The AC21 website can be used to provide links directly to member schools, or the provide information directly from the AC21 website itself. This short guide explains how to add and edit school information.
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Before you start
If you wish to update your institution’s information, you will need to have a valid AC21 webserver ID and password. If you have an ID, but have forgotten your password, you can recover it by email, instructions are given at the end of this guide. If you do not have a password, or if you have fogotten your ID, please feel free to request assistance from the AC21 offices at Nagoya University, who will be happy to help.
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World map
This screenshot shows the top page of the site. Hovering over a country with the mouse cursor dislays a list of institutions in that country in the panel to the left. Clicking on a country shows a country view, with markers for cities in which member institutions are located. We will return to this map later in our tour, but first, let’s click on the Home link (circled in red in the illustration to the right) to enter the main area of the site.
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AC21 home page
The AC21 home page is shown to the right. To edit institution information, we will use the login link on the right side of the page (circled in red). Click on this link to log in.
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Login page
Clicking on the login link will display the page shown to the right. Enter your AC21 ID and password in the fields, and click the log in button to log in.
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Display after successful login
If your login is successful, you will see a screen like that shown to the right. Note the new tabs above the content area. When logged in, you have special privileges to view and edit additional content within the site. Administrative staff of AC21 have privileges to view, add and edit all information throughout the site. Representatives of member schools have privileges to edit and control the display of the member page of their institution. We will now manage institution pages in the system, To go to the list of schools, click on the Members & Partners tab at the top of the page (circled in red in the illustration to the right – the tab may be in a different position, but the one you want will be named something like Members & Partners.
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Members & Partners screen
Clicking on the Members & Partners tab will display a page like that shown to the right.
The AC21 Members folder (circled in red) contains all of the information pages for member institutions. To manage school information, click on this link.
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The AC21 Members folder
By clicking on the AC21 Members folder link, you will be taken to the listing of institutions it contains, as shown to the right. Next, let’s assume we are a member of AC21 staff at Nagoya, and that we want to add a new school to the list. We can do so by clicking on the add ac21memberinfo link (circled in red).
Note that this step is only of interest to AC21 staff at Nagoya University. After creating a page, we will illustrate how it can be edited by member institutions.
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Editing a member information page
Clicking on the add ac21memberinfo link will open a screen like that shown to the right. We will create the new page by filling in the information, and clicking on a save button at the bottom of the form. The fields with a red spot next to the title are required; required fields must be completed in order to save the form. For convenience, some of the fields have special, helpful features. We will now look at these features before saving the form.
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Selecting a country
Clicking on the Country field will display a list of countries like that shown to the right. The list is long – it contains all of the countries recognized by the UN – but you can locate a country quickly by typing the first few letters of its name. In the illustration to the right, we have clicked on the Country field, and typed the first few letters of “United States”. When the desired country is highlighted, we select it by pressing the Enter key on our keyboard.
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Entering coordinates
The fields Latitude and Longitude are for the geographic coordinates of this school. Precise coordinates are not required; the coordinates of the city in which the school is located are sufficient. Note that a longitude position to the west of Greenwich (in England) is negative, and those to the east of Greenwich are positive. Latitude positions above the equator are positive, and those to the south of the equator are negative.
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Editing the Overview field
The last field in the form is the Overview field. This field provides convenient formatting menus and buttons (similar to the popular “Word” word processing software provided by Microsoft Corporation). Using these buttons, you can add graphics, tables, numbered lists and other formatting to the content of this field.
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Saving school information
When we are done editing school information, we can save our work by clicking on the “save” button at the bottom of the form (circled in red in the illustration to the right).
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School information page saved
When the school information page is successfully saved, you will see a page like that shown to the right. Note that all of the information we entered is not displayed; the latitude and longitude are used only for placing the marker for this school on the country map; but the most important information for readers is the message from the school, so that is all that is displayed in “view” mode for this page.
One item to note regarding this freshly saved page is its review state (circled in red), which will be set to public draft. This setting controls the way in which this page is displayed on the AC21 website. This is a very important item, so let’s take a close look at what it does.
