Club Websites

Intro

You're lucky enough to be a part of a transition period for club websites. There are two main club website platforms in play right now:

1. OmniUpdate (old)
2. LifeRay (new)

OmniUpdate is the old club website platform. It's confusing and doesn't look very nice. It's difficult to use, and permissions require manually entering in webmasters.

LifeRay is a big unknown. Please consult Marist IT for the documents concerning how to use it.

OmniUpdate

Link: clubs.marist.edu

Click the top right corner, there's an invisible button that logs you in.

Guide to the website

OmniUpdate is the content management system for the club websites. It is a pretty horrible application, and it's difficult to navigate and manage. It will be getting replaced soon. We are not sure how soon but a good person to ask in IT would be Antoni Sousa.

Note: You'll need to either be on the Marist network or logged in with the VPN client to access OmniUpdate.

Users

Adding New Webmasters

Note: Please only allow one webmaster per club. Allowing multiple webmasters causes content conflict issues that are a pain to resolve.

1. Collect the CWID of the User you are adding.
2. Go to the Users page.
3. Click "New".
4. Fill out the form:

OmniUpdate User Information

• Username: [email protected]
• First name: Webmaster’s first name
• Last name: Webmaster’s last name
• Email: [email protected]
• User Restrictions
• User Level: “8-Designer”
• Approver: “None”
• Toolbar: “CSS Strict”
• Uncheck “Create Group”
• Click “Submit”.

4. Lastly you'll have to add them to a group. The group usually has the same name as the club so add them to the group of which club they're in and remove the person/people that were already in there.

Additionally you can allow them to edit the source code. Only do this if they requested it and know what they're doing.

NOTE: Its good to go to content -> pages -> click the house icon and search for the club you just created the webmaster for. Once you do that check if any pages or files are locked and unlock them. If any files are locked the new webmaster won't be able to edit them

Modifying/deleting webmasters

Click on the “Setup” tab, then “Users”. You can edit or delete each row/user.

Creating a club

First, ensure that the webmaster user exists (see the Add an officer section). Then, go through the following steps to create a new Group:

1. Click on the “Setup” tab, then “Group”, then “New Group”
2. Enter the name of the club
3. Add the members of the club from the list on the left
4. Click “Submit” Next, create a Section of the “site”
5. Click on the “Content” tab, then “Pages”
6. Click on the “New” button in the topright corner
7. Fill out the club information. See the notes on the right side for formatting information
8. Click “Submit”

You’ll now need to give the correct permissions to the group you created earlier.

1. Click on the “Content” tab, then “Pages”.
2. Fill out the form:

• Access Settings
• Check “This folder and all existing items within”.
• Assign access to the group created earlier. – Set “Toolbar” to “CSS Strict”.
• Set “Template Group” to “Club Editors”.
• Directory Variables
• Click the “New Property” button.
• On the second line, first box, fill in the path of the folder you created (e.g., clubname). In the second box, put the actual club name (e.g., Club Name).

Finally, you’ll need to set up the PDF and image folders:

1. Click on the “Content” tab, then “Pages”
2. Select the appropriate club by selecting the name of club in blue
3. Click on the “New” button
4. Click the “New Folder” button
5. Fill out the form:

• Name the folder PDF.
• Leave all the boxes checked.

6. Click “Create”
7. Repeat steps 1-6 for the Images folder

Custom Websites

Sometimes clubs will want to create their own websites. We don't have any restrictions on this because we aren't Communists.

If you ever need to check if a custom website is already created there are a few ways to do that:

1. In the Marist SGA GitHub organization you can search for the name of the club
2. You can check on our production server as well. In the /data/sga_webapps/ folder
3. Also you could login to mysql as root user on the server (see Database guide) and run show databases; to look at all of the databases

Follow these steps to help get them setup:

1. Create a repository under the marist-sga organization and add them as collaborators. You technically don't have to make this private so its up to the current CIO
2. Get their most updated codebase in there
3. Hop on (ssh) the server (dev first) if you don't know how to do that see Server Guide
4. In the /data/sga_webapps/htdocs/ do a git clone
5. Run sudo vi /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/lxsga.conf
6. Add this to the file:

In this example the website would be called foo

Alias /foo /data/sga_webapps/htdocs/foo 
<Directory "/data/sga_webapps/htdocs/foo/">
    Options Includes FollowSymlinks Multiviews AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

7. Now anytime they want changes they'll make them and you can just run a git pull origin master

We'd like to eventually get them access for them to update on the server themselves but we haven't gotten to that point yet.