Customization

What a group manager can change about a group from the site: its logo and settings, the pages that make up its content, the categories those pages are filed under, and — on a super group — the modules around them.

A new group is a shell. The Overview tab shows whatever the hub's custom fields collected and a list of members, and that is all, which is enough for a reading group and not enough for a project people are meant to find their way around. soilcarbon, the group built through this chapter, needs three pages — a sampling protocol, the analysis pipeline, and who to ask about what — filed under a Methods category so the two protocol pages sit together, and its own logo so a member can tell it apart from the other four groups in their list. All of that is on this page.

What is not on this page is anything that changes the group's HTML, its template or its CSS. That is the boundary worth learning early, and the section at the end says exactly where it falls.

Two entries in the Group Manager menu do all of it: Edit Group Settings and Manage Group Pages.

Members holding a role can reach them too: Edit Group Settings needs the role permission of the same name, Manage Group Pages needs Create/Edit Group Pages & Categories. See Member functions.

Group settings

Group Manager → Edit Group Settings opens the same form used to create the group, with everything filled in. The sections are described in Creating and deleting a group. The two that shape how the group looks are Logo and, under Privacy Settings, Access Permissions.

Select Save Group when you are done. Saving emails the group's managers a summary of what changed.

The group logo

The logo is how a member picks the group out of a list. It shows on the group page, in the group browse listing, and in the mail the group sends.

The Logo section only exists once the group has been saved at least once.

1. Open Edit Group Settings.
2. In the file browser on the right of the page, select Upload a file — or drop a file onto it — to put the image in the group's uploads folder.
3. Choose it from the Logo drop-down. A preview appears below.
4. Select Save Group.

Which tabs appear

Every tab is a separate decision about a separate audience, and the two useful moves are opposite ones: turn a tab off entirely so the menu stays short and nobody wonders what is behind it, or open one wider than the rest so outsiders can read something before they ask to join. soilcarbon keeps Overview and Citations open to anyone and everything else to members.

Access Permissions, in the Privacy Settings section, lists every tab groups can have on this hub. Each one takes a value:

Value	Who reaches the tab
Any HUB Visitor	Everyone, signed in or not
Registered HUB Users	Anyone with a hub account
Group Members Only	Members of this group
Disabled/Off	Nobody. The tab is removed from the menu

Overview cannot be turned off. Whatever is preselected is the hub's own default for that tab until you change it.

Group pages

Group pages are the group's own writing: the things that are true for a while and want a stable address. A protocol, a list of who does what, a set of instructions for a new student. They are not conversation, and they are not the wiki.

The group's content pages live behind Group Manager → Manage Group Pages. The screen has two tabs, or three on a super group:

• Manage Pages
• Manage Page Categories
• Manage Modules — on a super group, or when the hub has switched modules on for ordinary groups

Upload Images/Files in the header opens the group's file browser, the same one used for the logo. Back to Group returns to the group.

Creating a page

The steps below make soilcarbon its first page: the sampling protocol, readable by members only because it quotes site coordinates that are not public yet.

1. Open Manage Group Pages and select New Page.
2. Fill in Title. It is required.
3. Fill in Alias if you want to choose the segment the page gets in the URL. Aliases take lowercase letters, digits, underscores and dashes; spaces are removed.
4. Write the page in the Content editor. It is required.
5. On the right, set Status — Published or Unpublished — and Privacy, which is either Inherits overview tab's privacy setting or Private Page (Accessible to members only).
6. Under Settings, optionally pick a Category, a Parent page and an Order, and choose whether the page shows Comments. Comments default to Use Group Setting, from the group's own Page Settings.
7. Select Save Page, or Apply Changes from the drop-down beside it to save and stay on the form.

An unpublished page stays off the group's menu, but managers can still open and edit it. A private page is restricted to group members even when the Overview tab is open to everyone; the page list marks it with a padlock.

Editing a page

From the Manage Pages list, select the page's title, or Manage Page on its row. The row's drop-down also offers Edit Page, Preview Page, Publish Page/Unpublish Page, Version History and Delete Page.

The list itself shows each page's URL, a padlock on private pages, a coloured stripe for its category, and who has it open if someone is editing it. Filter the list by category, or search it by title.

You can also edit a page from the group itself, if the group's Author Details page setting is on: the edit control sits in the byline at the foot of the page. With Author Details off there is no byline and no control, so go through Manage Group Pages instead.

Reordering and nesting pages

Drag a page by the handle at the right of its row in Manage Pages. Drop it on another page to make it a child. The hub sets how deep the nesting may go — five levels by default.

Version history

Every save that changes a page's content creates a new version.

1. Open the page's Version History.
2. Step through the versions with Previous and Next, jump straight to a version number with the menu between them, and use View Source Diff to see what changed in the markup.
3. Restore This Version copies the version you are looking at back to the top of the history as a new version. Nothing is thrown away.

Deleting a page

Select Delete Page from a page's drop-down in Manage Pages. The group's home page cannot be deleted, published or unpublished.

Page categories

Categories group pages together and give each one a colour, used as a stripe in the page list and as a filter. They matter once a group has more pages than fit on a screen — soilcarbon files the sampling protocol and the analysis pipeline under Methods, so a manager can pull up just those two. They are a manager's convenience, not a permission: putting a page in a category does not change who can read it.

1. Open Manage Group Pages and select the Manage Page Categories tab.
2. Select New Page Category.
3. Give it a Title, and a Color if you want one.
4. Select Save Category.

Each row's Manage Category drop-down offers Edit Category and Delete Category, and shows how many pages the category holds.

You can also make a category while editing a page: choose Other in the page's Category menu.

Modules

The Manage Modules tab puts blocks of content in the positions around a group's pages. It is present for every super group; for an ordinary group it appears only when the hub's administrators have switched group modules on. The screen is described in Super Groups.

PHP and JavaScript in a page

Sooner or later somebody wants a group page to do something: pull a live figure out of a database, embed a widget, run a script. This section is the answer, and mostly the answer is that you cannot do it yourself.

An ordinary group's page content is filtered: <script> blocks and PHP tags are stripped out before the page is stored. Nothing you can do from the site changes that.

There are two ways round it, and both need an administrator:

• The group is made a super group. Its pages may then contain PHP and JavaScript, and it gets a template, modules and a web space of its own.
• Or the group is left an ordinary group and its Trusted content page setting is turned on, which lifts the filtering for that one group without making it a super group.

In either case content that contains <?, <?php or <script is saved unapproved and mailed to the hub's page approvers. Until one of them approves it, visitors see the previously approved version, or a placeholder saying the page is awaiting approval. The page shows Pending Approval in Manage Pages meanwhile.

The group calendar

A group's Calendar tab is only useful if people see the events without going to look. Both routes below put the group's events into the calendar a member already reads — the field season's sampling trips turning up beside their teaching, without anyone copying dates across by hand.

Members can take a group's events away with them, in two ways. Both live in the Subscribe box below the calendar on the group's Calendar tab.

Tick the calendars you want — the group may have several, each with its own colour, plus Uncategorized Events — then:

• Download saves an iCalendar file (.ics) you import into your own calendar application. It is a snapshot: later changes on the hub are not reflected.
• Subscribe hands the calendar to your default calendar application as a live subscription, so changes made on the hub show up in your calendar.

The box also shows the subscription address, so you can copy it into an application yourself.

If the group's Calendar tab is restricted to registered users or to group members, you are asked for your hub username and password when you subscribe.

A calendar that is not publishing events is listed but cannot be ticked.