This section contains information about navigating the CICAAW website, features, how to submit content, etc. If you have any questions regarding how to use the website, or how to accomplish something on this website, hopefully your answers can be found here!
If you have a question you'd like to see answered here, please submit feedback to us. We'll do our best to answer what we can, as quickly as we can.
If you are a member of the CICAAW, you should have a user account already setup.
Your username is formed from your first and last names put together with a space in between (e.g. John Doe's username is "John Doe"). If you don't have your password yet, then contact an officer to get it.
On the left side, there are three sections named Menu, Navigation, and User Login. To login to the website, simply enter your username and password into the User login section and hit the Log inbutton.
If the login failed, try again, being very careful about your spelling. Points to keep in mind:
If the login succeeded, the Navigation and User Login sections on the left side will have been replaced by Member Menu and JohnDoe. The JohnDoe menu contains the create content item which is where you can add forum topics, events, images, etc. (officers can add more things).
Now that you're logged in, you'll notice new options below lots of different pieces of the website (e.g. forum topics, events, images, pages, stories) such as add new comment, edit this page, or administer (officers can do more things).
Yes! As long as you choose a username that isn't already taken, and as long as it meets all of the requirements for allowed characters (spaces, underscores, dashes, letters and numbers are all allowed).
But, for the CICAAW website, we request that you please don't change your username. Just leave it as your actual name (e.g. "Joe Turner").
There are two ways to change your username/email address. In all cases, you must first login to the website. The methods to change your username are:
After you get to the edit form fields, simply enter your new username in the "username" field - or change your email address in the "email address" field, then click on the "Save user information" button at the bottom of the form.
Comments allow you as a user to interact with the content on a site--to respond to an article, offering your own ideas, additions, or critique.
When you bring up an article to read, look for comment-related links at the bottom of the article. If you're not logged in, this might read "login or register to post comments". When you do log in, you should see something like "Add new comment". Click on the link and you're ready to comment away.
Comments can be a great way of enriching a community site--but they can also lead to unfriendly, even harassing exchanges. As with any communication, it's important to try to ensure that your comments are respectful and constructive.
Comments on the website are "threaded". This means you can comment directly on an article--or you can reply to an existing comment. If you reply, your comment will be indented to show that it is part of that discussion.
First, you need to login to the website with your existing username and password (see the What do I do if I forgot my password?" FAQ question if you forgot or lost your password).
To change your password:
All contact information for the CICAAW website and key personnel are available via the Contact Us link in the menu above.
To get to the menu for adding content, you must first be logged in. Then on the left side, in the section with your user name, click "create content".
You'll be presented with a list of types of content you can create. What ones you see depends on whether your user is setup as a member, an officer, a prospect, or whatever.
Notice that in the main page space in the middle is a description of each type of content--a handy reference.
Click on "story" at the bottom of the "create content" menu. You'll get the "Submit story" form.
From here, it is just a matter of filling in the form and posting it.
At the top of the form is some administrative stuff. If you're not sure what to do, just look at the "Allow user comments" bit. The website supports discussion/comments on postings--but such comments are not always appropriate. If your article is one that could be usefully commented on, keep the default "Read/write". Otherwise, choose "Disabled".
The title is straightforward enough. Try to be descriptive and catchy.
Next comes the "Topics" pull-down menu. This is the section your article will go in--or in the technical language of the website ("taxonomy terms"). What you're seeing when you pull down the menu is all the sections available on the website, with their structure. So, choose the appropriate section for your story and continue down the form.
The "body" field is where you put the main content of the page. If you've typed this into a word processor or HTML editor, just copy and paste it into this field. Alternately you can just type straight in. For the most basic page, just type and include double line returns (hit "enter" twice) at the and of each paragraph.
You can optionally format your entry in friendly old HTML. But hey, if you're a novice, don't worry--that's not as difficult as it sounds. Here's a quick primer:
If you want something to be bold, just enclose it in "b" tags, like this:
<b>This text is bold</b>
Note that there is always an opening tag (no forward slash) and a closing tag (a forward slash before the tag name, indicating that you are turning it "off").
To make something italic, put it in "i" tags:
<i>This is in italics</i>
To put things nicely in paragraphs, enclose them in "p" tags.
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
To make bullets, first open a list with a "ul" tag (that stands for "unordered list"), then put each list item in "li" (yes, for "list") tags. Don't forget at the end to close off your list with a closing "ul" tag. Here's how it looks:
<ul>
<li>This is the first bulleted item</li>
<li>This is the second bulleted item</li>
</ul>
And to make headlines, use "h" tags, using numbers as appropriate. That is, for a first-level headline, use "h2" (we're starting at 2 because these are really sub-headlines and shouldn't be bigger than the original page title). For a second-level headline, use "h3". And so on! Example, with a paragraph after it:
<h2>This is the Headline</h2>
<p>And here is the paragraph</p>
That wasn't too painful, was it?
Decide where you want the "teaser" (the part of the main text used in links to the article) to end. If you do nothing, the software will choose a breaking point for you, like at a paragraph return--but it's better to decide yourself, to make sure the breaking point is appropriate. You do this by typing in:
<!--break-->
The "teaser" will end at the point you put the <!--break-->.
And you're set! You can preview the page you've prepared by hitting "Preview" (recommended, and sometimes required) or you can bravely or recklessly just go ahead and publish it by hitting "Submit".
You have two options to create a new forum posting:
To edit or delete existing content, log in and then bring up the page you wish to edit. Look below the article (or article summary) for a link that says "administer", or sometimes "edit this page". Depending on your user permissions, you might see this below all pages or only certain ones (like those that you yourself submitted).
Clicking this link will bring up a page with a form for changing the page. To edit the page, change the text or settings and then submit. If you wish to delete the page, look for a "delete" button near the bottom of the page. When you click it, you'll get a second chande to confirm that you wish to delete the page--or to change your mind!
Adobe Acrobat is becoming the standard for document archiving and distribution. It's easy to use, it's cross-platform compatible, and it's reader is FREE!
Click on this link and follow the instructions to install the free Acrobat viewer on your computer.
If you forget or lose your password, you can have your password automatically reset to a new one, and emailed to you. Because we store your password in our database with a one-way encryption algorithm, we can't retrieve the actual value of your password. This insures that if anyone were able to get ahold of the encrypted format of your password, they wouldn't be able to decrypt it.
Therefore, when you recover your password, our system automatically generates a new one for you, and emails it to you. Once you login with that new password, you can change your newly assigned password to one that you can remember.
To recover your passsword, simply click on the "forgot your password" link in the login box. Enter either your username or email address you used to register your account when you created it, then submit the form. Within a few minutes, you should receive an email with your newly assigned password.
Yes! Select ‘Create Content’ then ‘Image’. Once added, an image will automatically show up in the Galleries and the ‘Random Image’ box (unless you mark it as private).