uCoz: website creation. Chapter 5

Chapter 5.

Account AdministrationAccount Administration is something that, to some extent, all the chap-ters of the textbook are devoted to.

In this chapter we consider the interfaces for content management, the administration panel and how to work with it. It's not necessary to investigate this panel thoroughly, for this there is information in the forum or in the FAQ of the system. When creating and managing the site the main thing is not to learn all the checkboxes by heart, but to under-stand what each one is responsible for where to look for which settings.

Administration panel of the website The administration panel for the website is its sacred place. No kidding. From here you can even remove the site. That is why hackers hunt for a password to it so often. This panel is often referred to as the Control panel.

You can get to the administration panel in two ways:

• By adding ‘/admin’ to the name of the site in the address bar, to get http://your_site.ucoz/admin ( ), and entering the password for the control panel and the CAPTCHA (the numbers from the image) in the window that appears:

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• Through the webtop, clicking on the CP icon opposite of the site's name in the list of sites:

If there is no personal password set for the site, the password for its administration panel will coincide with the password for the webtop. Inthiscase,youimmediatelyfindyourselfintheadministrationpanel.If the site has a personal password, you must enter it:

To set a personal password, see the ‘Security’ chapter. The administration panel looks as follows:

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Chapter 5. Account Administration

Itcanbedividedintofiveparts.

• Adminbar — through this menu you can access almost all the features offered by the administration panel. This part always remains in its place.

• Informationpanel — composed of the following elements:

• Interface — here you can choose the color of the adminis-tration panel, making it, for example, black (as they say, each to his taste)

• Language — allows you to select the language of the admin-istration panel. If you prefer to work in English or Arabic, select it. The language of the site will remain unchanged!

• Logout — returns you to the form for the password. Always close the administration panel, or exit it after making changes, if you are not working at your personal computer.

• Therectangleinthecorner — pointing the cursor to this item, you will see how much space on the site is currently occupiedbyyourfiles:

This part of the panel always remains in its place.

• Columnwithmodules. On the left is a list of activated modules. Clicking on the name of a module, you will proceed to its indi-vidual preferences. Using the links below the list, you can switch between Active and Inactive modules. Clicking on the arrow to the right of the name of each module opens a menu allowing you togetdirectlytoaspecificsectionofthemanagementmodule:

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This part of the panel always remains in its place as well.

• Panelwithbasicinformationaboutthesite. Here the basic information is shown: your name, address, website, settings for the FTP-client, available space, as well as a variety of informa-tion from the administration of uCoz.

• Mainpanel. The largest part of the main page of the admin-istration panel is reserved for the most necessary and often called upon functions. Almost all of them are duplicated in the upper menu. This part of the panel changes when switching to different functions; it is here where their settings are displayed.

Let's look at what constitutes the top menu, as it concentrates all the power of the control panel.

Common

This tab contains such important and necessary information, as the number of the server where your site is located (it may be useful in case of any failure), IP-address of the server, links to the main pages of the administration panel, and the site itself. In the example in the picture the site is located on the server s24.

Almost every menu item will be described in a separate chapter of the book, so here I will just say a few words about what each function is responsible for and where it is described in full.

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SettingsThe Settings menu includes the following items:

• CommonSettings — carefully and thoughtfully read through them in this chapter below. A great deal depends on these set-tings;

• Substitutionofdefaultphrases — this feature is intended to change the majority of system labels shown in the code of the system that cannot be replaced simply by editing the design. For details, see the ‘Basic tools for working with the site’ chapter;

• Adbannercustomization — determines the appearance of the advertising bar on your site. See below in this chapter;

• Domaintransfer (own domain) — behind this option is a huge tool for attaching a domain to the site and working with DNS, see the ‘Domains’ chapter for details.

DesignThis menu contains functions for working with the appearance of the site (their detailed descriptions are given in the ‘Design’ chapter)

• Designmanagement(templates)— function for customizing the appearance of all the site's pages;

• Designmanagement(CSS) — function to customize the CSS for the site;

• Sitemenubuilder — a very handy feature for creating a vari-ety of menus on the site;

• Quicksubstitutionoftemplateparts — a function that facili-tates the making of repetitive edits to the code of the pages;

• Importationofremotecode— a function to adjust the interaction with third-party sites, described in the chapter ‘Intermediary tools for working with the site’;

• Templatebuilder — function to create your own outline of a site;

• Templatesbackup — function to create a backup copy of the template.

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ToolsTools for working with different aspects of the site are grouped here:

• Filemanager—functiontoaddfilestoasiteandworkwiththem, described in the chapter ‘Basic tools for working with the site’;

• Informers — function to create a special page element, de-scribed in the ‘Informer’ chapter ;

• RSSimport — a tool for importing RSS-feeds to the site is described in the chapter ‘Basic tools for working with the site’;

• Awards— a function used by you to show your appreciation or recognition of a visitor’s contribution. You can award the visitor aspecificiconorsymbolsuchasastarorheart,describedinthe ‘Administrating the Site’ chapter;

• Tellafriend — a tool for creating a special e-mail form, de-scribed in the chapter ‘Post forms’;

• Bannerrotator— a tool for creating a unit with changing ban-ners on the site, described in the chapter ‘Earnings’;

• Smilesbackup — a tool to add your own emoticons to the site, described in the chapter ‘Other tools for working with the site’;

• Projectbackup — a tool to create a full backup of the content is described in the chapter ‘Security’.

