Tandem Club Website - Regional Officer Administration
Introduction
This help provides a brief overview for regional organisers on using the TC website. The goal of the website site is to provide an easy way for people to provide information to club members and others as well as help attract members to the club. The site has been designed so that Regional Organisers and other members can easily add information without in-depth web site operating knowledge. Most information is added using simple form based entry.
Regional Groups have the ability to edit their own What's On entries as well as the facility to add their own news, rides and pictures. Regional organisers: Please contact The Tandem Club Web Group for a login on the site. Also we can set up your Region if it is not already present.
Note for most admin functions you will need the page specific left hand menu visible. You can toggle this on and off using the top menu's left hand icon.
Facilities
- Group web page area with editable text and pictures. You can edit these pages using the websites "Microsoft Word" like on-line editor. The main page also contains listings of news items, showcase items, documents and the What's On events for the group. You can make your regions web page look as you wish. You can also add extra web pages and even directories/folders with more web pages and documents if desired.
- News. Allows news snippets to be added to the website and optionally emailed to the group. These appear on the groups webpage as well as on the websites main home page (a random selection).
- What's On system. Allows TC regional events and others to be added and edited by RO's or other administrators. These will be listed on the website and in the Tandem Club journal.
- Showcase system for sets of pictures with descriptions.
- Documents system for upload of documents.
- Rides system for the upload of GPX and route sheet based rides as well as local places of interest. These are entered into our database system to allow other Tandem Club members to view and download.
- Membership database. You can view and send emails to your regions members using this system.
General
In order to administer the groups information you will need a login account for the site with permissions to edit your groups information. More than one person from your group can be setup with the ability to edit the information (adminGroup<Groupname> role). Contact The Tandem Club Web Group to set up an account for this.
Once setup you can login to the system using the Username and Password fields in the Account section in the left hand menu area or from the "Home" menu.
Once logged in go to your group's web page using the "Groups/My group" menu entry. The left hand menu area provides links to functions that can be performed for regional group administration. (The 3 horizontal bars button on the top menu shows/hides the left hand menu).
Contacting Your group by Email
The WEB system allows you easily to send an email to all the members in your region and those interested in your region (typically members in neighbouring regions). Simply use the "Send email to group" link in the left hand menu. This pops up a form allowing you to type in the emails subject and content. It also allows up to 4 file attachments. Those members outside of your region, but wanting to receive emails from your region, should edit their users preferences using the "User Preferences" menu item and tick the particular groups the are interested in in the "Groups of Interest" options.
News System
This is designed to add news "snippets" to the system including information on rides etc. to provide communications with your regions members and non members alike. Any member can add a news item to your group. The news items are shown on your groups WEB page and a selection is shown on the main Tandem Club home page.
There are two ways to add news, a simple Facebook like single line text entry with optional picture and an Advanced form entry.
The Advanced form entry can be accessed with the "Form" button on the news list. Just fill in the fields as desired. The only field that needs content is the message text area, but you can also add a title and a set of pictures if wanted. Pictures can be uploaded using the "Camera" or "Add File" button.
As well as adding a news item to the website, it is possible to send an email to all members of the group using this system. The "Send email to group" checkbox allows this. As well as the email going to those who are in your local region, it will be sent to all those who have listed your group in their "Groups of Interest" set in their WEB sites "User Preferences".
In the future it should also be possible to post this news item to the Tandem Club's Facebook page if the "Post to TC Facebook group" checkbox is set. However Facebook limitations prevent this at the moment.
The news items can be created, edited or deleted using the "Edit news" link in the left hand side by the RO or a site administrator.
What's On System
The What's On system is designed to allow regional group and other events to be added to an events database and be displayed to site visitors and your members. It also provides the facility to list these events in a suitable form for direct inclusion in the TC Journal. Regional Organisers can add and edit entries for their group. General site administrators or What's On administrators can add and edit any of the entries.
The system automatically displays only those entries that are in date.
To Add and entry:
- Click on the "Edit What's On" link in the left hand menu. This will bring up a page listing your entries and provide a means to add or edit them.
- You can now use the "Whats On" functions in the left hand menu. There are also V - View, E - Edit and D - Delete buttons for each entry.
- The events form is simply filled out. Please keep to the formats described on the form.
- Click on the Save button to save the entry.
Note it is now possible to upload a GPX file for the What's On event and link this to the What's On entry. Members will now see the link to this Ride on the website and will be able to view the Ride on a map with places of interest and download the GPX file for their sat navs. There are two ways to add this link to the What's On entry:
- Enter the GPX/TCX file's filename path into the "Route (GPX/TCX file)" field when adding or editing a What's On entry. This will create a Ride in the system with the GPX/TCX route and the description text from the What's On. Later you can separately edit this Ride to add more information such as pictures and more description.
