McNeese Website Documentation

Using My Workbench

The workbench provides a central location for managing content. The workbench page can be navigated to by clicking on the My Workbench link in the utility navigation. The workbench page has the following menu tabs (some may not be visible due to access control restrictions):

• my content
• create content
• my menus
• my sections
• my drafts
• needs review

The my content tab is the primary workbench tab and is the page that the my workbench link on the utility panel brings you to. Users who have permissions to manage the menus for their group will see the my menus tab. Read more about the menus in the Menu System documentation. The my sections tab will bring you to a page that lists all groups, displaying content associated with groups you belong to. For administrative users, this can be used to quickly add or remove a user from any given group. The next tabs are: my drafts, and needs review. These two tabs provide a list of content (see Using & Managing Workflow). For the my drafts tab, all content that is not in the published state and is authored by you is shown. For the needs review tab, all content that is in the needs review or needs validation state and may be reviewed by you is displayed.

In the content body of the my content page, there are two tables:

1. my edits
2. all recent content

Each of the content listing tables provide an actions column that is usually found on the far right side of the table. The actions column may contain links to allow a person edit, moderate, and view accessibility information for some content. The my drafts and the my reviews tables also contain a moderate column that provides links to change the workflow state in a single click.

Understanding Groups

The website uses groups to determine how content relates to other content, who is allowed to view or manage content, and where that content gets stored on the system. For most users, this can almost be ignored because most users only belong to a single group. The users who are only in a single group should still be aware of groups because it directly affects how and where content gets placed on the website.

It is important to understand that groups may be nested. Nested groups are groups that are part of another group and the terminology to distinguish the relationships are parent group and child group. When a group is nested in another, users of a parent group are granted the same privileges to all child groups in which they have for that parent group. Users of a child group do not have any privileges over the parent group unless they are explicitly assigned to a parent group. Users who are associated with a parent group will be in multiple groups and as a result those users should be careful to ensure that the content they create are placed in the proper group.

Most groups have what is called a url path. The url path designates how and where content should belong. As an example, this documentation is expected to be found on www.mcneese.edu at the path: https://www.mcneese.edu/documentation/website/managing-content. This documentation is expected to be in the website group that is a child group of the documentation group. The documentation group has a url path of /documentation and the website group has a url path of /website. When this managing content documentation gets assigned to the website group, its url path should expected to become: /documentation/website/managing-content. The last part of the url path is derived from the title given to some content. Pay attention to how the title Managing Content gets changed to managing-content. This happens because there are limitations as to what is and is not allowed to be used in a url path. Almost all users never have to care about the limitation because all of the work translating the title into a url path is doing automatically.

Creating & Editing Content

There are different ways to add content. One could go to the relative path of /node/add, click on the Add content link that is found in the utility bar, or click the create content menu tab found on the My Workbench page. All of those choices lead to the same place, the add content page. This page provides a list of all content types available to a given user. If the user is only allowed to create one content type, then this page automatically redirects the user to the add page for the specific content type they are allowed to edit.

While each content type provides different fields, there are a few basic fields shared amongst the different content types.

• Title Field
  The title is simply the name of the page. This field is used to generate part of the url path. The title field is required by all content types.
• Body Field
  Otherwise known as content body, the body field is where the page body is typed in by the user. Normally this field contains an editor that allows the user to type in and see what they type in is supposed to look like.
• Workflow Vertical Tab
  The workflow vertical tab contains fields associated with the group in which a particular content belongs. Most users will see the following fields inside this vertical tab:

  • Group Field
    The group field is a select list that allows a user to select which group the content in question belongs. Selecting the proper group is important because it directly controls how and where the content gets placed on the website and who is allowed to edit and manage it. A user is only able to see and select groups in which they belong to or are child groups of a group they belong to.

There are more fields available than those listed above. Fields may become visible based on the content type and the user's privileges. If you can see more fields than those listed above, be sure to read the inline documentation that is often placed directly below that field. Such inline documentation will describe a fields purpose and how to use the field.

Adding & Using Images

Using images on this website can be unusually difficult. There are different ways to upload and use the images, each with its own benifits and detriments. In addition to the different ways, images have very strict accessibility compliance requirements.

Before even talking about uploading and using images, the accessibility requirements must be understood and followed. All images that you will be using must have an alternate text. For photos of individual people, the alternate text would simply by the name of the person in the photo.

The first and preferred method of uploading or inserting an image onto a page is through the editor. The editor organizes images into multiple directories and many of the directories are organized into groups. These groups directly relate to the workflow groups, making images easier to sort and navigate through.

To use the editor for uploading images, one should click on the image icon in the toolbar of the editor. Users should click on the browse server button. The browser server should open a new window where one can navigate, upload, manage, and select

The second method of uploading or inserting an image onto a page is through the image uploader in the files vertical tab. This method is less organized and has more problems, but it also provides a very useful feature many users will want. This useful feature provides a way to automatically allow content to be expanded to its original size when clicked on.

The major problems with this second method are:

• All images are in one directory.
  This makes it very hard to find an image once it is uploaded. Finding your image can be confusing if other users used the same file name you did.
• Removing the image from the vertical tab removes the image from the content body.
  This is not apparent at first because once an image is removed from the vertical tab, it still shows up in the content body. It may even show up after you save the page. This is because the image gets temporarily cached when added to the vertical tab. The images will eventually disappear when removed from the vertical tab.