MultimediaA set of tools for insertion of video and music into the site. The whole tab is described in the chapter ‘Multimedia’.

SecurityHereyoucanfindthesettingsrelatedtopasswordsandtheadministra-tor session. The complete tab is described in the chapter “Safety”.

Help

• uCozsupportforum — link to the system users forum, forum.ucoz.ru;

• FAQ — Link to the FAQ of the system, faq.ucoz.ru;

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• Sitepromotion — some theory about how to promote the site;• Technicalsupport — link to a form for contacting tech sup-

port, it is described in the chapter ‘The uCoz Community’.

PaidservicesTools for working with the basket for orders and paid services. The tab is fully described in the chapter ‘Paid Services’.

Key account settings Let us return to the Generalsettings tab in the settings. Here are the settings that affect all modules at once and largely determine the ap-pearance of the site. The tab is as follows:

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ParameterName Capabilities Howtoget

Name of your site Thenamespecifiedherewillbedisplayed in the top portion of your site, i.e. its title which is made up of the characters you chose. It is used for system code $SITE_NAME$

Type name of your site in the text box

Your site's address (URL)

Address to be used by the system as a link to the home page from anywhere on the site. By default it's the same as the address of the site. Used for system code $HOME_PAGE_LINK$

It is best not to change this link.

Site design You can replace the design selected when creating a site with any other standard template

Click on the link [selectdesign], and select a new template for the site from the list

Site language Thissettingspecifiesthelanguagefor all the inscriptions on the site. Site language and the language of the administration panel may be different

Select your preferred language

Language of the control panel

Thissettingspecifiesthelanguageusedto work with in the control panel

Select your preferred language

Site is temporary down

The site can only be viewed by users of the ‘Administrators’ group. This option may be useful when updating the site and setting its design. All the others will be shown a message about the reason for the inaccessibility

Check this option if you want to activate it

Description for the visitors why the website is tempo-rary down

If you activate the Siteistemporarilydown option, you will be able to specify what label the user accessing the page will see

Type the desired text into thefield.Forexample:'Site under maintenance' or 'Site is closed for upgrade'

Site takes part in our Rating and TOP 100

At uCoz there is a rating of the most popular sites in the system: top.ucoz.ru. Your site may appear in this ranking too, if it is heavily visited

Check this box if you want to participate

Site category If you agree to participate in the rank-ings, you will need to determine the category which is the closest to your site's topic

Check this box if you want to participate

We shall take a look at all the settings one by one:

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Brief site descrip-tion (150 charac-ters)

Describe your site in a few sentences Fill in the text box

Use ‘Builder’ for the website design customization

In the admin bar tab on the site the Builder tab will appear. With its help you can visually customize the site at your discretion. For people with insuf-ficientknowledgeofHTMLandCSSthis feature will be indispensable. For details of the Designer, see ‘Design’


Activate ‘Who's online’ feature

Activate this option if you want codes $ ONLINE_COUNTER $ and $ ONLINE_US-ERS_LIST $ to work. For more informa-tion about the function, see ‘Statistics’

Check this option if you want to activate it. In thenextfieldenterthenumber corresponding to the maximum number of users to appear in the list

Activate PDA templates

Enabling this option adds special templates designed to browse the site from a PDA or mobile phone. For details about the PDA-version, see ‘Design’


Use tree-like com-ments structure

This mode allows users to access easy dialogue during Commenting materials. For more on this see ‘Blog’


Disable AJAX for page switchers

If Ajax is enabled, then when you change pages only part of the list of materials will be updated, not the entire page


Use Friendly URL In the URL of your materials their names, but not the serial numbers will be displayed


Overlay uploaded images with text (watermark)

When the watermark is activated, the image of the JPEG format and a size greater than 100 × 100 pixels, will be imposed with the text you specify


Watermark text If you want to use the watermark, a fieldforitstextwillappear

For example, enter your site's name or an inscription like ‘All right reserved’. You can use only Latin letters and ASCII characters

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Contact details Used to create messages in case of any activity on your site (if the necessary settings are turned on). All characters sent from the site will get to the speci-fiede-mailaddress

If necessary, change your name and contact email address

Smileys set The selected set will be used for all modules and functions that use smilies

You can choose any option from the list or upload your own. For details, see the chapter ‘Other tools for working with the system’

Local time Specify a time zone according to which the site will display the current time

Select your time zone

Date and time format

How to display the date and time on the site. So:25.02.2005 23:23 or, perhaps, like this: 05/02/25 11:23 p.m. There are plenty of options

Select your favorite display option

Display current date as ‘Today’

