How to Maintain the Troop 89 Website¶

This document outlines how to maintain the Troop 89 website without any coding or web design experience. If you are interested in contributing to the website’s source code, please see Contributing to the Troop 89 Website.

Accessing the Admin site¶

Link: The Troop 89 admin site.

Most management of the Troop 89 website can be accomplished within the customized admin site. If you are already logged in to the Troop 89 and have been granted access to the admin site, you should be able to access it by the link listed above. If you unable to reach the admin site and believe that you should have access, contact a webmaster.

Posting Announcements¶

From the admin site, navigate to Troop Announcement | Announcements | Add Announcement.

In the announcement creation form, provide a title, a date of publication, and some content for the announcement. Currently, announcements can be written in either plain text or Markdown. For a brief tutorial on how to stylize writing with Markdown, see GitHub’s Mastering Markdown guide. In the future, a rich WYSIWYG editor may be provided for announcement creation, such as the one available for flatpage creation.

Advanced

At the bottom of the announcement creation form, you will find a collapsed fieldset title “Advanced”. Expanding this fieldset will give you access to two additional fields: the user, and the slug.

The user field determines the person who is displayed as the author of a post. Note that this is separated from the system that records actions in the admin interface: the users responsible for creating and editing an announcement will be visible in the changelog.

The slug field determine the url that the announcement can be accessed with. By default, this field is generated from the the announcement’s title, but you may wish to edit it in some circumstances to create a more expressive url.

After saving your announcement, you can view it on the live site by either navigating to the homepage or clicking the “View on Site” buttom in editing form.

Creating events¶

From the admin site, navigate to the Events | Events | Add Event.

In the announcement creation form, provide a title, type, description, and start and end time for the event. Currently, event descriptions can be written in either plain text or Markdown. For a brief tutorial on how to stylize writing with Markdown, see GitHub’s Mastering Markdown guide. In the future, a rich WYSIWYG editor may be provided for announcement creation, such as the one available for flatpage creation.

For information on how to create a report for an event, see Creating an Event Report.

Advanced

At the bottom of the event creation form, you will find a collapsed fieldset title “Advanced”. Expanding this fieldset will give you access to one additional fields: the slug.

The slug field determine the url that the event can be accessed with. By default, this field is generated from the the event’s title, but you may wish to edit it in some circumstances to create a more expressive url.

Creating and editing static pages¶

The management of static or “flat” pages is handled by our custom flatpage app.

Navigate to the Flat page listing in the admin to view the page currently available on the site. From there, you may search for a page by title in the search box, filter what pages are shown by their parent page, or sort the pages by url or title.

To create a new flat page, click the “Add Flat Page” button in the top right corner of the page. In the flat page creation form, provide a URL, title, and rich body for the new page.

Take particular care when picking the URL for the new page. The URL that you provide will be used to determine where your new page should be displayed on the site. For example, a page with the URL /about/squirrels will be listed as a subpage on the /about/ page and will visible as a related page on the /about/chipmunks page.

Advanced

At the bottom of the flat page creation form, you will find a collapsed fieldset title “Advanced options”. Expanding this fieldset will give you access to two additional fields: a “registration required” checkbox, and a template name.

If selected, the “registration required” flag will restrict access to the flat page to users who are logged in to the website with a Troop 89 account. The page will not be listed for users who are not logged in to the site.

The “template name” field specifies the Django template from source control to use to render the page. This field defaults to flatpages/default.html. You should only edit this field if you need to heavily customize the rendering of your flatpage, such as loading a custom template tags or querying additional data from the database.

Creating an Event Report¶

Event Reports are a specific type of flat page that can be automatically generated from an Event.

To create a new Event Report, navigate to the event you intend to describe in the calendar. On the event’s detail page, you will find a large button underneath the navigation toolbar that says “Create an Event Report”. If you cannot see this button, you likely do not have permission to post new flatpages.

After clicking the “Create an Event Report” button, you will be redirected to a form that is prepopulated with information to create a flatpage from the event’s details. From here, write the content of your report for the event in the space provided.

Be sure to save your report before closing the page.

How to Maintain the Troop 89 Website¶

Accessing the Admin site¶

Posting Announcements¶

Creating events¶

Creating and editing static pages¶

Creating an Event Report¶

Updating the newsletter archive¶