Introduction

Local Veggie Web is a content management system for building web sites ideally suited for local vegetarian and vegan groups and local contacts, although other styles of sites are very possible too. The system offers facilities for reviewing restaurants and shops, publishing events, publishing news, displaying galleries, writing FAQs, team working, membership, private content, distribution lists and a link management.

The system was design with those in mind with little technical computer skills, limited computer resources and limited time. But the system also boast the flexibility to satisfy those with needs beyond LVW's standard facilities.

LVW was built upon the experience of running the Thames Valley Vegans and Vegetarians group and these insights give LVW an distinct advantage over generic content management systems you may have come across and is vastly superior to the free web space offered by organisations such as the IVU.

As well as gaining the use of the system, free hosting , free support and a free sub-domain name is provided. You may wish to use your own domain name if you have one. See the section on Domain Names for more details.

LVW sites can also be directly fed into ActiVeg's Network Contact map.

Requirements

• I very recommend that you use the Firefox (http://www.mozilla.orgroducts/firefox/) browser for configuring your site.
• Unless you are uploading large numbers of images, a dial up account should be OK but life is a considerably easier on broadband.
• Although HTML skills are not required, the smallest knowledge of HTML and CSS will go along way in making your site just that little bit more special.

Registering

Go to the registration page on www.lvw.makessense.co.uk and it will tell you all you need to do. Registration is not immediate as it will take time for your domain name to be propagated around the Internet before you can use it and I need to create a template for your site. Typically, this is done within one working day unless I'm busy saving the world. I will send you your account details when everything is ready to go.

Once you have a site you can create accounts for others to help you build the site, and you control what they can and can not do.

Domain Names

The domain name is the name people type in to their browser's address box, a unique name that identifies your web site.

You will be given a free LVW sub domain of either:

• www.makessense.co.uk or
• www.veggroup.org or
• www.vegangroup.co.uk or
• www.veginfo.org.uk or
• www.vegguide.org.uk

You choose the sub domain part of the name. E.g. perhaps your group is called 'The East Sussex Veggies', your domain name could be :

• www.eastsussexveggies.makessense.co.uk or
• www.eastsussexveggies.veginfo.org.uk or
• www.eastsussex.vegguide.org.uk or
• www.esv.makessense.co.uk or
• www.esveggies.makessense.co.uk or
• www.esv.veggroup.org

Different LVW subdomain names work better in some situations:

• www.eatvegan.makessense.co.uk, www.govegan.makessense.co.uk ...
• www.bristol.veggroup.org, www.brighton.veggroup.org ...
• www.londonveganfayre.veginfo.org.uk, www.veggieweddings.veginfo.org.uk ...
• www.guildford.vegguide.org.uk, www.portsmouth.vegguide.org.uk ...

Well, you get the idea. The choice is yours as long as no one else has grabbed that name first. You can check which names are currently being used by looking at the LVW section in the links page.

You may decide that a sub domain of of one of my domains is too much of a mouthful and would prefer your own domain name.

If you already own a domain name, or just want to purchase one through your own ISP, then it should just be a matter of setting that domains IP address to LVW's (87.106.101.96). This is something your ISP can do, or perhaps with online tools your ISP has provided you. From about £3.00 a year you can have buy a .co.uk or .org.uk domain and for about £9.00 a year you can have a .org.

Another route you may consider is that of having a LVW domain sub domain and putting your existing domain in a "free-parking" service and have that domain redirected.

LVW can buy a domain on your behalf and control it's DNS (the mapping of the domain name to and IP address). The costs depend on the domain name. Buying it yourself is recommended.

If you wish to have email at your domain, be it from a sub domain or your own high level domain controlled by LVW, there is a cost of £1 a month.

Getting Started

• Decide on a sub domain name.

• Register.

• You will be sent a user name and password. This will allow you into enter the configuration section of www.lvw.makessense.co.uk. You can now start configuring your site.

Configuring your site

When you log in to LVW it will know which site you want to configure - its domain name will be shown at the top of the web page preceded by your user name.

Clicking on your domain name at the top of the page will open a new browser window showing your site.

The left hand menu will have expanded to show the configuration options. The configuration pages are all quiet similar so do not fear that there is lots to learn.

Placing your mouse of the options will give you a bit more information.

Tutorial

Note: This tutorial is aimed at new site owners. If you been given a administration account by your site owner they may have not given you access to some of the area specified in this tutorial, but the same principles and methods will be applicable to any part of the site's configuration.

We will change a few fields. Once you've successfully done that a few times, you will discover that configuring all parts of LVW is basically the same.

We will change some of your Domain Details. These are things associated with the whole of your site rather than individual sections within it.

Clicking on the Domain Details link on the navigation menu will take you to a sub menu of things you can change.

