This is part two of a tour to help you find your way around the ocPortal adminzone and where you can find the most used settings and features. If you have not read part 1 you can read part 1 here.
The Structure screen
Your site is made up of pages and panels within zones. To explain this simply a Zone is a particular section of your site. You may decide your site has 4 different main sections which deal with different subjects and need different information on the side panes. Each zone has its own set of pages and panels. Each page can have any number of different panels which will depend on how you style your website. The most common of these are left and right which can be used to display related data such as latest forum posts on a subject or a section related sub menu.
Within the structure section you can configure all of the main sections of your site from Zones to panels and pages. There is also an Add page wizard in here too.
The Structure section also houses the configuration of your forums and chat rooms if you are using these on your site.
The Style Screen
The style screen is used to define how your site appears to its visitors. Within this section there is a Logo Wizard where you can create a logo using a simple process if you do not already have a logo.
One part of this section which you will need to use if you are planning to create your own website style is the Themes section. In this sub section you can control all parts of your theme including the templates that make up the site, the CSS, the images and the theme options. Another very useful tool is the theme wizard which you can use to make very quick changes to the basic colour scheme of your site to set the main colour scheme before working on the rest of the theme.
The Tools Screen
The tools screen is home to several sections which may be extremely useful to you as administrator of your site or may be not needed at all. This section includes ocPortal’s newsletter section where you can create and send regular newsletters to your site’s members. This section also has a code editor and ocPortal’s inbuilt upgrader.
One part of this section you will likely use more than any other is the members section where you can administrate all of your members details from sending welcome emails to adding or editing member details. You can also download a CSV file of all of your members, or import them from elsewhere. This section also has a link to managing your site’s usergroups.
The final three things I want to mention are the website clean-up tools to keep your site running smoothly, links to a wide range of RSS and atom feeds for your site and OcCLE which is an in built command line environment.
The content screen
Probably the most commonly used section of your sites adminzone will be the content section. Within this section you can check and add any type of content for your site from news posts and articles to image and video galleries. The image of the day can be controlled from here as well as polls, quizzes, chat rooms and your site calendar.
In this section you also have a link to all of the pages on your site and the ability to add new ones. From here you can control your downloads directory and your file library. For most sites many of these options won’t be used, but having all of them in one section makes administering your site very easy.
Docs
The last part of the menu is a link to the Documents section of the main ocPortal website which includes a range of tutorials including basic installation and more advanced tasks. I suggest exploring this section of the ocPortal site and familiarising yourself with the different sections of your own sites adminzone before jumping in at the deep end!
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