- If the ride's GPX/TCX file has already been used to create a Ride on the system, you can set the Rides "id" (a number) into the What's On "GPX Ride ID" field when adding or editing a What's On entry.
For the TC journal editor there is a "Journal List" link that allows the journal entries to be displayed in a form suitable for a simple copy/paste action into a word processor.
Gallery Pictures
The system arranges groups of pictures in named showcases. These have a group name as well as a title and description. Pictures can be uploaded one at a time or as a batch using the "Add pictures" link. It also pre-scales the pictures to 1280x1024 resolution for speedy upload.
Titles of the pictures can be edited by selecting the showcase and using the "Edit showcase pics" link. As well as titles and descriptions, the picture can be marked as good. When so marked it will be show by the random picture display system.
Rides
You can upload GPX files and/or route sheets to the rides system using the "Edit rides" menu item. As well as GPX rides places of interest such as cafe and tourist places can be added to the system. See the rides system help for more details.
You can also add a GPX file while adding a What's On entry which will create a Ride automatically so the groups GPX/TCX route can be seen/downloaded on/from the WEB site.
Alternatively if you added the Ride first, you can link this to the What's On entry. Find the box 
and add the Ride ID. The easiest place to find the Ride ID number is from the URL of the ride. When the ride is open, look at the web address - https://tandem-club.org.uk/rides?cmd=view&id=876 , the last number is the ID number, in this case 876.
A very detailed xplanation and walk through with lots of examples is at Adding a Ride as an RO
Documents
The documents system is designed for PDF, OpenOffice/LibreOffice or Microsoft Word text and spread sheet type documents. It allows the documents to be uploaded. Multiple versions of a document can be uploaded.
Group's Web Page
The group's main page can be edited using the "Edit page" link in the left hand menu. You can add any number of WEB pages to your region's WEB site area including sub directories (Folders). Each page can be simply edited on-line using the simple Microsoft Word like editor provided.
This page editor presents a word processor like interface with a set of toolbar entries along the top. Normal word processing features such as paragraph style, bold, Italic, bulleted or numbered lines etc can be used. The system can also create hyperlinks to other website pages or off website pages.
Simply type in the information and format it as required using the menus at the top of the editing area. Note that the web pages will resize when viewed on a mobile phone. If you want multiple columns you ideally want to use what are called "div" blocks so that these columns can disappear when viewing on a mobile phone. If you want this sort of page layout see some of the other web pages on how to do it. You may need some knowledge of HTML and CSS to do this. Contact us for help on this.
There are some special "<websys>" script entries on the page that include the RO's information, News, What's On, Showcase and Documents live information. These automatically insert the appropriate information on the webpage. Be careful not to delete these (they look like a name with ()'s eg. "groupContact()"). To edit/move these you will need to edit the page source with the "Source" button and have some understanding of using HTML tags.
Pictures can be inserted with the "image" menu button. You can either use a picture existing on the web system or upload new pictures using using the "Browse Server" button. The "Browse Server" button pops up a simple file browser with an Upload area in the bottom left hand corner. To select a picture simply double click on it. By default the File Browser will be located in your groups directory on the web system.
When uploading images, the images can be resized prior to sending to one of a set of sizes using the size field. By default they will be resized to 1280x1024 before sending up to the server. Make sure the orientation is correct before uploading them. Once uploaded, selected and inserted into the document they can be resized to the size required if needed by clicking on them and using the resize handles at the image corners. Inserting images into table cells is sometimes useful for ordering multiple images. Note that images will be resized automatically for the device being viewed on.
As well as images, links to onsite or offsite information can be inserted using the link button. Also maps, videos etc can be inserted.
If needed, and if users have an understanding of HTML formatting, the "Source" mode of editing can be used for more control over the page layout and contents. Use the menus "Source" button to access this.
Make sure you click on the Menu's save button or the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page to commit your work before moving off this page.
The "Add a new page" button can be used to add a new webpage. A link will be added at the bottom of the current page to link to it. Once you have edited the new page you will probably want to edit the parent page and move/format the link as desired.
The "Add a directory" button can be used to add a separate directory (folder) with an initial page. this is useful to structure your additional information.
Special, website generated, blocks can be included using the following code entered in "Source" mode:
<websys>whatsOnList()</websys>
There are a few functions that can be used. These currently include:
| groupContact() | The groups contact |
| newsListAdd(height, "news") | This shows the recent news in a window 300 pixels high |
| whatsOnList(3) | The next 3 entries from the What's On list |
| documentList(3) | The next 3 entries from the documents |
| showcaseGroup(3) | The next 3 entries from the showcase |
| picturesRandomImage(width=30%) | A random picture from the system with given width as a percentage of the page width |
For more information see: WebsitePageEditing.html
Website Style
Please see the Website Style Guide for information on style.
Regional Officers Guide
Technical Information
More detailed technical information is available: help/index.html