Help

The Formula Vee website is a community portal for the Formula Vee community. What is a portal? It essentially allows any community member to author and publish content themselves on the site. All content is reviewed by the site webmaster, and either approved for publishing, or rejected with comments to why it isn't suitable. This de-centralised authoring of content reduces the workload for the webmaster, and encorages more content submissions, resulting an a faster growing and more regulary updating site, which makes it more informative and useful.

How do I publish content?

First you must register with this site. Click on the 'Join' menu item, enter your prefered username, password and your e-mail address. Once you have joined, you will be automatically logged into the site. Every time you visit the site, you must remember to login before you can publish content.

Once you have added new content, if you want others visiting the site to see the content, you must 'Publish' it. Firstly, you must be viewing the content you have created, then you click the drop down menu towards the top right of the page, and select 'Submit'. This will bring the state of the content to 'Pending' which, will prevent you from making further changes to the content. A site reviewer will then review your content and approve it for publishing as soon as possible.

Once your content has been published, you cannot modify it, unless you retract it. You can retract content the same way you published it using the drop-down menu at the top right of the page.

Home folder

Ordinary members can only add content to their own folder. To access you own folder, click the 'my folder' menu item.

Each item you add to your own folder will be listed on your home page when somebody finds it though the 'Members' link on the menu. If you want a custom home page, you should create a 'WebPage' in your folder, and ensure that its Short Name is 'index_html'.

What content can I add?

News Articles

You may add your own news articles. Once approved, news articles appear to the right hand side of most pages, and in the news archive, until they are retracted or removed. News articles always show up in the order they have been created or modified. You can archive your news article indefinately by simply not deleting it. You may wish to keep all your old news articles inside a separate folder inside your home folder.

Classified Advertisements

You can create forsale, wanted or commercial advertisements. You may create the advertisments for yourself, or on behalf of other people in the Vee community who may not have internet access. Forsale and wanted advertisments are shown in the 'Classifieds' section of the site. Commercial advertisements are shown in the 'Commercial' section of the site. Advertisments will be displayed until they are explicity retracted or removed, and they will be displayed in the order they were created or modified.

Driver Profiles

You can create your own driver profile that will be displayed in the drivers section of the site, and you can also create driver profiles on behalf of other Vee drivers who may not have internet access.

Events

If you have a Formula Vee related event that you want added the the site calendar, then you can create an 'Vee Event'. The webmaster will normally create all racing events each year, however you may wish to create events for committee meetings, AGM's, or social events that the webmaster doesn't know about in your area.

Webpages

You can create your own web pages that will be accessed via your home folder on the site.

Files

You can upload files such as PDF, Word, or Excel documents to your home directory, and link them from any webpages that you create.

Photos and Photo Albums

You can upload your own photos to your home folder, and link them from webpages. If you want to publish photos for a particular event or race meeting, you should first create a Photo Album, then place your Photos within the Album. All published photo albums will be listed in the "Photos" section of the site. Remember that must submit the album for publishing as well as submitting all the photos within the album. You can submit all photos at once easily by selecting all of them using the checkbox at the top of the album folder contents view, then pressing the 'change state' button at the bottom of the list, then selecting 'submit'.

Personal settings

You can edit your personal preferences and change your password by clicking the 'my perferences' link on the menu. The content editor setting defines how you can edit text in Webpages, Classifieds, and News Articles. The default is the "HTMLArea" editor, which is a fancy WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that works within most web browsers. However, if you are having trouble using the editor, you should select 'None'. This will allow you to enter standard text, structured text, and HTML.

The "Allow editing of short names" setting is unchecked by default. By default, all content items are automatically given a short name that you cannot change when you create them. The short name is effectively the items identifier to the system, and usually its value is not so important so long as it is unique. You can however over-ride the default short name given to your items by changing the short name setting which, will display an extra field on all your item edit pages that allows the short name to be edited.

Content Properties

Each item or content type has a 'Properties' tab. Settings on this page allow you to 'fine-tune' your content. In most cases, the settings on this page do not need to be changed.

Allow Discussion on this item

In most cases you should disable discussion (which is the default). However if you have created a specific item that you want open for discussion, check the 'enable' box, and this will allow other members to write comments at the bottom of the item.

Keywords

These allow keywords to be assocated with the content for searching purposes. Most content types do not make use of this feature. Links however use this feature. If you create a Link, you may choose for it to be published on the site in a specific area by choosing the appropriate keywords:

• Photo Album - The link will show up on the photos page
• Associated Service, Australia, World, Driver/Team, Sponsor - The link will show up in the appropriate section on the 'links' page.
  

Effective Date

This is the date that the content will become viewable on the site. It defaults to the creation date of the content (i.e., it is viewable immediately).

Expiration Date

This is the date the content should no longer be viewable on the site. By default, this date is not set, meaning the content is viewable for ever.

Contributors

This field can be used to note the people who have contributed to a document over time.

Content Sharing

Each item or content type has a 'Sharing' tab. It allows you to give other portal users access to edit the item you have created, or view the content before it has been approved by the webmaster. To share your content with another user, they must already be registered with the site.