New Member Information - Web Site - The Library

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New Member Information - Web Site

This is a Wiki version of the mail sent to new members of The One when they join. It provides some basic instructions and information on the organization and use of our web site. It does not cover everything, obviously.

Welcome:

Greetings!

You now have an account on The One's web site. This rather lengthy message attempts to explain about the organization and use of the web site. The guild member part of the web site is really a Wiki, an environment geared for collaborative sharing and editing of material. While this is very powerful, it's not necessarily very intuitive.

The web site is organized into two parts: a public part (http://www.WoWKindness.com/) and a guild member part. The public part is where you first visited The One and applied. Although much of the content in the guild member part can be viewed anonymously by anyone on the web, not all of it can. In order to view restricted pages and to make changes to your profile or post new forum threads, you need to log in with your personal user name and password.

Things To Do First

Now that you have an account, you'll need to some things on the guild web site.

Find the web site! The main site is at http://www.WoWKindness.com/.
Login using your user name/password (in the Logging In section below).
Download the two guild GUI mods: GEM and oRA2. There are links to these in the "Mods" tab on the Dashboard. The GEM page contains information on how to configure it, along with some screenshots. Ask for help if you run into problems. GEM is the shared event creation/viewing mod between The One and its allied guilds. oRA2 is used for end-game raid instances. If you're not doing any raiding yet, you don't need to download oRA2.
Find your profile page and edit the text in it.
Add a picture of your character to your profile page.
Configure GEM and be sure to read the Honourbound Alliance etiquette and looting rules.

The Top Navigation Menu:

Both the guild member part of the site and the public site share a common navigation bar across the top. The different links there correspond to different areas of the two web sites and allow you to quickly jump around. These areas are:

Home: The main public guild page. This is where you first met The One and found the link to apply. That page can be handy as it summarises any big event activity automatically (right-hand side under Questing) and recent Forum threads.

Login/Dashboard: Login/Dashboard take you to the "Dashboard" of the guild member part of the site, possibly after asking you for your user name and password. The "Dashboard" is described later.

THB: The One is a founding member of The Honourbound Alliance, a group of like-minded primarily social guilds. The one maintains several information pages for THB. This area includes news, our shared GEM event calendar, raid progress information, raid event information pages, etc. You can also reach it via http://www.honourbound.org/thb/

Profile: This is where your guild profile (and any alts you have) will live. It's also home to the guild roster by rank, by profession, and by class. Some of these are very cool lists!

Quest: Quest is where social events, raids, and instance adventures are planned if they're organized by the guild or are part of an ongoing series within our allied guild partners. It's also where we have information about the various dungeons, with quest chains, advice, and links to maps, etc. The lower-level dungeons are fairly well-documented here.

Library: Repository for information about the guild, like our rules, who the charter members were, etc.

Forum: The most commonly visited area of the site. This is where people can post messages about almost anything they like. It's also where screenshots and suchlike tend to appear.

Web: Not used by guild members. It's for the site administrators primarily.

Logging In:

To access the guild member part of the site, you can click either the "Start" or "Login" links at the top of the main web site or go directly to http://www.WoWKindness.com/confluence/. Logins do require cookies to be enabled on your computer. There's a shortcut link of http://www.wowkindness.com/wiki/.

The Dashboard:

When you login or use the "Dashboard" link, you'll be taken to the "Dashboard" of the web site. The Dashboard is appears in two large columns. The left column is generally site-related information and news. It's broken down into a number of different tabs:

Welcome: general information about the site.

News: important announcements and reminders or interesting things on the web site this week.

Week: Events and activities occurring this week.

Month: An event calendar for this month. Hover (you need JavaScript enabled) over a given day to see a list of events for that day.

Just click the appropriate tab to change between those. The web site will remember which tabs you've chosen. The most useful ones there are usually "News", where I post announcements, and "This Week" where I summarise social events and other game-related events in the upcoming week.

The right column is all about new messages, pages, or updated content across the guild member site. Some items may not appear in this list if you're not logged in. This is where you can quickly see what's been going on. The different tabs are:

All: Shows all recently updated content, including new messages, changes to information pages, new profile, new comments, new forum threads, uploaded pictures, uploaded files, etc. Everything!

Forum: This shows all recent activity in our Forum area and how long ago the activity occurred.

Quest: New events, update information, comments, raid progress, etc. is all in here.

Us: A summary of changes related to the people of the guild. Comings/Goings (using the comingsgoings label) are shown here out of the Forum area and recent updates to various profile page or other guild roster lists.

Pictures: A collected list of recently posted screenshots (using the pictures label from Forum postings) as well as the screenshot of the week.

Mods: The guild and its allied guilds make use of some GUI plug-ins to help coordinate events and for raiding purposes. There are only two you are required to install and they're both listed in this tab along with their current version. You can download them from the guild site. We have some instructions.

Your Profile:

The Profile area contains guild member profiles, including your own! When your account was created, a template for your profile was also created. It's your job to keep your profile updated and to provide us with a picture of your character. Your mentor can help. To find your profile (or anyone else's), click on the blue kindness droplet anywhere it appears beside someone's name. That always take you to that person's profile page.

To edit your profile, click the "Edit" tab that appears next to "View" and "Attachments". Those tabs are just below the big bold blue character name. The "Edit" tab will only appear if you're logged in. When you click it, the page changes somewhat and you get a box with the page's content and some new tabs: Rich Text, Wiki Markup, and Preview. Rich Text gives you a word processor-like way to edit the content and see it as you do it. It's a little bit buggy across browsers and can mess up pages sometimes, but give it a go. Wiki Markup is the default. It's the language of tags used to format and display the content. Preview shows you what your edits will look like before you save the page.

