This tutorial will take you through the initial setup of your site, after the Signing Up process. Along the way it will introduce many of the features that are available to you within the MyBandSite system.
Note
Look out for notes like this one that give important information.
Warning
Look out for warnings like this one. These are used when you need to be aware that what you are doing could have serious consequences!
After signup, you should be able to view your site by going to the url provided in your details email. This will be the site short name, followed by the mybandsite domain, so if you used RCB as your site short name, your site will be available at http://rcb.mybandsite.co.uk
The site doesn’t contain very much content yet, consisting of just the default homepage. You should find that the links work, but again there’s not much information displayed on the pages. You’ll find that the Members, Contact Us and Links links don’t work yet, and take you to a Page Cannot Be Found error message, styled in the same way as your site. We’ll fix this later in the tutorial.
The Members’ Area link will prompt you to login to the site. This is your username (without the short site name suffix) and the same password you used before.
The private area has links across the top of the page, again these don’t have much detail behind them yet. The one we’re interested in at the moment is the Admin Site link. Click it. This takes you into the Admin Site.
There are three tabs across the top of the admin site. Public contains information displayed on the public side of the website, Private is for the private area, and Site is for controlling some other aspects of your site, including styling. Ignore the others for now and look at the Public tab.
This contains three sections, Events, Members and News. The News section is where we want to be for now, so click on News items.
This page shows a list of news items. We created one for you when you activated your account, so there is one visible already. Click on it to edit it.
This will show the details for the news item. The following information is editable:
Note
Notice the grey bar at the bottom of the news item. You can use this to resize the box that you are typing the news text into.
Have a mess around with this news item, and click Save at the bottom of the page. Check back on your site’s homepage and you should see that the changes you make in the admin site are shown on the site. (There may be a small delay, no more than 60 seconds, until changes are visible.)
Note
To make it easy to navigate around the admin site, note the breadcrumbs trail just below the MyBandSite Admininstration header. Clicking on the Home link here will take you to the main admin page, where the tabs are.
Next, try creating a new news item using the Add News Item link at the top right of the page showing the news item list. Notice that the news on the homepage is shown in reverse order, with the latest news item at the top, ordered by whatever the display date is.
Note
When creating and modifying news items the today and now links are very useful, defaulting in the current date and time. Clicking on the small calendar icon will show you a calendar with which you can choose the date.
By now, you should have one or more news items visible on your homepage. Easy isn’t it? We can apply the same simple interface to adding events.
On the Public tab, in the Events section, click on the Add link beside Events. Fill in the details of an event, marking it as Public in the Public private field and Confirmed in the Confirmation field.
Note
Notice that some of the field names on the left are in bold, and other are not. The bold ones are mandatory: they must be filled in. The others are optional, you don’t need to put anything in them.
If you go back to your site and check, you should see that the events you have entered are visible under the events link. If you created any events as Private instead of Public, they will only be visible from the Events Diary link inside the private area. Likewise, if you marked any events as tbc (To Be Confirmed), then they will also only appear on the private area link.
Again, have a mess around and create some more events - you can always delete them using the delete link at the bottom of the edit page.
Note
On the page in the admin site that shows the list of events, there are two links at the top right to take you directly to the private and public events pages. Notice also that there is an area on the right hand side where you can filter the events and show only public or private ones.
If you look in the private area’s event diary, you will find a link at the top of the page labelled Printer Friendly Version. This is intended to provide a page which can be printed out and then handed out at rehearsals, detailing the upcoming events for the band. If you try it now, you will find that it has a header that needs some customisation to fit your particular band.
Go to http://www.mybandsite.co.uk/ and click on the documentation link at the top. This presents you with four options:
We need to override the template for the printer friendly joblist, but we don’t know what the template is called so we can’t use the Templates list to find it. If you navigate to the printer friendly joblist you will find that it’s url is (for the RCB example) http://rcb.mybandsite.co.uk/private/events/printer/. The key thing to note here is the path after the domain name, in this case /private/events/printer/.
In the documentation page, click on the Url List link (you may need to login at this point) and find the url /private/events/printer/. Click on it. The page shown will provide some details about the events module, and the focus will be on the printer friendly page section. This shows the template involved (private/events_printer.html and the values that are passed into the template - a list of jobs and today’s date.
