collaboration

Adding a Language

Lindsay — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:51:10 +0200

It is very easy to add a language. Once you have signed in go to the black bar at the top of the home page. Select 'site configuration' then 'localisation'. you will then see 'manage languages'. Click on 'add language' then you will see a drop down list of languages. After you have added a language go back to 'manage languages' then click 'enable'.
To add the language to the menu category (the choice list you see when you go into create content), simply go to 'content management' on the black bar at the top of the home page and click 'categories'. You will then see the list for languages where you can add a term.

“A while ago i created a new image gallery by doing the same thing in image galleries (ie site configuration ect) but I forgot to link it to the main image menu that appears on the right hand navigation bar on the home page. Today I linked it into that main menu so that it appears in the gallery list. To do this I went to the black navigation bar at the top, clicked on 'site building' then 'menus'. I then went to 'add menu item'. In here it asked for the title, which in my case was 'Electronica' as that was the gallery that I'd created. It then asked for the path. This is the URL that the menu wants to link to and was the address for 'electronica'. To find this I had to click on the gallery and copy the address from the bar which was http://www.thenextlayer.org/image/tid/275 It then asks for a parent, and in this case the parent menu item I wanted to link to was 'image galleries' which could be found in the drop down list.”

Howto create a Forum Topic

Lindsay — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:48:58 +0200

To create a new forum topic go into 'create content' on the left hand side bar on the home page, then click on forum topics. Its pretty straight forward from there as regards the subject and the language options*. The forum topics are limited, but if you wanted to add another category eg copyright, then you would click onto content management on the black bar at the top of the home page, click categories, then click add term on the forums. This gives a few options such as the parent category, which you may want to put under the term 'site building' for example.

Back to creating a forum topic. if you look at menu settings, here you can link the forum to other topics. Therefore for example if you want to link your forum into the taxi to praxi main menu, you select the parent category as Taxi to Praxi from the list and your forum topic will become a child of that parent. Another setting is the publishing options; if you want your post to go to the front page, you tick the box under that says 'promote to front page'. To add a comment to an existing forum, just click 'add comment' at the bottom of the main forum posting.

Howto create and use 'Organic Groups'

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:13:20 +0200

The organic groups module allows you to create a working group where a number of people with shared interests can create content which is non-public, visible to group members only.

To be able to create and moderate a group, you need to get 'group moderator' permissions. To get this you need to ask the Administrator.

To create a new group you first need to create a new content type.

In the navigation bar under your name on the left side bar, which I call the admin menu, go to 'content type', then select 'add content type' choose a name and a type (same as name but machine readable), tick 'published' but not 'promoted to front page'.

Under 'organic groups usage' tick 'Group Node', this is mandatory, everything else select to your liking and save content type.

Then go to 'create content', you will find your new content type there, select it and everything else is pretty self explanatory, by creating the first content node of this type you set up the group. Select
'private' maybe and 'moderated', do not offer it for 'selection on registration'

You can decide if your group should be listed on the 'groups' homepage. I would suggest to say 'yes' to that.

Now, to create content for your group, click on groups, and then on your group. Once you are 'inside' your group, there is a new 'groups' menue on the lest sidebar; you will probably have to scroll down a little bit to get there. Select one of the content types offered there.

You can then decide with each article if you would like to publish it only in your group or visible to all.

Here you go. Enjoy group life;)

note of caution: as a group moderator you are given quite a few rights. please use those rights with caution.

There is some more information here:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/og

TNL Howto

Lindsay — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:57:26 +0200

The aim of this book is to provide a central point for all advice relating to the use of this site. By adding your experiences, learning curves and shortcuts, advice for all abilities can be added and used. The individual pages can be added to if others have easier or more logical ways of doing things, and comments can be placed for discussion on more specific areas of topics.

Howto create structured research documents with 'Books' (revised)

Armin Medosch — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:31:38 +0200

In the past few months TNL has gone through significant changes. Although many of those are not visible on the surface straight away, they constitute great improvements of the site. Key changes have been made especially in regard to this forum topic about books and bibliographic references.