All configuration pages have the same format. The domain you are editing, a title showing what section you are in, in this case Domain Details.

The options available differ between configuration sections, but always include things to edit, normally things to create and delete, and often some preferences.

The preferences control how things appear on your site. For example, you can remove "events" from your sites navigation menu as you may not do events.

Changing some simple text

We'll start by changing your group's name.

The button Site name will take you to a page where you can change your group's name.

Editing Site Name is a very simple page, it has one field to enter: Name. ( If you hover your mouse over the field name you will get some extra help.) Enter or change the name displayed. When you are happy, press the Submit button and you will be returned to the Domain Details page.

If you now click on the link to your site at the top of the page you will see your changes live on your site in another window.

Error checking - let's make some mistakes

Go back into Site Name and this time delete the content of the Name field and press Submit again. Now a pop up box will be complaining you have neglected to give a value. The '*' after the field name indicates that this field required a value. Other fields may have more complex error checking such as a valid telephone number, valid URL etc, but again, any mistakes will be displayed in the same way.

If you decide not keep your changes, just press the Cancel button.

Creating a link

The Internet is made up of links. Links lead users from one part of the web to another. Links join one part of a web site to another part of the same web site or to another completely different webs site. Links are often referred to as URLs and hyper links. Here are some definitions.

Next we will pretend to set up a link to your forum. (We'll talk about forums in more detail later.) Press the Set forum button.

Setting up a forum gives us a chance to see another little feature. Type in a valid URL, say, http://www.bbc.co.uk/. You will see a Check Link button at the end of the field input box. This link will allow you to check you have entered the link you expected. Any place in LVW that you enter a link you will get the opportunity to check it before you commit it to your site.

You will also notice a forum link appears on your sites navigation menu if you set a forum.

As the BBC is not your forum, delete the value you entered and submit again.

Adding descriptions and HTML

Sometimes you need to add more than just a line of text. When there is much text to enter we start to have to be concerned about the formatting of it. Web sites are formated by something called HTML. In its simplest form there's not much to it, but as the complexity of a web site grows, it can start to hurt your head. LVW produces all the difficult stuff that gives structure to your site, but LVW does not have a clue about how the content you type in needs to look, but it helps where it can.

Places where you can choose to format your content are normally large textarea input boxes. Wrapped around these textareas you will see one of two available editors. There is the default HTML Editor and an optional Rich Text Editor (RTE).

The HTML editor allows you to write formatted simple text as well as HTML.

In the long run, learning to use HTML will make your site better, but for most situations the RTE is adequate . The RTE is a bit like using Word, so even the most timid users should find it OK. The vast majority of users use HTML editor.

You can choose which editor to use under the Preferences option at the top of the navigation menu.

Let's have a go. (Stick with the HTML editor for the moment.) Press the Descriptions link on the navigation menu. Now on to the Edit the site's 'Home Page' text button.

This is the first field we've come across that could use some HTML, but you don't have to write HTML into it. Plain text may be adequate in many situations. If you use no HTML then LVW will convert your plain text for you. Type in some text like this:

We are a vegetarian and vegan group prompting a veggie life style in Berkshire.

We organise social events and encourage business to improve their veggie offerings.



Pressing Preview (AS-IS) will give you a simple preview of your changes.

The blank lines between the sentences told LVW to separate them as paragraphs.

There are a few other tricks you can do with simple text to make LVW format your text in a more interesting way.

  ==========
  Headline 1
  ==========
  
  Headline 2
  ==========
  
  Headline 3
  ----------
    

will produce headers (ensure they are all at the start of the line).

This is *strong text*
This is _emphasized text_
    

will produce bold text and emphasised text.

More details on simple text formatted can be found here.

Press the Submit button when you are happy and have a look at your web site.

If you want to try more interesting things have a read of the introduction to HTML.

Using images

Images are an essential part of making your site look interesting. They are a bit more complex to use then just entering plain text.

Take care with the images you use. Look at well designed sites and gain an appreciation for what works.

Your images need to compliment your site. Consider how the colours you set in your skin blend with your images. You may wish to use an art package to alter the colours of an image to fit with the other colours on your site . The One Voice for Veggies WOMAD site is a simple example.

You can defined standard image dimensions with the Image Template configuration tool and then LVW will adjust your image's size when you load it.

Now you have a nicely sized image, choose Images from the main navigation menu. Find any old image file on your computer - a .jpg will be fine. Now, click on the Load a new image button.

Loading an image

• Click on the button at the end of the File name box. This will allow you to pick the file on your hard disk.
• Next add a description for it. LVW will complain if it thinks your description is too short.
• Add any keywords, e.g. 'test' (see below).
• Add some comments, if you wish (see below).
• Ensure Type is USER and press submit. Depending on the size of the image and the speed of your line, it may take a while for the image to upload.

