Main Configuration Settings

The Settings page, accessible at administer > settings, contains many general configuration settings for your CivicSpace site. Here you can modify some of the information you entered in the configuration wizard during initial site setup:

• Name. The name of your CivicSpace site, displayed at the top of every page and also optionally as part of your theme in the header
• E-mail address. The email address used as the "From" address for all emails sent out by your site, including for new user registration, forgotten password requests, and subscription notifications.
• Slogan. A short descriptive phrase about your site, which is optionally displayed as part of your theme; required to be included in the CivicSpace directory. The slogan will also appear in the description for the site's RSS feeds.
• Mission. Brief introduction to the purpose or goals of your site. Optionally displayed in a special style above the first post on your front page. Also required for the directory feature.
• Footer message. Message that is optionally displayed at the bottom of pages as part of the theme. The default message contains a copyright notice which you can add to or modify.

Other default settings include

• Anonymous user. The name used by default to label all posts by users that do not register, set by default to "Anonymous" in the comment configuration page.
• Default front page. The relative URL that indicates which page of items (or individual page) is shown on the front page. See Changing the Default Home Page of the Site for more information.
• Clean URLs. Instead of site URLs that look like http.//www.mydomain.com/?q=node/42, clean URLs look like http.//www.mydomain.com/node/42. Enabling clean URLs means ?q= is removed, which makes URLs look nicer, is easier to type, and is more search-engine friendly.
• Default 403 (access denied) page & Default 404 (not found) pages. For linking to customized error pages.
• Discard log entries older than. How long the system keeps log messages in the system. One week is generally believed to be a long enough period of time, so it is the default on CivicSpace sites.
• Cache support. Disabled by default on CivicSpace sites. Useful for very high bandwidth websites; whenever traffic to a site increases dramatically, the software will take measures to reduce the load on the server.
• Time and date format settings.

Support: How to get help

Modules and Features

There are quite a few other modules listed on the module configuration page which have not so far been mentioned. In this section, you'll find descriptions of some of them. Some are currently running; others are turned off. You can also load other contributed modules by downloading them from drupal.org and installing them yourself. Make sure that they are for Drupal 4.6 or they may not work.

Always remember that whenever you enable a module, you should check any permissions the module might have associated with it in order for users to have access to the module. When working with permission settings, it is often useful to create a test user and grant them the role for the permissions you are enabling. Then login as that user and verify that you have indeed granted the permissions.

Also check the administration menu and adjust any configuration settings. Some modules may have their own listing in the top tier of the menu; others may have a listing elsewhere, such as within the settings area of the menu.

Content: Creating Stories, Blogs, Forums, Books, and Pages

If you visit the create content link you'll see multiple content types configured for your use. In CivicSpace terms, each book page in this guide, story or forum is considered a basic content type known as a node. Thus, each of the various content types are particular types of nodes with specific functions and display characteristics:

• Stories are posts which appear on the default home page of a CivicSpace site, akin to a community weblog or Slashdot-like site where all site members can post. Or, the regular site users can be denied the ability to post to the front page using stories, allowing the site administrators to use the front page as an announcement board.
• Each individual user on the site can have their own blog page. An aggregate of all recent blog posts from all users is available through the Blogs link in the navigation header.
• Forums are much like any other threaded discussion forum where users can post to forum areas created by an administrator.
• Books, in this distribution, are used for the CivicSpace Site Configuration Guide, but can also be alternatively used for collborative projects (not covered within this documentation).
• Static pages are a way for a site administrator to create pages which are not included in one of the other node displays and could be used instead of the Books for additional resource pages.

NOTE: Site administrators wanting to setup a community weblog as their home page can choose to allow all site users to submit and edit stories, or they can enable the blog module and set all blog posts to automatically promote to the front page. The sub pages in this section of the guide provide details on how to configure this.

See also the administration help for nodes, stories, books, forums, blogs and pages.

Blocks: Controlling Content in the Columns

CivicSpace page layout is very similar to many other websites: a header, a footer, a main content column down the center, and block columns down the side with links and other information. Blocks, then, are the small boxes of links, etc., you see in the left and/or right hand columns.

As an administrator, you can choose which blocks appear in the left or right and in what order (using weights) in the block administration section. You can create and edit custom blocks such as the Sample Block which uses HTML. There are also some other blocks included with the distribution which have not been enabled. Try them.

For a more in depth explanation of blocks, see blocks in the administration help page.

Note: Do not turn off the Navigation Block or the User Login Block. Without these, you'll have great difficulty logging on the site and administering it.

Comments: Adding to the Discussion

This module allows users to post responses to other posts. Through administer you can configure what types of comments are accepted: anonymous, anonymous requiring an email address, or registered users only. You can also configure permissions for types of users (authenticated, administrative, or anonymous) so that comments written by the respective types of users enter an approval queue before they are published or are automatically published. Comments in the approval queue must be manually accepted and published by a site administrator. Comments are also searchable. Comments can be viewed seperate from their posts for easy editing and deleting.

