To participate in our working groups and to create any kind of content, some prerequisites are required.
1. Please familiarize yourself with our Community Guidelines.
2. You must have a user account on Consultant Commons with permissions.
* The default account at ConsultantCommons is enabled with all the permissions required to participate in creating content for: posts, events, and documents.
3. You must be logged-in. If you are not logged-in Login
4. All content must be associated with a Working Group. In order to add content to a group, you must first be subscribed to the group. To subscribe to a group, navigate to the group's page and click on the 'subscribe' link shown in the left side bar.
5. Once subscribed to a group, you should see a menu in the left side bar that will allow you to create content for the group.
Attachments can be added to all types of content on the site. When creating a new page of content, you will see an "File attachments" section near the bottom of the content creation page.
How-to Attach Files.
Attachment References
File attachments are generally shown at the bottom of the content their attached to in a small box offset from the content. Additionally, the Attachement section will show the URL of where the attachment is. It is then possible to directly link to it from within the body of the content. See linking for instructions on how to establish links.
Attachment Options
List - It is also possible to attach content and not have it listed at the bottom of its associated content.This is useful when the attachments are referenced as links in the main body of the content. By default, this is checked. Unchecking this will make the attachment disappear from the viewer in the attachment section.
Delete - Checking this will delete the attachment when content is submitted.
Each type of content has essentially the same basic elements available:
Authoring Information - This defaults to your login and the current date and time. Article display in lists sorts newest to oldest by the authored on date and time. Therefore, if you want your content to artificially appear higher or lower in a listing of content, adjust this field.
Options - This controls the display of the content
User Comments - This controls whether a piece of content can accept comments. When turned on, a comment text box is available for readers to comment on the content. The comment is appended to the content in a threaded discussion list manner. User comments should be pertanent to the article itself rather than a general discussion list.
Title - This is the content title.
View/Edit Permissions - This allows content authors to indicate if content is editable by other kinds of users. Typically only a book is editable by multiple users. However, using these settings, other users can have the possibility of editing other kinds of content.
Parent (Books only) - When authoring a book, this drop-down will appear. This allows the placement of a book page relative to another page. This provides an easy way to sequence pages. Book pages automatically get forward and back navigation. See About authoring books for more details.
Path Alias - By default all content gets a node id and therefore all content ends up with URLs like www.consultingcommons.org/node/3. However, by using this field, you can create a friendly URL like www.consultingcommons.org/hardwareguide. For this kind of URL simply put in "hardwareguide" (minus the double quotes). Now the content will be available via its original URL and your friendly URL.
Content Categories - For each taxonomy vocabulary available, you will see a multiple-select list box that allows you to "tag" your content associating it with certain categories of information. This allows your content to show up in one or multiple navigation trees.
Body - This is where your content goes. By default the HTMLArea editor is turned on allowing easy tagging of content with appropriate HTML tags. By default all HTML tags are allowed. If you want to see the HTML source of your content press the "<>" icon and the mode will switch to "source" mode. Pressing this again will switch back to WSYWIG mode.
* TIP: When pasting from other websites, it is recommended that you switch to source mode as the editor will bring in the HTML from the other site which may or may not work out for you. By pasting in source mode, you simply get the text which you can then format from there.
Input Format - Generally, you don't need to adjust these settings. Filtered HTML allows a subset of HTML tags through.
Log Message - Provides an explanation of the additions or updates being made to help other authors understand your motivations.
Weight - This will change the position of where this content fits into lists. Negative numbers place higher than positive numbers.
Create a new term in The Commons - If you don't find a taxonomy term in the listing above the body, this allows you to create a term on the fly. Please be mindful of where you put a term.
Attachments - This allows any number of attachments to be added to a piece of content. Attachments can be listed at the bottom of the content as clickable links or they may be hidden and you can link to them directly in your text by using the URL provided next to the attachment name once the attachment is uploaded.
A note about article abstracting: When content is shown in a list or on the front page only a topmost portion of the content will be shown. This is determined by the system. However, if you wish to specify where the break should occur put "<!--break-->" (without the quotes) into your text and the system will display your content up until that point. Putting this at the end of your content will force the entire display of that content.
Links within content can be created a number of ways:
Entering HTML Source
You can directly enter valid HTML link tags (a href, img, etc) by switching to the source view (html) and hand entering tags that you are familiar with.
WYSIWYG Controls
The WYSIWYG editor contains controls for easily adding hyperlinks and images.
Adding hyperlinks - The web link control () allows you to specific any valid URL in a pop-up window. To use, select the text you wish to link, click the () icon and enter the URL you wish to reference. The pop-up window also allows you specify if you want the link to open a new window or in the same window and allows you to enter text that will appear upon hovering over the link.
Adding images - The Insert/Modify Image control () allows you to specify any valid image URL. Using this pop-up window you can easily set various attribute that relate to an image. Images may be from other places on the Internet, from this site, attachments to your content, or image nodes from the image gallery.
Note: If you are using a pop-up blocker or have pop-up blocking turned on in Firefox be sure to allow this site to create popups in order for this to work properly.
Special Markup - [inline:xx]
This system also contains a special markup tag which allows you to easily reference attached files. By entering the text such as "[inline:1], the system will reference the first attached file.
By adding "=yourtext" to the tag (i.e. [inline:1=Download the file]) you may also optionally specify the title text for the file. For images, the title text will be used as a roll-over tooltip. For all other files, the title text will be the actual link text.
While this system provides a WYSIWYG editor, it is bound by the constraints of HTML. When pasting text from other applications it is important to realize that there can be a dramatic differerence between the kinds of formatting that is available between desktop applications and HTML.
General.
When copying items from desktop applications, often an HTML version of that content is put into the clipboard. This HTML tends to vary in quality between applications.
Results from web browsers.
One of the easiest ways to enter content into the system is from another web browser. When pasting copying from another browser, you'll often be copying the HTML that makes up that content. Therefore, there is a possibility that you may be pasting into this system, poorly formed HTML and your results during a preview may look different than expected.
Results from Word.
When content is copied and pasted from Word, the WYSIWYG editor normally will accept all of Word's HTML. Some of this HTML is doesn't work correctly within the template of this system.
Pasting just text.
For many documents you may find that pasting in the text and reapplying formatting may be faster than cleaning up HTML that is not working properly. Do do this: