How to register as an admin to write and post bulletin articles - part 1.

This tutorial will show you how to become an admin so that you can write bulletin articles and post them to the Web Site. There could be two main reasons why you may want to do that.

a. You may have taken part in some project or had a Rotary experience that you want to share with others. Or you may just have the desire to write about something to do with Rotary.
b. You may be the chairman of one of the District committees and you want to report to other members of the District on the progress of your particular program.

There could be many other reasons, but they are the most obvious right now.

1. The first thing that you need to do is apply to become a site admin. This is easy, all that you need to to do is go to the admin request form, fill it out and submit it. If you simply want to post a general article, just apply to post to the general bulletin. If however, you want to post to a specialised bulletin, say YEP for instance, then make a suggestion and it can be created or you can be authorised to post to an existing category with permission of the chairman of that particular committee.

2. Here we will use our Rotarian Fred Blogs as an example. Fred has requested that he be allowed to post articles to the general bulletin section of the site. His request has been Ok'd and he has been granted access to that bulletin's admin area.

3. To post an article, all that Fred needs to do is go to the site and make sure that he is logged in. He can now access the admin area.

4. Once Fred has clicked on the admin link, another window to show the admin area.

Notice that Fred is logged in.

Also, notice that on the left hand side of the page there is a menu which allows Fred to post a new entry, edit any of his own entries, do a search, access his profile, do a member search and send an e-mail to other registered members. Fred can open the District site in another window by clicking on 'visit your site' in the right hand top and he can also access a help page and exit (logout) if he wishes.

5. But Fred really wants to publish an article about the great weekend that his Rotary Club has just had running their major fund raising project for the year. He even has some photos that he wants to include with his article as well. No problems.

First Fred needs to click on 'New Entry', this is the screen that he is presented with.

Let's have a look line by line at what Fred can do here.

1. He can type in a date and time when he wants his article to expire. If this were an article about an upcoming event, that would be the best thing to do. However, with an article of general interest there is no need to worry about this field, as the article will be automatically archived over time.

2. Fred can add some basic HTML commands to his article if he wants to place a link to another site or make some text bold. The red arrow on the right of this bar is for uploading images or files. We will look more closely at this bar, and how to use it, in later tutorials.

3. Fred needs to compose a title for his article. It should be short (no more than twenty words) and relevant and he cannot post the article without it.

4. Fred need not worry at this stage about writing a 'blurb' as it will not be seen.

5. The main part of Fred's article needs to go into the 'body' section.

6. If Fred has written a really long article, he may want to place the bulk of it into the 'more' section so that it will not take up so much space on the main bulletin page.

7. Fred is only authorised to post to the 'general' bulletin, but he could apply to post to others as well.

8. Fred can leave his article open for all to see, (recommended, otherwise it will be a waste of time) or closed so that others cannot see it.

9. He should leave the three checkboxes checked.

10. Fred can decide whether or not to allow other registered members to comment on his article. He should leave this checked to encourage communication.

11. Fred's author name is correct.

12. So... Fred decided to write his article in Word, because it was fairly long, and he wanted to use the spellcheck. Then he copied and pasted it into the form. He placed some into the body of the article and the bulk of it into 'more'. Fred could also have gone to http://www.iespell.com/ and downloaded their free spellchecker add-on for Internet Explorer (very, very handy if you are writing to forms on the Web).

Fred can preview his article before he posts it and can return to it and edit anything that is not correct. However. Fred is a good writer and his article looks fine so he takes the plunge and submits it.

Fred's article appears as a headline on the home page of the District site. The title is a link to the complete article.

That is all there is to it.

But Fred has some images that he wants to use and he wants to highlight some words and make links of others, so... on the next page we will continue on and show how Fred can edit his article to include these things. (Coming Soon)