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ocPortal Tutorial: Admin Zone overview

As a webmaster, it is important that you are able to monitor and control every facet of your website. This is possible through the Admin Zone: the heart of your website. It can be accessed from anywhere by choosing the 'Admin Zone' zone link which appears at the bottom of every default-themed ocPortal page. You may be prompted to login again to confirm your current session – this is for added security.

First glance

The Admin Zone at first glance

The Admin Zone is divided into sections, with links across the top-panel to allow easy access to each – most of the tabs will take you to an interface with icons that allows you to navigate throughout the system.

Content Management Zone

The Content Management Zone is the place to manage most of the categories and entries on the system. Things that are considered 'content' generally can be expected to grow in quantity over time, and rarely be removed; this does not always match up to expectations, but is the best definition based on the practical split between what staff should only ever be able to do and what contributors should be able to manage themselves, if granted access.

Extreme examples of what is and is not considered content are:

• Authors are considered content, because they are solely a type of entry, and the number of author entries is likely to grow over time.
• Forums are not considered content because they form a fairly fixed structure that is not likely to grow (although it might be changed).

Flagrant text is not content because the number of visible entries never exceeds one. Forum-topics/posts, chat-messages, and CEDI-posts are content, but they are informal, with the management integrated tightly into the public interface.

Admin Zone

To-do list

The to-do list

The first section in your content area is your to-do list. This is an automatically generated list of things that need to be done on your website. Some are day-to-day updates, such as changing your image of the day or adding news. Some are less frequent and more critical, such as making backups and sending newsletters.

ocPortal will attempt to mark whether or not these actions have been completely recently. For example, if it has been more than 24 hours since you updated your image of the day, it will be marked as 'not done'. You can choose how often you would like to do these activities (for example, making backups monthly instead of weekly) by going to the Setup Section then the 'Configuration' icon and then 'Administrative options'.

Version Information

This section shows information about the current version of ocPortal that you are using, and whether or not it is the most recent one. If not, you will be given a link to upgrade to the latest version.

Notes

The note area

This is an area for you and your staff to make notes. You can write anything you need in this space, and it will be shared between you and all of your other staff.

Tips

You will be provided with a large number of handy tips. They are organised into 4 levels of increasing difficulty with a combined total of about 60 tips.

Simplified Admin Zone

If a user who does not have permission to use many aspects of the Admin Zone enters either the Admin or CMS zones, then they will be presented with a simplified interface, consisting just of one screen of icons, and an informative front page. This feature is particularly useful if you are using ocPortal to create a website for somebody else, and you do not want them to be off-put by the full complexity of the Admin Zone. By using this feature you'll be able to tailor your clients administration experience to the extent that they won't really consider the website to be an ocPortal website, but rather a website built from scratch just for them.