Changing text that's already there is generally straightforward. Just change it! If you need help with the formatting, copy some of the existing mark up or try the notation guide (http://www.wowkindness.com/confluence/renderer/notationhelp.action) There's usually a link and some common markup on the right-hand side when you're in Edit mode.

At the bottom of the big text editing box, there's a space for you to comment on what kind of change you're making and a tickbox. If you're just fixing a spelling mistake or something minor, tick the "minor change" box. That will prevent people from being mailed a notification that your page has changed. Otherwise, when you're satisfied with your changes, click the "Save" button.

Posting Pictures:

Want to add a picture? Pictures are attachments. Click on the "Attachments" tab and you'll have a form with which to browse to some content on your local computer and a space to annotate or provide information about the picture. If possible, please try to optimize your pictures for web viewing so that they're not a) large in viewing size and b) large in terms of file size. People have to download and view this stuff. (-: Also, please only post JPEG (.jpg), GIF (.gif), or PNG (.png) files. .bmp, .tiff, etc aren't cross-platform and are really large to boot!

Once you've uploaded the picture, it will automatically appear in the "gallery" on your profile page because the template comes with a built-in gallery. If you need to display a specific picture in a specific place, like your missing profile picture, edit the page and change the line that says:

!YOURIMAGE.jpg|thumbnail!

to

!IMAGEFILE.jpg|thumbnail!

Where "IMAGEFILE.jpg" is the name of the file you just uploaded.

If you're not editing your own profile page with its built-in gallery macro, you might want to add an automatic gallery of pictures. To do that, add the following line in any page:

{gallery:columns=2}

Save the page and you're golden.

Note that WoW now saves pictures automatically as JPEGs for both Windows and Macs. However, the filenames tend to be rather long, like WoWScrnShot_011807_230422.jpg. You'll find it easier to work with if you rename them to something shorter and more representative of the picture content before you upload it.

Posting New Forum Threads:

To post a new forum thread, the easiest way to do that at the moment is to click the "FORUM" link at the very top of any page. That takes you to the FORUM area of the web site. One of the options on that page (if you're logged in!) is to "Add News". That's on the right-hand side on the same line as all the View/Edit, etc. tabs.

Give your message a title in the "New News" space and type your message into the big text box below that. Again, you get three tabs: Rich Text, Wiki Markup, and Preview. Those work as described in the "Your Profile:" section above.

You'll also notice there's an area for "Labels". Labels help organize content and, in some cases, group it together for automatic display elsewhere. The two most useful labels for the Forum space are: comingsgoings and pictures

Adding a label of "pictures" to a forum message automatically adds it to the "Recent Screenshots" list that appears in the "Pics" tab of the Dashboard. Adding "comingsgoings" to a post automatically adds it to the list of comings/goings in the "Us" tab on the Dashboard.

You can add pictures to Forum posts. I suggest using the {gallery:columns=2} macro when you write the message, then you can add the pictures via the Attachments tab after you've posted the message.

You can edit the content of a Forum post but you can't change the title. Make sure you pick a good title. (-:

Comments on Pages/Posts:

Many pages have comment areas. That includes the Forum, of course. They can even be threaded. Click the "Add Comment" link at the bottom of the page and you'll get a box in which to type your message for posterity. Comments, once posted, can't be edited. You also probably can't delete a comment yourself.

Events & Activities:

There are all kinds of events and activities taking place. Many are planned and some are spontaneous. Most planned activities have some kind of representation on the guild's web site. Here's a list of places to see what's going on:

Week: A tab on the left-hand side of the "Dashboard". It summarises most major social events and raid/instance activities occurring during the current week.

Elsheindra's GEM Calendar: There are links to this in various places: the bottom of the "This Month" calendar on the left-hand column of the Dashboard as well as in the "THB" tab of the right-hand side of the Dashboard.

Month: A tab on the left-hand side of the "Dashboard". It has a calendar month shown. Mouse over a given date to see the events for that date.

Questing: Area on the main public web site (right side) that shows major One raid/instance/social events but only ones with information pages maintained by The One, so cross-guild 5-man events, for example, don't appear there.

Between those and the actual GEM plug-in you can use in the game, you should be covered.

Creating Your Own Event:

You might want to go on a 5-man adventure or maybe something larger or maybe some kind of social event. Social events are usually posted as "News" in the QUEST area of the web site. Instances/raids can be posted via the shared GEM plug-in from within the game or on the web site.

Events in GEM will be added to the guild web site when the next weekly update is done if you've planned it far enough in advance. Your other choice is to ask someone for help on how to create a QUEST News posting with details of your event for the web site.

Some guidelines for posting on the web site:

Events should go in the QUEST area and not the FORUM area
Include the instance name and the date in the title. Titles can't be changed after it's posted. Including that info makes it more useful when it appears in a list.
We post event times in Game Time. That's what time WoW thinks it is in Paris. For the UK, that's +1 hour. That is, 20:00 Game Time is 19:00 in the UK.

More Info:

This is version 3 of this information and it doesn't cover everything, of course. Feel free to ask your mentor or other guild members for advice/help on anything to do with the web site. There are all kinds of cool features hidden around.

An updated copy of this message can be found in the LIBRARY section of the web site.

April 2, 2008

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