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Using the news database.

The news database is running off of a server application called pMachine. pMachine allows you to add text and pictures to a website without needing to open up an webpage editor. All of the main sites have this ability built into the first "news" page. pMachine can also be added to your own personal pages though this is something the Webmaster must set up for you. Once it is setup it works seemlessly and will take care of itself indefinately.

Before you get started there is one thing that you need to do first:

Get a login and password from the Webmaster. Email him, and let him know which news page you will need to be able to add things to. If you want to have access to more than one let him know so that he can set you up that way. Otherwise you will only be able to add news to one page.

I suggest printing this page for reference as you start using the news database. I have done my best to include everything I could think of that someone might ask when starting out.

To login to the news database go here:
http://www.chathamsd.org/news

You will be forward to a page with login and password fields like this:


Type in your login and password and click "SUBMIT". If this is your personal computer you may also want to check the "Remember Me?" box so that you will not need to type in your login and password everytime you use the database.

After logging in you will be presented with the following page:


The calendar shows the days for the month that have news entries. On the top right of the page is an "EXIT" button. You use this to logout when you are done if the computer you are on is not a secure computer (ie: your own computer would not need to be logged out because only you use it.) The "MAIN" button sends you back to the starting point at any time. You can ignore the rest of the bottons in that area as they apply to instalations that work differently then ours.

The links on the left are of the most use to you.

Under "MEMBERS" you will see a link titled "Your Profile." This link will send you to the following page:

The only important fields here are the ones marked with the red circles.

You will need to change your password since the default one the Webmaster will have given you is not secure.

You will also want to make sure your name is spelled correctly and that your email address is correct.

Once you have done that make sure the box next to "Show email address?" is checked.

You can then click "UPDATE" to have those changes made.

Now go ahead and click on the "New Entry" link underneat "WEBLOG." This will take you to the following page:


This is the page you use to add entries to the news database. Next I will go through the uses of the different fields and buttons.



Here you can edit the publish date and time of your entry. You can also have an entry expire at a certain date and time if you wish. Though those fields are blank by default. In most cases you will not want an entry to expire.



This is where you type the title of your entry. This can be anything you wish. It is usually helpful to be descriptive.



This is where the bulk of your entry will go. Any text, pictures, links, etc., will go in this box. With text you are able to both type the text in manually as well paste content from other applications.

Note: You will lose some things when pasting from other applications. All bold text, itallic text, and pictures will not transfer. However, there are ways to add both formated text and images which I will explain next.



This bar is the formating bar. It provides some help with formating but does not include all of the choices available. For now the important buttons are the <a>, @, B, I, and U buttons. Clicking one of these will create the code (pMcode to be specific) which will format text in the desired way.

The <a> button creates the code for a link. The @ button creates the code for an email address. The B button creates the code for bold text. The I button creates the code for itallic text. The U button creates the code for underlined text.

Note: There is a limitation to how these buttons work. You can't select some text and then click the B button and have it create bold text. The buttons will also ALWAYS add the code to the very end of whatever you have already typed into the Body field.

To create bold text you would need to click the B button first. This would add the bold text code to the Body field like in the picture below:


Then you would type the text you want to be bold inbetween the tags bold text tags:


So the folowing code:
[b]This is the text I want to show up bold.[/b]

Would look like this when it shows up on the webpage:
This is the text I want to show up bold.

Detailed instructions about using about using pMcode is below:

pMcode lets you add "style" or "formatting" to an entry which would normally require HTML.

pMachine will also automatically turn URLs and email addresses into "clickable" links.


Using pMcode for URLs

pMachine's will automatically format any URL, like http://www.somesite.com/ into a click-able link like so:


http://www.somesite.com/

However, if you want to have text that says something as a link you will need to use pMcode to do this. For example:

[url=http://www.somesite.com/]my site[/url]

Would create a link that looks like this:

my site

Both links go to the same place but the second one is much more descriptive.

Using pMcode for Email Links

pMachine will also format email addresses automatically. However, you can also use the email code in the same way as the url code.

