups when logged with these credentials because they don’t identify you as an individual member. When the users database is completely implemented, you’ll get a personal login/password that you should use in the ECA website when “being a ECA member instead of an IG coordinator/webmaster”.
An “Edit this page” link at the end of the “About” page. Clicking this link will open an editor that allows you to change the contents of the page. Obviously this link only appear in the pages of your IG when you are logged as an owner of the pages (either coordinator or webmaster).
A “Manage” option in the group menu. This link allows you to configure all the aspects of the IG sub-site other than the About page. When you click the link, you’ll see a form that allows you to change every aspect of behaviour of the group pages.

Things you shouldn’t change

You have the option to change everything in the group page, but you should not change:

The group name
The “privacy options” and “group invitations”. It is possible to select the group privacy (public/private/hidden) going to “Manage” -> “Settings”. All ECA IG’s must be public; never change this. In the same form, you can also set who can invite invite other members to become members of the group, by default any member can invite others and I don’t see how other configurations can be usseful.
Manage -> Extras -> General Settings. The implementation of group pages depends critically on the settings on this menu. Yo don’t need to change any setting here except if you are creating additional pages for the group sub-menu. This is described in a section later.
Manage -> BuddyDrive contains settings for an experimental feature that is not yet implemented. Please don’t chage this.

Finally,notice that, as an administrator of the group’s page, you can even delete the group. THIS INVOLVES DELETING THE SIG OR GIG as group membership, documents… are implemented as part of the group subsite, so be careful. You will be warned before deleting the IG, bout only once!

How to change the group icon

Select “Manage” -> “Photo”. You can either grag and drop your picture or find it in your filesystem.

Use a nice, good quality picture having a 300×300 minimum resolution and a 500×500 maximum resolution. This image will identify your group in all lists and pages, so try to make it showy but not strident.

How to change the group description

Select “Manage” -> “Details” (default option)

and fill the “Group Description (required)” field. This description is the text show as an abstract at the top of the group page and in all group lists. It must be kept short (ideally no more than 20 words or less) so that both lists and the group page don’t look odd and confusing.

How to use the Forum / Mailing List

in the “Forum” page, any member of the group can post interesting information of comment on other’s information.

When you enter the forum, you see an input box and a list of messages. Just write in the input box what you have in mind and this message will be spread immediately to a number of places:

It will go to the messages list that is under the input box in the forum page.
It will be sent by email to member groups that have configured their email options to receive alerts from the group.
It will be sent to anybody subscribed to receive RSS news feeds from the group.

The messages list

The first place where your message will show is in the messages list in the forum page. Using the selection box in the page you can filter the information shown there. You can select to see updates (messages and comments from all users), group updates (important messages by the group administrators, group memberships (who join or leaves the group) or everything.

For all messages in the list you can comment on the topic (this information will be posted to all places where messages are), mark it as a “favourite” post (like in facebook or other social networks) or (if the message is yours or you are the coordinator of the group) delete it.

email distribution of messages

This is a powerful feature of IG pages, because you have a mailing list “for free”. If you get used to do all IG communications through the forum, you can forgot about keeping a mailing list, including keeping up to date the list of members!

Members of the group can choose how to get updated on group activity by email. The options are to get updates as they are posted, as a daily or weekly digest, or not having email updates at all. When somebody become a member of the group, the default email policy of the group is applied. This default policy can be set by the group’s page administrator. Initially, “no mails” is set, so you will need to change this if you are going to use the forum at all. To do it go to “Manage” -> “Settings” and you will find the “Email Subscription Defaults” option by the end of the page.

More group email tools

Selecting “Manage” -> “Email Options” you can acces two additional tools for group emails:

Send an email notice to everyone in the group

Allows you to send an email notice to all group members. Everyone in the group will receive the email — regardless of their email settings — so use with caution only when something very important must be communicated to all group members whatever their choice about updates.

Welcome Email

Define an email to be send when a new member join the group.

Automatic RSS News Feeds

If you know what an RSS feed is just notice that the contents of the group forum can be exported as RSS by clicking the “Forum” -> “RSS” link. If you don’t know, it is possible to get started at the wikipedia. In short, an RSS feed is a file containing the title, author and summary of posts to a site. Readers for these files are available exists in many flavours, including widgets for web pages. This means that you can include an automatically updated list of the messages to your group’s forum in any other web page. This methods is used in some pages of this site. For example, the Meetings Announcements page has a section entitled “IUCr Meeting Announcements” that is rendered from a RSS feed from the IUCr. The full listing is automatically included and updated with less than a single line of code.

Adding more pages

You can add more pages to your group sub-site. This feature is quite limited: no hierarchical menus can be implemented and all pages will show in the menu. In practice this means that adding more than 3-4 pages will turn your group menu contents into a mesh. Please consider organizing carefully your contents to fit in 3-4 pages. If your contents are more complex than that, you should probably consider using an external site.

Adding a new page

Select “Manage” -> “Extras” -> “Add Page”. An editor will open where you can set the title and contents of the new page. Under the editor you can select to displaying or not displaying the page and a “Create Now” button to… create the page.

Managing pages

After creating the new page you will see a list of pages in your group. Typically you will see your “About” page and the new one you just created. Using the buttons next to the title of each page, you can view, edit or delete them. You can also re-order the pages (the menu options will display in this order). The “About” page must always be the first one, because this page, containing all required information, must be shown when first visiting the group page.

Renaming menu items

If you add new pages to your group, you can consider renaming your menu items (as I did for GIG-01) so they are “Contents” instead of “About”. To do this, go to “Manage” -> “Extras” -> “General” and enter under “Please specify the page name, where all custom pages will be displayed” the menu item under which you want to have all your pages. (“Contents”, “Info” or “Pages” or something similar are good candidates). In this form you can also change the order of your menu entries. Remember that the “About” page must always be the first one.

WARNING: The “Manage” -> “Extras” -> “General” form contains settings that are critical for the group page setup. Changing fields other than the one explained in the previous paragraph is highly discouraged.