Self-registering a user

Go to the main page of your website, then in the login block, click 'create new account'.

Next, enter a username and email address for the new user and click 'create new account'.

Note that, for security reasons, the self-registered user will not yet be able to log in to your site – you, as the administrator, will make the decision to enable, or later to disable, this account.

Administration of Website users

Now, go back to the main page of your site and log in to the site as the administrator, webadmin.

As the privileged webadmin user, click on control panel icon to access the website's control panel.

The control panel displays many icons that you can click on to control various aspects of your website. The control pages are organised intuitively in the control panel: for example, to create various content on the site, look in the 'create content' area; to administer various functions of your site, look in the 'administer' area; and to adjust advanced settings of you site, look in the 'settings' are.

For this exercise – administering website users - open up the administer area by clicking its title.

Now, click on the 'users' icon.

On this page, you can now see a list of users of your site. Note that, joe is the new user that you registered a few moments ago – note also that this user has the status 'blocked', meaning that they cannot yet use their account. The user webadmin is the user you are logged in as now – this is a special user that has enhanced privileges for controlling all aspects of your site. The admin user is necessary for more advanced management of the site and is reserved for expert use – potentially it could be used to accidentally break your website.

Now, as the administrator, let's enable the newly registered – but blocked - user, joe. First, click on the edit operation next to the user's account.

Details of joe should now be displayed. Note there is an item named status with options 'blocked' and 'active'; click the 'active' option to state that you want this particular user to have access to log in to your website.

Note that, to make final the changes you have made on this page, you must scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the 'submit' button. As a general rule, whenever you change an option or update some content, you will almost always need to scroll to the bottom of the page to click a similar button – this effectively saves the changes you have made.

With the previous steps, you have now allowed a new user to become a member of your website. That user can now contribute in various ways (discussion forums, diaries, articles) to the content of your site, and they can also be informed of news, updates, and events through email bulletins, etc.

Manually Adding a new User

In the previous scenario, a user, calling himself/herself joe, registered with your website and you, as the administrator, finalised the registration process by 'unblocking' their account. The alternative process of registering users is for the administrator (i.e. webadmin) to do the whole of this.

If, via clicking on the control panel icon (see the previous steps to remind you), you navigate back to the user administration page, you'll notice that there is a 'tab' on the page that says: 'add user'. Click this tab.

Now, you will be presented with a form for adding a new user. Enter a username (the name that the user will type to log in to the site), their email address, and a password (write this down) for them, then click 'create new account'.

In some circumstances, this approach to user registration is more appropriate (e.g. the first few accounts are created for a website); but, on the other hand, user self-registration is a great way to encourage growth of your website's on-line community.

Managing User Roles

Whilst it is good to encourage lots of users to become members of your website – indeed, it helps your site to have vitality and diversity – it would not be desirable to have all of those users changing every part of your site. Users of your website, therefore, can be allocated different 'roles', whereby some roles allow greater privileges to altering your site than others.

To understand roles and privileges, it is helpful think about what you want a user to be able to do when they visit/use your website.

• Typically, when a non-member user visits your site, you will want them to be able to view information and articles on your site but not necessarily change anything – perhaps you would want them only to be able to ask questions on a discussion forum.

• For a registered member of your website, you may want them, perhaps, to write articles or personal 'blogs' (web diaries), and to join mailing lists, but you will, perhaps, not want them to change core pages of your site or edit other members' content.

• To ease the burden of managing your website, you will likely want to share editorial responsibilities to a handful – but not all - of registered users, rather than have a single user (e.g. webadmin) be responsible for doing everything – what would happen if they went on holiday!

Such can be achieved through assigning roles to website users. By default, all non-registered users of your site are assigned the role of an 'anonymous' user, and all registered users are assigned the role of 'authenticated' (i.e. registered) user. If you decide that you want a registered user to have more control of the website's content, you can promote them to be an editor – or even a webadmin.

To demonstrate how easy this actually is, let's promote the second user to be a website 'editor'.

Again, return to the user administration page – as in the previous steps – and this time, click edit on the latest user.

Now, on the user's page, click on the role 'editor'.

Finally, as when you changed the 'blocked' status of the other user, scroll to the bottom of the page and click 'submit'. This user has now been promoted to be an editor or your website.

Now that we have done some administration tasks as the webadmin user, let's log out by clicking on the keys icon at the top of the page. Although the webadmin user can do pretty much anything with the site, it is best only to use this account for major administration tasks, especially since mistakes made using this account can have more impact than an account with lesser privileges.