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Changing the review state
Left-clicking on the public draft link will open a menu like that next to the arrow in the illustration on the right. If we highlight publish in the selection list and left-click, the review state of the page will change to published. A “published” school information page displays differently from a “public draft”. We will look closely at exactly how the two differ in a moment.
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Workflow and review state
Let’s take a break from the website for a moment, and learn a little more about what the review state setting is used for.
In every office, documents go through a review process before they are made public. Typically, a document is written by an author and reviewed by an editor or a committee before it is finally made public. We have all experienced the huge and confusing volume of email traffic that this process generates when it is done using email attachments.
The Plone webserver can greatly simplify this process, by using the workflow associated with a document (i.e. a web page) stored on the server. The review state that we learned about in the example above is used to move the the document up or down in the workflow shown in the illustration to the right. If the user is both the author and the reviewer (as I was in the previous example), he or she can perform all of the actions shown in the illustration – so I was able to publish the document immediately.
In a more typical case, the author submits the document, and a reviewer then checks it for grammar and style, and then publishes it. Published documents have the highest degree of visibility on the Web.
Let’s now take a closer look at the documents in our example, so see how the review state affects the presentation of an AC21 Member Information page on the Web.
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Logging out
To see for ourselves how published documents differ from public draft documents, we will be navigating back and forth between the world map and the list of AC21 member institutions. We will also be logging out and logging in again, to see how this affects things. Before proceeding, please review the steps above to be sure you understand how to navigate the site and log yourself in.
All set? Good.
First, let’s log out from the site by clicking on the log out link in the upper right part of the screen (circled in red in the illustration to the right).
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Log out confirmation screen
After logging out, you will be presented with a screen like that shown to the right, clearly indicating that your login session has ended. The site will now show only content that is accessible to an anonymous user.
Let’s see how the world map works for a casual visitor to the website. Left-click on the world tab (circled in red in the illustration to the right) to return to the world map view.
Note: After an institution is added, the world map must be updated by the web administrator in order for the new institution to appear correctly in the map views. We will assume that this has been done.
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World map again
In the world map view, we see that nothing has changed. (If our new institution were in a country with no other AC21 members, the new country would be colored green. In this example, however, nothing changes in the world map view.)
Let’s click on the United States to take a closer look.
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The public draft review state
In the country view, we see that there are two pinpoint marks in the country map. One is for the University of North Carolina. The other is for the new school that we have added, the University of the Rocky Mountain Time Zone. The member information page for the University of North Carolina is in the public draft review state. Remember that we changed the review state of the new page for the University of the Rocky Mountain Time Zone to published. To see how the review state changes the display of pages, let’s click on each one and see what happens. First, let’s click on the University of North Carolina.
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School home page
As you can see, we are taken directly to the home page of the University of North Carolina. When an AC21 Member Information page is in the public draft review state, the page redirects the user to the institution’s own home page. The contents of the page itself are not visible to the general public.
Now let’s return to the country view again, by clicking on the worldmap tab, and then clicking on the United States in the world map.
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The published review state
This time, let’s left-click on the pinpoint mark for our newly added school, the University of the Rocky Mountain Time Zone. Remember that we set this page to the published review state.
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The published review state
As the illustration shows, clicking on this link takes us to the AC21 Member Information page for this institution. A school that wishes to display information directly on the AC21 website can do so by submitting its page for publication using the review state setting, as explained above.
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Summary
This guide has illustrated the basic features of the World Map top page of the AC21 website. In particular, we have looked at how to create and edit AC21 Member Information pages, how to change the review state of a page, and we have seen how changing the review state affects the presentation of member information on the Web.
The maintenance of member information can be organized in a variety of ways. The task of maintaining member information can be delegated to individual institutions on a member-by-member basis. Alternatively, maintenance can be done by AC21 staff. Or the task can be assigned to the web administrator. Plone can serve any of these choices, without further changes to the system.