Floribama Riders

Site members who are in the "site editor" role can enable or disable accounts for users. When a new user registers on the site, the account goes into a "blocked" state by default. The site sends an e-mail to the Webmaster and Treasurer, who can both enable the account to allow our new member access to special site features, like posting blog content.

Site editors can determine who has signed up but has not had their account enabled yet by visiting the Users page. (You might want to bookmark this in your web browser favorites.) Also, I made a change to the right menu navigation on FloribamaRiders.com to make this more obvious. If you're logged in with site editor permissions, you should see a "Users" link like the attached screen shot.

Once you're on the Users page, you can see who is still blocked by following these steps:

1. Click the Status radio button
2. Select "blocked" from the pulldown
3. Click the Filter button

 Then you can decide who should be unblocked.

Some people write their blog posts in Microsoft Word and then post them to this site. You'll get the best results if you use this web site's "paste from Word" feature. The attached image shows the steps to take, which are:

1. Click the "Paste from Word" button.
    
2. Make sure both check boxes are checked. The "Remove Styles definition" is not checked by default for some reason.
    
3. Paste your Word content into the big box and click the "Ok" button.

A couple of notes. First, the "Clean Up Box" button doesn't do anything but delete anything you've pasted into the big box. Don't use it. Sorry, it's a little confusing. Second, you might see images in Word, but pasting them into this box won't get them onto the site.

Good luck, and click my username to contact me if you encounter any problems.

-John "Ice" T

I'll keep a running to-do list here for the site admin.

Site launch tasks

Place all existing files into redirects using .htaccess or URL aliases at admin/build/path

Import all paid-up users using http://drupal.org/project/user_import

 
Post launch

Figure out how to put multiple images in a blog post.

• See http://drupal.org/node/71054
• Lullabot recommends, "Use ImageCache to resize images. It's worth the poor u.i. and configuration challenges. Tastes best with ImageField, CCK, and Views."

Configure method for recurring events (chapter meetings)

On Tue, 6 May 2008, Bruce wrote:

> John,
>  I think we need to carefully consider the unmoderated auto-signup as
> we will get spammers.  It would be ok if someone will monitor it.  B.

On Tue, 6 May 2008, Woods wrote:

> John:
>
>  I have found that about 10% of the email addresses noted in the
> membership list are not valid for what ever reason.  I might suggest
> putting a notice with instructions out on the list server and also
> having the chapter VP's bringing this to the local chapter's
> attention.
>
>  Woods

Moderator approval

I was assuming that as soon as we launch, I would turn on a Drupal feature that requires moderator approval for signup.

So the site signup form would *become* the FBR registration form. I think I've got all the same fields, but Woods let me know if I'm missing anything. I probably have to make the membership type more granular so the user can choose "regular member - $30/year" separately from "regular member - $45 for 2 years."

When we migrate to the new site, I would like to simplify the account creation process for our members. I remember some people had trouble signing up for the forums at http://www.floribamariders.com/cs/forums, and anything we can do to make things easier would be gravy.

I have access to the current membership list from Woods. See http://www.floribamariders.com/member.htm

Auto-signup via e-mail

What do you all think about *automatically* signing up people for access to the site? We would import a list of members who are up-to-date on their payments. The system would notify the member at their e-mail address of the new account, and that person could log in to add their blog posts and see the private forums on the site.

I wrote some quick editorial guidelines for the site. I put them in "book page" format, rather than this blog because I see us developing these over time as a group, rather than with just one person. See the editorial guidelines.

-Ice T

Here's a quickie tutorial on how to promote content to the home page. If you are in the site editors group, you have these permissions. (The Site Editors include the club officers, as well select club members with professional editorial and tech experience.)

To see a list of recent content, you can click on Content in the right nav. (Again, this link will only work if you're a site editor.) If you find a blog post that should go on the home page:

• Click on the headline for that post
• Click the edit tab and scroll to the bottom
• Expand the "publishing options" heading and check "promoted to home page." Also ensure that "published" is checked.

Once you promote a blog post to the home page, its "teaser" automatically goes to the top of the list. There are two ways to control the order of the teasers on the home page.

Known issues

The collage banner in the header currently gets obscured by the word Floribama. We're working on that.

The technology

"Drupal" (pronounced Droo-pul) platform. This is a free open source system that runs several major web sites and offers a lot of flexibility.

This will involve switching web hosts, but after comparing features with Community Server and DotNetNuke, I think it's best for the club.

Here's what we have accomplished thus far in Drupal.

Online registration

We can put our registration form completely online and use SSL to encrypt the data just like banks do. See http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/user/register
(Note, you won't be able to access this page if you're already logged in.)

Paypal integration

A user can fill out a form on our site, specifying which track day options they would like. Then they click a PayPal button, and they're automatically on the PayPal site with all the right options filled in.

FBRs,

Our new web site is up and running in a development environment at http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/.

Feel free to create your own account and test things out. (When we go live, new accounts will require approval by the treasurer or another administrator.)

Assuming everything goes well and there are no major issues, we should go live next week. For those interested in all details of how we developed the site, see this blog post. To provide feedback, you can add comments to that post, or reply to the Yahoo list for a wider audience.

http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/blogs/admin

Quick notes:

1) We currently have an old "Moto GP or Bust" blog post as a featured item on the home page. As we add more recent content, the older posts will rotate down. A small number of FBR members will have the ability to promote content to the home page. We'll probably start with the club officers.