[SGVLUG] Call for webmasters

[Dustin]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Emerson, Tom wrote:

> There is some concern about the "banner" that appears -- this can be
> used for good or evil it appears

Ooh!  Evil!  Evil!  I vote for Evil!!!

> I presume we have control over the actual layout of the "site", but that
> appears to be at a somewhat lower level than what we can do as an admin
> -- at least, I didn't see anything obvious on how to move things like
> the banner to a different place, or how to change the main graphic, etc.

I think there is a template facility, which is probably what controls 
layout.  They might require shell access to install.

OTOH, there are a lot of templates at MamboForge, so installing them may
just consist of untarring a file.  I almost pasted in the web link, then I
just put it on the main page (the raw html page at sgvlug.laurences.net,
not the Mambo home at sgvlug.laurences.net/mambo). I had kind of planned
to put useful links there anyway.

MamboForge has other stuff, so someone will probably want to check it out 
sometime.

> know "where to look" to do certain things (though I gotta admit it took
> me a bit of time to find the "login/register" form at first -- it's on
> the left side towards the bottom, which may be relatively standard, but
> to be honest I've pretty much avoided any "register to view..." type
> sites anyway;

What threw me is that the way they distinguish mouseover from 
non-mouseover for icons is to grey them out normally and then color them 
in on mouseover.  Logical, I guess--but doesn't *Every Freakin' GUI 
Program In the World* use greyed out buttons to mean "not available"?  I 
think so, and so I tend to just skip right over greyed out things.  Took 
me a while to realize all the controls are greyed out until you mouseover 
them.

> ...to that end, it looks like we can mark most or all of the
> content "public", and visitors would not have to "register" at all (so
> we could even do away with the logon, and simply have an admin logon
> that is entirely separate from the site)

Maybe.  If we ever use the forum (say, to be an alternate mailing list
interface, if it supports that), or the member blog feature, we'll
definitely need logins of some kind unless we want to be known as the most
spammed LUG in the West.  If most of it is public people will probably
just ignore the accounts until they actually need one, which is fine.

Dustin