If the material is added to the site on the day of viewing, not the date, but the word ‘Today’, will be displayed


When opening the main page, redirect to

After typing a website address, the visitor will automatically be linked not to the main page, but to your chosen page. This may be the main blog page, thefilemanagerpageoranyofthecontent modules

Select any module or the main page

Default form type for entries editing

Depending on your preferences, select the type of form for editing materials to be used by default

You can choose from: The visual editor; BB-code + HTML; Pure HTML

<! DOCTYPE> tag value

This tag is used to specify the type of the current document — DTD (docu-menttypedefinition,descriptionofthetype of the document)

This tag will be added in the very beginning of the document. Use this option only if you understand its meaning

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Admin bar of the site In addition to the administration panel, in the system there is another very important tool for managing the site — the Admin bar. This panel is located at the top of the site, in the same place where the ad bar is situated and is visible only to users from the ‘Administrators’ group.

In the approximation it appears as follows:

Adminbar is very similar to the top menu of the Control Panel. It also consists of drop-down tabs.

GeneralTheveryfirsttabcontainsbasicinformationaboutyouraccountandsetup for cosmetic settings.

• Myprofileonthesite — allows viewing your group, nick, ava-tar,etc.withinthesite.Formoreinformationabouttheprofile,see ‘Users’;

• Unetprofilemanagement— transition to your uNet-account; • Logintocontrolpanel — the entrance to the administration

panel; • Adminbarcolor — repainting the bar in a more pleasant

color;

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• Logout — exit the site with the loss of authorization; • Closeadminbar — the closure of the bar.

ControlThis tab contains functions for managing the site's content.

• Inactivematerials — shows the list of the site's materials hid-den from the users, for further description, see ‘Administering the Site’;

• Commentsmanagement— management of user comments in the various modules;

• Filemanager—managementforuploadingfilestothesite;• Notificationsaboutupdates— allows to receive private mes-

sages or e-mails with every new comment or material in the section to which you subscribe;

• IPblocking— protection from unwanted users; • URLblocking— protection against spammers.

Addition This tab displays a list of activated content modules of the site. When you click on the name of a module, an add new content form will appear. For the Blog it will be a new record, for the PageEditor — a new page, for Photoalbum a new photo etc.

Users

• Siteusers — list of all users of the site;• Removalofuser'sentries — a tool against spammers.

Described in the chapter ‘Administrating the Site’;

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• MassPMdispatch — designed to send messages to groups of users. Described in the chapter ‘Administrating the Site’;

• Viewsiteas...— view the site on behalf of other groups. The function is described in the ‘Design’ chapter.

MultimediaThe tab is designed to work with video, audio and graphics:

• Graffiti — a tool that allows users to draw. Its full description is given in the ‘Main tools for working with the site’ chapter;

• All other items described in the ‘Multimedia’ chapter.

DesignThis tab is visible only when the designer is turned off in the general settings page. Otherwise, the Builder tab appears instead:

• Sitedesigncustomization — directs you to a list of page tem-plates. For more information about this process, see ‘Design’;

• Pagedesigncustomization — redirects to the template of the current page;

• Listofpagevariables — a list of current values of a number of system variables. For more information about variables, see the “System code” chapter.

BuilderThis tab appears instead of the Design tab when you activate the re-spective adjustment in the general account settings.

• Enablebuilder— switches the site to designer mode. For more information about this, see ‘Design’ chapter;

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• Listofpagevariables — a list of current values of a number of system variables. For more information about variables, see the ‘System code’ chapter.

HelpA tab, labeled with a question mark ‘?’, Contains background information:

• uCozsupportforum — link to the support forum; • FAQ — Link to the FAQ of the system; • Enabletips — activates site tooltips if they are disabled.

MagnifierThis icon appears in the admin bar when viewing the content, if since your last visit, new comments have appeared. Clicking on the icon you can navigate to the new comments (see details in the ‘Blog’ chapter).

User bar The User bar is a very stripped-down version of the admin bar. By de-fault it is shown for all groups except Guests and Blocked. This bar is designed to allow the user to manage his account, add content to the site (if members of his group are allowed to do this), etc. The user bar may consist of the following tabs:

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GeneralSimilar to the corresponding tab in the admin bar.

Control • Myentries — displays a pop-up list of materials of the user,

which he/she added to the site (if he/she is allowed to do it); • Mycomments — displays a pop-up list of the user's comments,

which he added to the site (if he/she is allowed to do it); • Commentstomaterials — prints all comments to the articles

on the site on a separate page; • Notificationaboutupdates — allows you to receive private

messages with each new comment in the section to which you subscribe;

• Sitesearch — displays a pop-up window to enter a search query.

AppendixList of modules that have been activated on the site, which a user can add materials to.

Users • Siteusers — displays a page with a list of all users; • Sendprivatemessage— a function to communicate with

other site users.

Multimedia This tab represents a truncated version of the corresponding tab of the admin bar.

Newcomments — exactly the same as in the admin bar.

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Documents

uCoz: website creation. Chapter 5