... add pages to this site

 

1. First, you should be the registered user. Anonymous users are not allowed to add new pages or modify existing ones. While we request for your Drupal account name (UserID) to match the RCF account, please note that both RCF and Drupal accounts do NOT share the same password.
2. Log in using the login box (bottom-left corner of every site page)
3. Using 'sitemap' or 'documents' link navigate to the site section you are going to extend.
4. Click 'add child page' link which is located below the page body.
   You should see the page labelled 'Create book page'
5. Put title into the 'Title' editbox and select a category in the "STAR" menu just below (no default is set but it needs at least one)
6. Put the page body into the 'Body' textarea. You can switch to plain text edit using the '' sign, if you need more control.
7. Leave 'Path alias' blank.
8. Leave 'Parent' as it is.
9. Click 'Preview' then 'Submit'. Enjoy your new page! It is immediately added to sitemap, participates in site search and many more!

... modify existing page

1. First of all, you can only modify your own pages  and pages for which you have been granted access / rpivilege to edit. Highly privileged users may edit about any page (Drupal records changes in revisions however so, actions are traceable). This being said ...
    
2. OK, Log in first using login box (bottom-left corner of every site page)
3. Navigate to the page you are going to modify.
4. You should see 'View' and 'Edit' tabs right below the page title. Click on 'Edit'.
5. Change the data according to your needs, then click 'Submit'.
6. Changes are applied immediately! Please, check the page view after submit.

... add comments to the pages

It is plain simple. Under every page (including polls and meetings) there is a link 'add new comment'. Just fill in title and body and click submit! Comments provide an interaction between site visitors and page maintainers, which helps to keep documentation in up-to-date state. The page owner may or may not receive updates depending on his subscription settings but should always see the comment whenever he/she will come back and visit his/her own page ...

... create a cross-reference to another page

Creating a cross reference

Reference to another page is done through a special syntax you have to embed in your HTML code. This tag is of the form [node:XXX] or [node:XXX, title="Alternate Title"]. It will automatically be converted into links.
For example

[node:802, title="this link"]

will give this link while
 

[node:802]

will give Software & Computing.

This extension works only within normal HTML text flow that is, it will not be replaced nor substituted within HTML code blocks. Note that the link refers to the URL page location of node 802 (the Software and Computing page).

 

Advanced notes

• <a href="?q=node/366">This link</a> would refer to this page itself i.e. this link. You would lose the associated path convenience but it is one way to cross reference a page to itself within a self-formed HREF (for example, if you need to use #name tags). This form should be used in a seldom manner as since Drupal 5.x, all HREF and NAME references are working as one would expect (in other words, don't use it - we mention it in case you __really__ need it).
• This the parser will automatically convert tags like [node:XXX, title="Alternate Title"] into links, how to write them literally if need be? You will need to disable the RICH Text Editor and go in Plain Text Editor mode and use the <code></code> HTML tag to prevent the conversion of quotes into &amp;.

 

Why using references of the form [node:XXX] ??

At each new page creation, Drupal adds a "node" reference to that new page. This number is unique and will never be used again in the lifetime of your Drupal installation. This means that as far as you refer to the node and the page has not been deleted, the reference will always be correct even if the page is placed at a different location as per the URL path.

For example, if node 802 is in /STAR/comp/ but later moves to /comp/, using a reference <A HREF="/STAR/comp/">this link<A> instead of

[node:802, title="this link"]

will lead to creating a non-dynamically adaptable pages and the link may be broken. Using Drupal's node syntax however will always (and regardless of where the page is as per its URL reference) lead to the right cross-reference.

 

... create a link to an existing (external) page?

Ideally, you don't since the purpose of a Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal is to keep all links self-managed. Instead, you should use cross-Drupal page reference as explained in our FAQ ... create a cross-reference to another page.

But in case you really (really) need to do this (pages are on a remote site and so on), here is how to do this:

• Do the usual -  add child page from a particular point
  For example, our example will Embedding
• A new page creation will appear. Chose a name for this page.
  In our example Old Requests
• In the field path-alias, enter the full URL of the target (remote) page.
  In our example, http://star.phy.uic.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/EmbeddingStatus?cover=print
  Warnings
  1. Some CMS allows for a URL path to be un-terminated by "/" and make a difference between a URL like .../BLA and ../BLA/. Unfortunately, your Web CLIENT may not comply. Entering a non slash terminated path as reference will cause the Browser to add the slash hence the link fail.
     Solution: In our example, we circumvented this by using a ?cover=print syntax
  2. After you click submit, you will NOT easily be able to re-edit the Drupal page and change the alias unless you have the node reference number.
     Solution: In our example, we kept a link to the original Drupal node on Embedding and strongly suggest you do the same.
• Providing you read the previous warning, click submit.
  A menu entry is now added, referring to an external page and link.