If you go to create content -- book page http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/add/book
you can create a new book page either on the top level of navigation or under some existing second layer such as 'Documentation' or 'Readers' or 'Waves and Code' which are at the time of writing the three top level links for books.

A book page is nothing else than a static page which is linked in a hierarchical structure to other static pages. You give it a title, select one of the categories and / or create a new one under the 'topic' vocabulary and then put your actual content in the body of the book page. Here take care to select the right Input format. For a beginning, filtered html will just do fine.

If it is your first page, the 'weight' pop-up menu can be kept at 0. Later this will take on a crucial function.

if you want to add an image or a 'related link' then just do so. You can also ignore those menu options. scroll to the bottom, the only menu option you should look at is 'publishing options'. Here you can decide if your book page should be published on the front page or not. If you are certain that you want to share your page with the wider public, then go ahead. Otherwise un-tick the 'published to front page' option. Then choose preview or submit and here you go, you have created a book page.

Once you have created your first page, you can scroll to the bottom of it and simply click on 'add child page'. You will get a menu which is exactly the same as the one you got via create content -- add book page. If you add now a second page, this page will automatically show up in a navigation menu below the first page.

However, if you have a more complex structure with nested hierarchies between pages, you will have to consider the weighting. by selecting a weight from -15 to +15 you select where the page shows up in the navigation. if you have a lot of pages which need organising this will probably take some trial and error. However, in principle this is easy and you cant break anything which cant be repaired equally quickly.

So far we have just used the built in book function. Part of the fun is that you can invite other people to edit your book pages for collaborative writing projects. If you make significant edits to a page, either your own page or the page of somebody else, select 'create new revision' at the bottom menu under 'publishing options'. This will later allow you two things: to move backward in time through revisions of the page, and to 'diff' revisions. Diff means that you can compare changes between the last two versions, which comes in handy if you do some collaborative text editing.

If you are used to complex text editing programs such as MS Word or Open Office, you will probably enjoy the Footnote and Biblio functions. In your text in a book page, you can us the fn tag <fn>and what you write in between the tags will appear as an automatically numbered footnote, but don't forget the end tag </fn>

Almost analogue to that works the bib tag. If you want to refer from within your text to a bibliographic reference, use
<bib> and </bib> whereby in between the tags you have to put the citekey. You can only use bib if your reference exists in the biblio reference database of tnl. To do that, go to create content -- biblio and add a reference, which can be anything from book to article to journal, etc. Once you have entered your reference a citekey will automatically be generated (you could also enter one by hand). the automatically generated citekey is just a number. Put this number between bib tags and it will again create an automatically numbered endnote which will contain your reference.

Enjoy your footnotes and bibs, admin 26.06.2008

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well, this is the question, innit? I am not sure to have the answer yet but I would like to develop it collaboratively with you.

I suggest to use the module 'books' in drupal to create structured research areas with agreed hierarchies between terms so that all of us can identify with those structures and feel comfortable in using them.

But when i started to think about an actual structure for 'books' i cam immedeately across taxonomical problems.

I would like to take it slowly and discuss those hierarchies with you.

For now I have added the term 'documentation' thinking it would be good to have some very high level terminology. continuing like this you could have

documentations
manuals
research
novels
etc.

continuing with this logic the first entry "waves and code" is wrong as it would have to come under research. then also waves and code have to be separated as obviously this way of putting it together is a pet book
idea of me but not a generic structure for research .

this could be a possible structure

research
    projects
    publications
        notes
        papers
        books

in this hierarchy my "waves and code" could be a 'project' or I could
file the actual text 45rpm under 'papers'. which other categories could
there be? a 'study' or 'research reports'?

but the basic question:

is it feasible or necessary at all to have so many hierarchies, or
is it okay to have just one layer of actual research projects? if we
have layers, then how many?

and the multi-hierarchy problem: 'notes' could relate to publications as
well as projects

should we add a category 'materials' which refers to images and
audiovisual means of documentation relating to a research project?

Ewan on the Boston Sterling mast

Lindsay — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:27:27 +0200