Components

A component is a whole feature of the hub: its own pages, its own database tables, and its own screens in the administrator interface. Most of what members see on a hub comes from one component or another, and a hub manager decides which of them are in use and how each behaves.

Every component in this book is reached from the Components menu in the administrator interface. Each has an Options button that opens its configuration and a Permissions tab that says which access groups may use it; the generated configuration reference lists every option of every component in one place.

The extension managers themselves — modules, plugins and templates — are covered in Extensions, and the article, category and media managers in Content, rather than here.

Which of these does your hub actually use?

Forty components ship with a hub. Almost no hub uses forty. A typical hub runs its resources or publications catalogue, groups, projects, support, and perhaps three or four others; the rest sit installed, empty, and out of the way. If you have inherited a hub, work out which are live before you read any further, because most of this section will not apply to you.

Three screens answer it, and they answer different questions.

• The Components menu lists a component only when it is enabled and you hold its manage permission. What you see there is what you can administer, not what your hub has installed.
• Extensions > Extension Manager, on its Hubzero Core tab with the Type filter set to Component, lists every component the platform ships, enabled or not. This is the full inventory.
• Menus > Main Menu shows what a visitor is actually offered. A component with no menu item can still be reached by typing its URL, so an empty menu is not proof a feature is off.

The quickest read on whether a component is used rather than merely enabled is to open it and look at its list. An empty Wiki Pages list or an empty Questions list means nobody has ever used it, whatever the menus say.

Turning one off

Tick the component in Extensions > Extension Manager and select Disable. Every one of its site URLs then returns a not-found page and it drops out of the Components menu. Nothing is deleted: the tables, the rows, the uploaded files all stay, and selecting Enable puts the feature back exactly as it was. Disabling is the whole of the lever — the components that ship with the platform cannot be uninstalled from the administrator interface at all, and there is no Uninstall button on that screen. See Extension Manager.

Choosing between the overlapping ones

Five of the components below do jobs that look alike, and a manager setting up a hub is asked to choose between them with nothing to go on. A hub does not need a forum and a question board and a knowledge base and a wiki. Run one or two. Every extra one splits the same small number of posts across more places, and a question asked in the wrong one gets no answer.

If members need to …	Use
Ask a specific question and have one reply marked as the answer	Answers
Hold a conversation that has no single answer, organised by topic	Forum
Read a staff-written explanation that stays put and stays correct	Knowledge base
Maintain a document together, with a history of who changed what	Wiki
Follow dated announcements from the hub, a member, or a group	Blogs

Two combinations earn their keep. Answers plus the knowledge base is the common one: members ask, and when the same question comes up a third time you write the settled version as an article and close the loop — the Answers component's About points option even defaults to a knowledge base address. Forum plus wiki inside groups is the other: the group argues in the forum and records the conclusion on a wiki page. Each of the five chapters opens by saying what its component is good at and where a sibling beats it.

Content and discussion

Component	What it does
Answers	Questions members ask each other, with answers, voting, and rewards.
Blogs	Hub, member, and group blogs.
Forum	Discussion sections, categories, and threads.
Knowledge base	How-to articles and answers to common questions.
Wiki	Collaboratively edited pages with revision history.
Newsletters	Email newsletters, their templates, and mailing lists.
Billboards	The rotating banners on the hub's front page.
Feedback	Success stories members submit and the notable quotes drawn from them.
Poll	A single site-wide poll. Reachable, but a poll cannot be selected.

The five overlapping ones are compared above under Choosing between the overlapping ones. The other four in this group do not overlap with anything: newsletters push mail out, billboards fill the front page, feedback gathers testimonials, and poll asks one question.

Research content

Component	What it does
Resources	The hub's catalogue of tools, datasets, presentations, and courses.
Publications	Versioned, citable publications and their curation workflow.
Projects	Private team workspaces for files, notes, and data.
Citations	The bibliography of work about or using the hub.
Collections	Member-curated boards of posts, files, and links.
Courses	Online courses, their offerings, and their students.
Events	The hub calendar and event registration.
Tools	The tool catalogue and the contribution pipeline.

Members and support

Component	What it does
Support	Support tickets, their queues, and the reports members file.
Wishlist	Feature requests members file and vote on.
Storefront and Cart	Products the hub sells and the checkout that sells them.
Tags	The hub's tag vocabulary and the pages that browse it.
Jobs	The job board, its listings, and employer subscriptions.
Services	The subscriptions employers buy to post on the job board.
Messages	An administrator-only inbox, separate from member messaging. Not reachable.
Mailto	The send-to-a-friend link on articles. No administrator side.

Search, metrics, and maintenance

Component	What it does
Search	The Solr search index: installing it, filling it, and tuning what it returns.
Usage	Traffic and tool-session reports.
Cron	Scheduled jobs and the plugins that run them.
Activity	The hub-wide activity log and the one chart that reports on it.
What's new	Aggregates recent content across six plugins and serves the hub's feeds.
Cache	Clearing cached pages, module output, and component fragments.
Check-in	Releasing records left locked by an editor who never saved.
Redirect	Managed redirects, the 404 log, and the external-link interstitial.
Control panel	The dashboard itself and the panels published to it.
Languages	Installed languages, the default, and the string override editor.

Integrations and developer tools

Component	What it does
Developer	OAuth applications, API tokens, and the generated API documentation.
SAML	The hub acting as an identity provider for external services.
OAI-PMH	The metadata endpoint external harvesters index the hub through.
DataViewer	Renders a database table as a searchable spreadsheet.

Members and access groups have their own chapters under Users, and the hub's global settings are in Configuring.