A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

3.1 Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP using MySQL as the database management system. Drupal, like many modern CMSs, makes it easier to create and organise content, allows easy site searching, provides menus and book facilities, an RSS feed and manages site contributors.

3.2 Configuration

Drupal version 6.19 was installed in December 2010.

3.3 Maintenance activities

The Status Page need regular monitoring as does the Log page.

Modules may need updating to fix bugs etc.

The website admin page contains links to common activities.

3.4 Site Style

The site style is garlandbga, which is a modification of the standard garland.

3.5 Blocks

The following blocks are used within the site. Most of these are standard Drupal ones that are configured through Drupal->Administer->Site Building->Blocks.

The only one that is expected to be updated on any regular basis is the BGA Current Information with the Front Page right (News Type block) being changed occasionally. These are both only displayed on the Front Page.

1. Header
• Search box
2. Left hand column
• Navigation
  The menu system (see below)
• Active forums
  Shown only for logged in users
• Secondary links
  Not used anymore
  Join the BGA, Contact Us, Site Index
• Current Information
  Front page only
  Contains the latest information about BGJ, Newsletter and Council dates Please don't change the title of the Future Go Events in the UK (Tournament Calendar) page otherwise this won't work.
  If you're wondering I cribbed the basic code from somewhere else...
• Online League
  Certain news pages only
  Shows the feed from the League minisite. This block is available because this feed is selected in the RSS News Aggregator
• Last site update
  Not used any longer
• Site Index
  Used on Site Index pages only
• CiviCRM ones
  Used on CiviCRM pages only
3. Right hand column
• Book Navigation
  Only on book pages
  Shows an internal book index and is excluded for the first page for each book
• News Type
  Front page only
  Is a Block generated from a View. The remaining non-news items are in the Header/Footer sections of the View. You can edit it directly from the Front Page by hovering over the colun and clicking on the [Edit] button
• Forthcoming tournaments key
  Only on /tournament/index page
  It's created like this to make it easier to maintain the Forthcoming Tournaments page
• Historic tournaments key
  Only on /tournaments/history* pages

Note: The weights are chosen so that they display in the order chosen.

3.6 Menus

The Menu system is in three parts - the Primary Links are those displayed at the top of all pages, the Secondary Links no longer used are those displayed under the Navigation links, which are the main items requiring some maintenance.

Entries are created in the Navigation links in two ways - either by selecting a Menu item within the Page/Story/Book entry or by creating a New (custom) Menu Item on the Drupal->Administer->Site Building->Menu page.

You can create two references to the same page from within the menu system, but it's recommended that in this case both should be custom items, to avoid future confusion.

The policy for menu items, no matter which way they are created, is:

• The menu hierarchy should only be more than 3 levels in exceptional circumstances
• The item path must always be a named URL for at least the top level and preferably for the second level (requires allocation of a URL when creating the Page/Story)

Note carefully that the weights are chosen so that they display in the correct order, not the alphabetical one.

3.7 Views

The Drupal Views system is used to create the News and Site Update pages (Drupal->Administer->Site Building->Views). In February 2011 Review and Club List Views were added.

These should be mostly self-explanatory when you examine them, but the following should be noted:

• Table Views are normally used, but not for the Newsletter View (views/newsletter) and a few others
• Pager mode is used, with typically 20 nodes per page
• Menus are used for the News and Site Update, but provided as a Tab and therefore not in the normal menu system
  This has the unfortunate side-effect of removing the location information from the page header
  
• There are two top-level Tab menus, defined by the URL structure, i.e. views/? and updates/?. Creating something xxx/? would create another top-level Tab
• All current views have a filter of Node:published=Yes. This is strongly recommended
• The News views use only Story, Poll or Image items. The Site Update views don't use Book Pages, Forums or Blog entries.

3.8 User Management

Users should be added as necessary and given only the permissions required to do their jobs: website contributor, website editor or admin plus the CiviCRM ones are the only classes currently.

Club editor was added in February 2011 to allow club secretaries to edit only the Club list pages (content type=club). If the secretary wants to edit their own web pages, then they also need to be at least a Web contributor.

3.9 Content Types

A new content type Club has been created to support the easy entry and maintenance of the data for our Clubs list, map and BGJ entries. This is like a page, but with some additional fields.

Note: The list of regions is held as a text drop-down list. So changing the name of a region requires you to go through every club in the region to change their entry and creating a revision entry for those clubs. Moral: don't even think of changing a region name!