[email=you@yoursite.com]click here to email[/email]

Will create an email link that looks like this instead of just having the link look like your email address:

click here to email

Font Sizes And Colors

You can specify font sizes and colors like so:

[size=4]Hey look at this![/size]

and

[color=green]Some green text[/color]

These would create text that would look like the following respectively:

Hey look at this!

Some green text

Font sizes can be any of the following:
-7,-6,-5,-4,-3,-2, -1, +1, +2,+3, +4, +5, +6, +7

Font colors can be any of the following: black, blue, fuscia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, brown, and yellow

You can nest any font tags as well like this:

[size=4][color=green][b]some larger green text[/b][/color][/size]

Which would look like this:

some larger green text

Bold And Italic Text

[b]some bold text[/b]

Creates text like this:

some bold text

[i]some italic text[/i]

Creates text like this:

some italic text

Note: You can also format the text in the Title. So I could put the bold tag around my title and it would show up in bold on the website.

Quoting

You can surround text written by someone else which you'd like to "quote" like this:

[quote]Some text. blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah...[/quote]

This will format the text as a blockquote like this:

Some text. blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah...

Submitting An Entry

After typing out an entry there are only two more steps before it shows up on a webpage. Below you can see an entry I typed out just as an example:



All I need to do now is make sure that after "DISPLAY IN" has the correct news database selected. For this example I will post the news to the Tenakee website. Don't worry it is easy to delete afterwards. However, if I were to click on "tenakee" I would be given the below list of choices for where to display the entry:



You can see that Kris Dorsey and Jim Parking both have their own news databases for their class pages. You could have your own as well if you wish. If you don't have a need to be able to access more than one news database then you may not have any choices.

After making sure that the post is going to the correct news database all that is left to be done is to click "SUBMIT." The entry will then be posted to the website and you will be presented with this page:



Three of the links along the bottom are of interest. "EDIT" allows you to make changes to the entry if you see a mistake. "CLOSE" will prevent the entry from being displayed on the website, in this case clicking "CLOSE" would prevent the entry from showing up on the Tenakee website but it would not delete the entry. "DELETE" of course deletes the entry permanently.

If I now go to Tenakee's website I can see my entry on the main page:



The next important page is the "Edit Your Entries" link on the left of the page underneath "WEBLOG."



The "Edit Your Entries" page will list every entry you have made with the most recent being the first in the list. From this page you can edit and delete any of your own entries.

Adding Images

Now that some changes and aditions have been made to the server I have been able to get image uploading done in a way that will work for everyone regardless of the type of computer you are on.

To add a picture to your entry the process is now very simple.



In the formatting bar above you should see an arrow pointing up:

Clicking this arrow will bring up the file upload window.



The first step after this is to click on the "Choose File" button. This will let you browse to a file just like you normally do in an application. Find the picture you would like to upload and then click on the "Choose" button. In the picture below you can see that I uploaded a file name "angoonstaf...00.jpg".



After choosing a picture you click on the "Upload" button.



You are then presented this page. It confirms that you uploaded the image and that it is now on the server. You are given the choice of creating a thumbnail so even if you upload a huge image (like the one I just uploaded) you can create a smaller one that is displayed instead. Then the server will make a link so that if someone clicks on the smaller image a window will pop up that contains the larger image that you originally uploaded.

To do this you need to click on the box next to "Create thumbnail from image".

Then type in a width that is reasonable. Anywhere in the range of 150-300 Pixels works well. You do not need to worry about the length since it will be resized automatically depending on the width you choose.

Then you need to click on the box next to "Create window popup for file". This will make the link to the original image.

In my case I gave my picture a width of 200:



Finally you click on the "Continue" button.



This tells you the image was uploaded and resized. Finallly you click "Close Window" and it adds the image code to your news entry.

The code looks like this:


Then I can press Return a few times and start typing any text that I wish to acompany the image. You may add as many images as you want. Just make sure that you put a couple of lines between each one before pressing the red "File Upload" arrow again.

Here is my finished entry in the Body Field and then as it is Displayed on the Angoon Elementary Page:





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