Comments can be configured to control:

• list display options
• chronological display options
• number of comments displayed for each post
• placement in relation to the post
• anonymous poster settings
• comment subject fields
• comment previews
• location of comment submission form

Themes: Confinguring and Choosing Appearance

CivicSpace provides a few themes with your site and other contributed themes are available for download from Drupal. The themes section also offers various configuration options which affect the display and navigation for the site. For instance, under themes in the administration area, administrators can choose which themes to enable and designate the default theme for the site. If more than one theme is enabled, site users will be able to choose from the configured themes using the edit tab under my account.

Site administrators can choose whether to set various configuration options on an individual theme basis or across all themes. For example, the global settings page contains the following options:

• Logo image settings. Used to override the default logo for a particular site theme.
• Menu settings. The primary links and secondary links fields here are for customizing the navigation links available in the header of every page. Note that if the primary links field is left blank, CivicSpace will automatically generate links to enabled modules. NOTE: Some of the themes offered on this site use a specified format instead of HTML for the creation of primary and secondary links. Thus, in configuring any themes, always view both the global theme settings and the one's for the individual theme you are using. Look for instructions underneath the text field where inputting the primary and secondary links.
• Display post information on. Controls whether the submitted by and date information users see with each node is displayed for a given node type.
• Toggle display. Enables or disables various page elements such as the site name and slogan, the search box, and the primary and secondary links.

Advanced: HTML and CSS coders can choose to create their own site skin. Consult the Theme developer's guide in the Drupal handbook for more information.

Users: Configuring Site Access, Registration, and Posting

CivicSpace has a permission system which places users into roles/groups of users. A visitor who is not logged in is an anonymous user and a newly registered user is an authenticated user. An additional role has been added to this installation, an admin user which is given full access on the site. In the original account setup, the root super user account which was created first is not affected by the CivicSpace permission system; this user always has access to everything.

Some configuration tips:

• Registration. The default registration permission settings on this site allows anyone to register. The user settings page will allow you to change whether users can register on their own, require administrator approval, or not at all. The email sent to users can also be changed here, as well as the registration page information guidelines that users see when registering.
• Posting comments. The comment module section of the access control page controls whether or not anonymous users or authenticated users can post comments at all or only with moderater approval.
• Administrator view of comments. As an administrator, use the new comments display to see a table of all contents or those waiting for approval. The comments approval queue display provides a similar table for those comments awaiting approval..
• Making the site private. It is possible to lock the site up and grant access only to logged in users. On the access control page, make sure all boxes are unchecked under "anonymous users." Uncheck access comments and access content. Remember to "Save permissions" at the bottom of the page.
• Upgrading permission status. Many sites will need to have more than one site administrator. Visit the user list page and select "edit" for the user you wish to upgrade. name anywhere on the site and you'll find an edit account link. Look for Roles and check the appropriate box, then save your changes.

Tracking and Statistics

CivicSpace provides a number of ways to find out who has been visiting the site and who has been posting content:

• User list page. A table of users with their last access to the site.
• CivicSpace logs provide userful statistics and system-generated messages:
  • Recent hits. Logs of access to individual site pages. Provides information such as username, IP address, and referring page.
  • Referrer logs. Site referers for both internal and external links.
• Recent posts page (link available in the main navigation menu when the tracker module is enabled). The most recently updated nodes, including those with new comments. Logged in users will find a red asterick * beside all new or updated content.
• Content configuration and comment configuration sections. Each provide tables listing nodes and comments respectively from which an administrator can edit, view, or delete.

Enabling CivicSpace Automated Tasks: Configuring Cron Jobs

Some CivicSpace modules, such as search, notify and aggregator, have periodic tasks that must be triggered by the script cron.php included with your CivicSpace installation. You can do this manually in your browser by visiting your cron URL page (a blank page will display once the cron tasks have been executed).

However, the better way to do this is to have cron.php executed automatically using the Linux/UNIX crontab function.

• The following example crontab line will activate the cron script
  on the hour:

  0 * * * * wget -O - -q http://www.example.com/cron.php

• If your host has the text browser lynx on the system, make use of the file provided in your Drupal installation in scripts/. Edit scripts/cron-lynx.sh, subsituting the name of your site. Then setup a crontab every hour:
  

  00 * * * * /home/www/drupal/scripts/cron-lynx.sh

Alternatively, Drupal has a poormanscron module available for download. However, this module is much less efficient in terms of system resources compared to the methods described above. The poormanscron module checks to see if cron needs to run every single time a page is viewed on the site.

More information about cron is available in the adminstration help page and at the Drupal Handbook Cron system and crontab page.

Licensing & Acknowledgments

The text of this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (2.0). Permission to copy, modify, or redistribute this guide is only granted if this license is included and the CivicSpace Site Configuration Guide is attributed.

Content for this guide was produced by CivicSpace and was based on DrupalEd documentation. Thanks to Bryght for permission to draw on some of their How To's in constructing this guide.