What you can do.
This help is here to provide the information needed to add content to the website.
The basic structure of the website has been established for you and now it is time to fill it up with words and pictures.
It is possible for many editors to work together to build up content but only a few administrators can alter the structure.
If the structure is not serving your needs, talk to an administrator - many things are possible!
You are limited in what you can do to try to prevent you accidentally breaking the structure. However you are at liberty to add and modify a great deal and we rely upon you to behave responsibly.
You can
- add pages of information with words and pictures,
- organise pages within a menu system,
- add pictures to the image library,
You can't do anything though unless you are logged in and you can't log in without an account.
How it works
The website is built using some software called Drupal. There are books written about Drupal but all you need to know is in these help pages.
Behind the scenes is a database. When you add content you are putting information in to tables in a database. When Drupal shows a web page it selects information from the database and formats it. Because of this we can create pages that do things like "show all photos of a harlequin ladybird". When another photo of a harlequin ladybird is added, so long at the information in the database is correctly completed, it will automatically appear on the page of photos.
Content types
A content type has been created for each different type of thing we want to include in the website. This is equivalent to a table in a database. Each content type can have any number of fields to store different bits of information. For example, there is a Book content type which has fields for Title, Author, Publisher, etc. By structuring content types with fields we are then able to select or order books according to the contents in the fields.
The following content types currently exist.
- Article: details of a journal article
- Book: details of a book
- County Recorder: details of a county recorder
- Family: a page about a beetle family
- Image: a photo of a beetle species
- Key: key facts about a species
- Page: a general page in the top level of the website
- Page - Aquatic Coleoptera: a general page in the section of the website about the Aquatic Coleoptera Recording Scheme
- Page - Carabidae: a general page in the section of the website about the Carabid Recording Scheme
- Page - Chrysomelidae: a general page in the section of the website about the Chrysomelidae Recording Scheme
- Page - Coccinellidae: a general page in the section of the website about the Ladybird Recording Scheme
- ... a page type for every scheme in fact.
- Page - Scarabaeoidea: a general page in the section of the website about the Scarabaeoidea Recording Scheme
- Scheme - details of a recording scheme
- Species - a page about a beetle species
- Website - details of a website
Those content types that I describe as "pages" are those that a visitor to the website will see. Where I say a content type contains "details" this information is typically seen by the visitor in a summary form, such as a list of books. What this means is that, if you want to add a book to a list that you see on the website you don't edit the page containing the list, you add a new record in the book table and it is automaticaly added to the list. The Drupal word for any such record is a node.
Vocabularies
As you can see there are all these different bits of stuff that need ordering somehow so that we can join things togethter. To do that Drupal has something called vocabularies. These are lists of terms, words that can be attached to a node. Two vocabularies have been created, one is a list of species names and the other is a list of recording scheme names. When you create an image node, for example, you tag it with a term from the Species vocabulary in order that the system can then show the image in the right place.