Help Page

Using the Website as a Visitor

Welcome to the St Francis Parish Website!

As a visitor to the website, you can browse the information we have available - simply use the links in the bar on the left to reach different areas of the site.

Occasionally a news item may be appropriate for a single Parish group only - such as the list of numbers for next weeks' hymns for the Music Group. These items can be reached by selecting that group on the Groups page, then clicking the 'News & Notices' link for the group.

You can in fact also submit data to the website - for example about activities in neighbouring parishes, or to add information about a new parish group - but anything you submit will not be shown until it has been checked by one of the Parish Website Administrators. If you do submit anything, please provide your own contact details in the detail of your submission so that we can contact you if necessary. To enter data, go to the page on which you would like the information to appear, then click on 'Submit Data' on the left. See the help topics further down the page for more details on Website Policies and on Using the Data Entry Forms.

Website Policies

The Website is intended to be a means of communication for the Parish and those interested in it.

Items submitted to the Website will not be approved for publication if:

They are of no direct relevance to the Parish or the wider Catholic and Christain community
They include any abusive language, including personal, racial, sexist or religious abuse
They may be considered defamatory, libellous or slanderous, or are otherwise illegal (or potentially so)
They promote groups directly and explicitly opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church

Only those who have formally agreed to publication of their details on the website (by way of the parish Web permission Form) may be named as contact points for website items. The one exception to this is where contact details have already been published elsewhere on the Web and wording is being directly reproduced: in all such cases a link to the original web content must be included.

Using the Website as an Administrator

As a Website Administrator, you can enter information, edit existing information, and approve information submitted by visitors.

First you need to log in - select 'Log In' and enter your username and password as supplied by the Parish. You will find that the Log In button on the left hand bar changes to 'Log Out', and an option to change your password appears.

If you now select any page (except the Home Page), then click 'Edit Data', you will find that you are presented with a page on which you can enter new data, or select existing entries to edit.

If there are any entries from visitors to be approved, these will be shown separately - to approve entries, select them, check the details conform to the website Policies (removing any personal information unless you know the Parish has permission to use it) then tick the 'Approved' option.

If you are have Full Site Administrator status, you will also be able to alter the text on the Home Page, and maintain the People database (which includes both login details and contact details for those parishioners who can be listed as Contacts for website information). You can also reach the Site Log, showing who has changed data and when, and send data to the Parish Newsletter Editor - to reach these functions go to the Home Page and select 'Edit Data'.

Using Special Features of the Data Entry Forms

Text Editor Boxes

The text editor used on the site is called Whizzywig, and comes from here.. It features a toolbar rather like a small version of the ones familiar from Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.Org and other word processors. It allows easy selection of Bold, Italic, Underlining, Bullets, Numbering, Text Colour, Inserting Links, Tables and (sometimes) Images. There are also Undo and Redo buttons.

To enter text in the Whizzywig text area box, click somewhere in the text area: when you first start entering text, the cursor may not appear until you have started typing.

To copy in text from a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, select the text in your editor, and use its 'copy' function. Then click in the text area on the website form, and on your keyboard press CTRL and V together. You will probably then need to click on the 'Clean' button (see below) to remove non-standard codes inserted by the word processor.

Bold, italic, underline, bullets, numbering, colour, undo and redo probably need no more explanation - they work just as the would in any word processor.
Tables may not work properly unless some text has been entered before you insert a table, so please do enter something (even if only few spaces) before clicking the table button. Once you click the table button, a secondary toolbar will prompt you for details of the table you want - set it up and click 'Insert Table'. Once a table appears, you can insert text into the rows and coilumns just by clicking in the right place in the table. In some browsers, a toolbar will appear allowing you to add/delete rows or columns: in other browsers, you will find a little '<-x->' symbols at the top and sides of table cells - clicking on the '<' or the '>' will inset a column to the left or right of the cell (or arove or below if using the symbols on the side of the cell); clicking on the 'x' will delete the column or row.
Inserting Links: first put in the text you want to appear as the link text in your item, then click the 'insert link' button. In the secondary toolbar which appears, enter the full details of the link address. Click 'OK', and your link is inserted.
Inserting Images: Images can only be inserted when editing articles - so if you want images in an article, add the article text first, save it, then edit your article and you will find that the 'images' button has appeared. Clicking the 'images' button takes you to another window where you can upload pictures (maximum file size 50k), or choose from images you have already uploaded for this article. To select an image, click on its name in the list: this will take you back to the editor window where you can choose what alignment to give the picture, and what margin to leave round it. Click on Insert Picture' and it will appear.
The CleanUp tool which tries to clean up any text pasted in from Microsoft Word. Check that it has worked by looking at your item afterwards - the internal workings of Word documents are not public, and the programmers have had to work out how they work to clean up after them!
The <> button allows you to directly enter HTML if you would rather do so. You should be aware that only basic HTML tags will be accepted.

If your browser does not have javascript turned on, or does not support some features, you will simply see a blank text box instead - you can still enter your data but will have to use plain text. If you know how to use HTML, you can add bold, italic, and underlined text, and use tables, by manually including the HTML tags necessary.

Dropdown Boxes

You will find that some items have drop-down boxes. These provide the only available options for those items - such as parish group names, or contact names. In each case there is a blank line at the top of the list which drops down - select the blank line if nothing in the list is suitable.

Contacts

The Parish has obtained permission from some parish members to show their personal details as contacts for website items. Only those who have given permission should be shown in any entry - do not manually enter other contact information. If the contact you have in mind for an item is not listed, consider asking them to give appropriate permission to the Parish using this form.

Notices applying to a single Parish Group

You can enter specific News or Notices which apply to only one Parish group. This may be useful for administrative matters for those groups - such as the list of numbers for next weeks' hymns for the Music Group. Simply select a group from the 'Show only for' dropdown on the News Entry form, then the news will be shown only from the link on the Groups page, and not on the main News page.

Rotas

Enter a rota as a news/notices item, and preferably use the 'tables' functioon in the text editor to lay out your rota. Then select the group whose rota you are entering from the 'Show only for' dropdown on the News Entry form - this will avoid all the rotas for the parish being listed on the main front page!

To read a rota for your Group, select your Group from the Groups page, then click on the 'Read Group News & Notices' link immediately below the Group Description.

Ideas?

Contact the webmaster (see link on the Home Page) with any ideas or suggestions! We are already planning in the near future to be able to add pictures to items, and to extend the 'Single Group News' idea so that groups can have their own Diaries and Links as well as News Pages. A Forum is a possibility, though complex to fit in with our Child & Vulnerable Adult protection responsibilities.