... do you find the node number of a page?

In ... create a cross-reference to another page, we noted the node:XXX syntax but how does a user know the node number?

• If you have more than "view" privilege, you can find the node number by moving your mouse over the page available tabs such as "Edit" or "Revisions" and inspect the link
• The link is like this STAR/node/802/edit or STAR/node/802/revisions respectively - in this case, the node number is 802 and correspond to Software & Computing
• Use this node number for your cross references

ATTENTION:

• Stating the obvious, if you are not logged in or working from a guest account, you will NOT be able to see any tabs on any page
• Similarly, individual users may set protections on pages preventing you from accessing it ... please report if this is the case

... quickly add a picture on a page

It IS possible to copy-and-paste an image in the WISIWIG editor of course and this feature has been there for ages. Please, be responsible and balance your convenience and the scalability / long term usability of this method. If you have many imagest o include, you need to understand that the resulting page will be large as the copy-and-paste will essentially add an image bitmap information to the page HTML itself ... below a few pros and cons.

Pros:

• Quick and easy hence perfect for quick pages or singe purpose image
• Perfect for blogging

Cons:

• The page itself becomes bigger and since we saved them in a database, this could get out of hands
• The orginal resolution may be lost
  • Note: images handled by ImageAssist in contrast are Physically saved on disk and can be re-used many times (and downloaded in full resolution).
• Original transparency will be lost
• The included image cannot be referenced by another page (you need to include it again if you want it to appear on another page)
• ...

Now, how to do that

• Open an image - I use iView in my example
• Use your image viewer "copy" short key
• Make sure you have the FCKEditor set to WISIWIG (not plan text editor)
• Make sure you use the full HTML option in "Input Format"
• Use the CTRL/V function ...

The image below was included that way, actually copying the image from the Drupal site by simply using my browser (right click, "Copy Image" and using CTRL/V here). Hard to do it simpler ...




The demonstration is done that the WISIWIG can indeed display bitmap images. A note however that the ability to copy-and-paste images highly depends on your Web browser and/or ImageViewer capability to put and recover the image from the clipboard. Don't blame Drupal for everything ... It can do it but your OS and tools need to have that copy and paste from clipboard capability.

I cannot delete a page, why?

As any action in Drupal, "delete" is  a permission which is granted to users with privileges (your PWGC and detector sub-system's software leader) but not to normal users. So, why is this not granted to normal users? Before you scream and shout, please read the below ...

The ability to delete pages was suppressed by default (i.e. normal users not allowed to do so) and by design requirements: it was brought up that our previous Web support (standard set of web pages) had up to 50% of dead links and cross links to other documents. This "complaint" was a recurrent theme and we decided to investigate. It did not take long - we determined this was because users made lots of "cosmetic" changes to their own pages such as change in the name of page or changing the directory tree structure (hence the document previously located at /a/b/c/x.html was now /x/yz/w/a.html). Of course, all of this sounded good for user A restructuring their pages but not to user B who referred or cross-linked to them. A content management system was identified as needed.

Upon deploying Drupal, the decision was made to try to not allow page deletion and to encourage Drupal's native way to cross-reference a page ... and we have 100% of cross-links valid since 2005 when Drupal was first deployed and used in STAR (that's quite a change for sure). Though, links to external web sites still have some issues (as we cannot guarantee they would exist forever).

Since lots of users ask how to delete a page, I wish there would be an option "allow deletion until the page is at least a few days old" because the accidental page creation event is more frequent than anything. But it is a allow delete or a deny delete. For now, the least of the two evils was chosen by demand. But if you want a page to disappear, you could ask a privileged users (any PWGC and sub-system leader has that right and I hope they will use it wisely) to

• delete the page for you - we would hope they would mostly if the page is recent enough and/or is not referenced from anywhere else ...
• BETTER option for older page: privileged users can also edit, go to the bottom of the form and search for "Publishing Options" and uncheck "Published" - this will hide the page but it will STILL exists meaning that if someone has reference that page, they will still find it. It would be highly recommended though to leave a message indicating the page is obsolete.