Click on the template name (private/events_printer.html). This will show you the details for that particular template, and you should be able to see that the html in the template matches up with the html you saw when you viewed the printer friendly joblist in the browser. We need to copy this template into your particular site, then change it to fit our needs.
Click on the link above the template, Override This Template On Your Site. This will copy the template into your site, using a name including the current date/time, so it is not immediately used. Use the Click here to edit the new template link provided which will take you directly into the admin site and edit the new template.
Correct the template contents to match your site details (or just remove the bits you don’t want), rename the template to remove the date (the name should just be private/events_printer.html) and click Save. If you go to the printer friendly joblist now, you should find that your new header information is visible.
Bit of a detour now, we’re going to get the contact details page working. If you click on the Contact Us link from the public site, you will get a Page Cannot Be Found error. This section of the tutorial will make this page work.
Flat Pages are simple pages which are themed to look like any other part of your site, but just contain a title and some html, with no dynamic content like the events list.
In the admin site, click on the Site tab, and then click on Flatpages. There are none installed by defaults, so you’ll have an empty list. Click on Add flat page at the top to add a new flatpage. Fill in the following details:
Once you’re happy, save the page, navigate to the Contact Us page, and see your content.
Go through the same process to create a links page, at /links/.
The only module installed by default that we don’t yet have any data in is Members. The site supports a public members list, which is organised by section and supports drilling down to show a page from each section containing photos of the band members. It also provides a private members list, which contains contact email and telephone numbers.
Members records can be created in the admin site in the same way that News Items and Events were changed above. However, you will need to create Section’s first to group your members. By default, the user you created at startup will have been created as a Member record, in the Percussion section (sorry).
Whilst creating members, you will notice a droplist to allow you to link the members to a user. This is important - a user that does not have a Member associated with it will not be able to log into the private area. Users are not set up on the admin site, but are maintained through the control panel on http://www.mybandsite.co.uk/.
First things first, we need to create another user. Go to the control panel at http://www.mybandsite.co.uk/controlpanel/ and login. Click the User Setup option. Use the add new user link to add a user for another member of your band. Ensure that you mark the user as Active, and that they have Private Area Access. This should be the default for the majority of your band members.
Warning
Every day at 6am, all users are sent an email if any events have been changed the previous day. This means that if you add users the same day as you were messing around with events, you may end up sending them an email overnight! To avoid this, delete the Event Notifications from the Events area of the admin site.
Once you have a user, create a Section record in the admin site to place that user inside. Next, create a Member record, and point that record at the user created earlier. Mark the user as Visible.
Note
The username in the droplist will have the site’s short name suffixed onto the end of it, this is normal
Warning
Don’t forget, a user that hasn’t had a Member record associated with it will not be able to log into the private area.
If you go to the public members url, /members/, or the private one /private/members/, you will still get a Page Not Found error. This is because the site allows you to have public or private members list, or both, and by default neither is enabled. This gives us an opportunity to look at module options.
Go back to the control panel on http://www.mybandsite.co.uk/controlpanel/, and click on Modules Configuration. You will see the list of modules installed at the top, and the others available at the bottom. Don’t enable any more just yet, but notice that the Members module has a configure link on the right hand column. Click that, and you will presented with the options for this module. Enter True in both boxes to enable both the public and private pages, and click Save.
Note
Don’t forget that changes made in here may take upto 60 seconds to take affect.
You should now find that you have pages under both the public and private members lists, and that they contain the members that you created. Try logging in with the new user you have created.
The control panel includes a mechanism for informing users of their account details. Go to the control panel users list and edit the new user you created. There is a link available to generate a new password and send welcome mail. This will reset the users password, and then send an email to the user with something like the following text:
Hello Tom, welcome to Rothwell Concert Band!
The band website is available at http://rcb.mybandsite.co.uk/.
The site has a private area, which has lots of interesting things including a job list. When events are added to the job list you will be sent an email to this address.
To get into the private area, go to http://rcb.mybandsite.co.uk/private/ and log in as:
tim
password
Please keep this password to yourself, and don’t tell anyone else what it is.
Once you’re in, use the links at the top to access different parts of the site. You can also change your email address or password from the profile page.
Any problems, let me know.
Enjoy,
Tim
The email will appear to come from the site admin.
You should now have enough information to add data to your website and have it display on the public site. You also know how to create flatpages, and how to add new users for the private area.
In the next section, Tutorial Part 2 , we’ll look at changing the overall style of the website.