Adding hyperlinks to a page

To add a hyperlink (a link to another webpage on the Internet), simply highlight the text, and click on the hyperlink button (this looks like a chain link). Then, when the hyperlink window appears, type in the address of the webpage, starting with http://..... or paste it in from your browser's address line.

Adding images to a page

Before an image can be added to one of your website's pages it must be 'uploaded' from your computer to the website. To upload an image, click on the small camera icon in the text editor and then when the images window pops up.

In the 'upload' window, type a name for the image that you are about to upload. Then click the 'browse' button to select the image from your computer. To finalise this process, as in the other steps, scroll to the bottom of the 'upload' window and click the 'submit' button. Note that you may have to wait a short time, depending on how fast your Internet connection is, for the image to be uploaded from you computer to the website.

Now that your image has been uploaded, you may insert it into the page by clicking the 'insert' button.

Once the picture is in your page you can drag it around, align it, and resize it as you would with a word processor.

Remember to click the submit button at the bottom of your page to save the recent-most changes.

Important Note: Page width

Since you can add any content to your pages (e.g. images, text, and even tables), you must be cautious not to make the page so wide that it spoils the layout of your site (e.g. pushes the right-hand blocks rightwards and out of the page). In some cases, such as on wide administration pages, this is unavoidable, but in most cases you can resize images and tables accordingly; or if you do want a wide page, then it is possible to hide blocks on certain pages (e.g. if you wanted a big map on a page, etc.).

Creating a new page

So far we have edited an existing page, but the ability to create new pages – or, indeed, any other type of content - will allow your website to grow with information.

To create a new page, make sure you are logged in as a user who is capable of editing core content of the site (i.e. a user with the role of 'editor'). Once you are logged in, click on the control panel icon at the top of the page. Now you should see some icons and categories – notice that there are fewer available for a user with role 'editor' than there were for the more privileged user webadmin.

Since we want to create some content, scan the control panel for the relevant options, and you will see the icon 'create content' and a collapsed icon list also called 'create content'. If you want more information on the types of content you can click the icon, otherwise, to quickly create new content, click on the icon list header.

The icons in the 'create content' area represent different types of content that you can create. They are fairly self-explanatory, but to give you an idea of what each piece is for:

• blog entry allows you to write entries for your personal diary.

• forum topic allows you to write a topic on one of your website's forums

• image allows you to upload an image to your website

• newsletter allows you to write a special page that will be emailed to a list of newsletter subscribers

• event – an piece of information that is associated with a time (e.g. a party, a meeting, a holiday). Events can be easily browsed on a calendar by visitors to your website.

• page allows you to create a new page for your website

• story is similar to a page, only it is better suited to dynamic content such as reports and news articles that will eventually be archived (i.e. a story about an event that took place, etc.)

Now, by clicking on the page icon, we will create a new page for your website. From this step onwards this scenario is very similar to the one where you edited the 'home' page, only this time you will have to create the page and then add it to your main menu so that users of your website can find it.

As well as having a home page, every good website should have a 'contact' page to tell website users how to contact the group or organisation. Type in a title, and then, as before, type in a some text, and perhaps add some images, to your new 'contact' page.

Now, before submitting the new page, if you scroll down to the bottom of the editing page you will see some advanced options for your new page. By default these options are hidden/collapsed because you don't necessarily need to change them to add a new page, however since we want to add the new page to the website's main menu, we'll want to expand the 'menu settings' options by clicking on the heading.

The 'menu settings' options will be expanded as follows, whereupon you can fill in the title and description for the new menu entry:

Before changing the remaining menu settings, it is important to know how menus are structured on your website. Firstly, there is more that one menu on your website, and it is likely that you will only ever want to change one of them, called 'Site Menu', since this is the menu that appears to users on the top left hand side of your website.

The next import point about a menu's structure is that it is not simply a list of links to pages on your site, but it is a hierarchy of links. This means that related menu items can be grouped to help a user to find related pages whilst avoiding having a very long, flat menu. When you add a new page to a list, you must therefore locate the correct menu, in this case 'Site Menu' or 'Main Menu', and then choose a 'parent' item from within that menu – the new menu item will be grouped below its parent menu item. The last point about menus is that the order in which menu items are displayed in a menu is controlled by assigning a 'weight' to them.

You can experiment by choosing different values for 'parent item' and 'weight' and then submitting the changes to see how the position of the menu item changes. Here are a few possibilities: