Hub managers

The administrator's guide. A hub manager configures the hub, manages its members and their access, curates its content, installs and configures extensions, and keeps the site healthy. Almost all of that happens in the administrator interface at /administrator, which this book walks through screen by screen.

It is written for whoever ended up running the hub, which is usually not a full-time administrator: a researcher, a lab manager, somebody who inherited the site along with three other jobs. So each chapter says what a screen is for before it says what fields it has, and it says where a change is hard to undo, reaches people who are already using the hub, or cannot be tried out first. Where something does not work — an inert button, a dead filter, a setting nothing reads — it says that too, rather than describing the intention.

This book is not a field-by-field reference; that is the generated configuration reference. It is not about writing code for a hub, which is Developers.

The exception is the first step. Installing a hub is being rewritten for the new web installer; everything after a hub is running is covered here and current.

Where to start

If the hub is new, read The administrator interface and then The first week with a new hub. The first covers the login and the back end's menus; the second is the ordered path through the choices that are hard to change later — mail, registration, access, the front page, and the scheduled jobs — with a link to the chapter covering each. Configuring has the settings screens in full.

If the screens make sense one at a time but not together, read How a hub fits together. It is the mental model the rest of this book takes for granted — the two halves of the application, how a page is built from a component, a template and its modules, what lives in the database and what lives on disk, and what a manager can and cannot break.

If you are taking over a running hub, start with Daily maintenance and Users.

If you are here because something has gone wrong, try Frequently asked questions first, then the chapter for the screen in question. A hub that has just become public and is suddenly full of junk accounts and junk posts wants Spam, which is worth reading before that happens rather than during.

In this book

• Getting started — the administrator interface and the first configuration.
• Integrations — connecting the hub to analytics, Google Drive, the rich text editor, and CAPTCHA.
• Daily maintenance — approving content, support tickets, cron jobs, notices, and tools.
• Frequently asked questions
• Configuring — hub settings, components, modules, plugins, registration, and authentication.
• Users — members, access groups and levels, groups and super groups, member import, and user notes.
• Menus
• Content — articles and URLs.
• Components — one chapter per component's administrative side, from Answers to Wishlist.
• Extensions — the extension, module, template, and plugin managers.
• Spam — the spam filters and how to tune them.
• Security — hardening the operating system and the CMS.

Every parameter you can set is also listed in the generated configuration reference.