The Description is how you will recognise the image, e.g. "Me and Joe on our bikes.".

The Credits are to display any credit to the person who made the image or took the photo. This will displayed under the image.

The keywords are used to create galleries and to aid sorting of your images. Keywords are words which categorise the image, e.g. "bike Joe holiday", "lost the van".

The Comment is there to allow you to say more about what is happening in the image. This is only useful if the image is going to be used in a Gallery.

Even if you do not plan to use Galleries on your site, I strongly recommend you still use keywords for all your images. As the number of images you have grows, you will make more and more use of keywords in order to find a particular image.

Selecting loaded images

The top of the image tool displays the last images you either loaded or edited.

Below them are a number of selection criteria by which you can find you image(s) by. After choosing one, those images will appear below the selection box.

To edit or delete an image just click on it. (The other options are explained later in the manual.)

Using Images on your pages

The tools Articles, News, Events, Contacts, Recipes and Locations allow you to use an image by selecting it from a pick list using the Description you gave it, plus a preview.

Using images in other parts of the site - those fields that accept HTML, is nearly as easy. In which ever editor you are using, click on the Image button. A window will pop up to allow you to choose the image. There are also a few other options to play with. On pressing submit an lVW_IMAGE tag will appear in your edit window. Something like <img src="20" class="align_left">

The number in the src="20" is the LVW image ID. If want to manually use the HTML img tag you can use a standard filename for your images but there are advantages to using LVW's image ID. If you reload an image it's filename will change and therefore you will need to change any img tags that point to it. If you use the LVW image ID you will not need to make any changes. The ID is used when editing your images in LVW and hence it is much easier to remember than the cryptic (but unique) file name LVW gives to it.

Also by using the ID LVW will automatically create the correct width, height and alt attributes for your image tag. You can supply the width and height attributes if wish and these will override LVW's.

Old timer LVW users will remember the special lvw_image tag. It is dead now. The system will still render pages that contain them, but please don't use them any more.

Special instructions

Aside just using the LVW image ID you can prefix it with a command expressed as a single letter.

• Just entering the ID will produce an imag tag for the full size of the image.
• By placing a "s" in front of the ID LVW will produce a thumbnail size image.
• By placing a "i" in front of the ID LVW will produce a thumbnail size image that is a link to the full size image.
• By placing a "t" in front of the ID LVW will produce text that is a link to the full size image.

Images in CSS

You can also use the LVW image id in your CSS code:

body { background-image:url(3425); }

You now have all the basic skills required to fully populate your site. Reading on in the guide will give you more details about specific LVW's features and how to make the best of them.

Have a look at some of the other LVW sites, such as www.t3v.veggroup.org and www.supervegans.org to get a few ideas of what you can do.

What should you do first

• Set your site name: Domain Details->Site Name
• Set your site description: Domain Details->Site Description
• Check your contact detail: Domain Details->Contact Details
• Create your home page text: Descriptions->Edit site Intro text. Say something like:

  Welcome to my group. We are a local vegetarian and vegan group in xxxx,UK. We campaign for better vegan catering and animal rights etc.

  Just some brief and welcoming.
• Change your About page: Descriptions->Edit Site About text
• Change Contact page: Descriptions->Edit Site Contact text
• Choose a theme: Skins->Customise. Create a new theme and import one of the standard themes into it, then make it active.

Now you have a basic site. But let's make it a little more interesting.

• Create a news story about the birth of your site: News->Create a news category, then Create a new news item
• Review a few local restaurants: Locations->Create a new location (You can also click on a town name to create a new location)
• Announce your next event
  • Ensure you've enter a location to have it at: Locations->Create a new location
  • Create an Event Contact, which is most probably you: Contacts->Create a new event contact
  • Create an Event: Event->Create a new event
• Create a few links:
  • Create a category for your new links: Links->Create a new category
  • Create the links by clicking on your new category.
• Make an FAQ:
  • Create some section topic for your questions: FAQ->Create a new FAQ section
  • Create the FAQs by clicking on your new sections.

Now the more advances stuff:

• Customse your site's theme: Skins
• Think of other thing you want to tell the world about, Create a few articles: Articles->Create a new article and create a place on the navigation menu for it to hang from: Navigation Menu->New top level menu
• Get as many other sites to link to your as possible!!!! (You already have links from the other LVW sites).

And there's more ....

Section Details

Domain Details

These are things associated with the whole of your site rather than individual sections within it.

Group Name Domain Details->Group name

Site Description Domain Details->Site description

This brief description is used on yours and other LVW site links pages.

Something as simple as "Veggie info in and around Oxford" will suffice.

This is the description Google display for your site - it is important to set it sensibly.

Keywords Domain Details->Group name

Keywords may help some web search engines find your site faster. Keywords are what a surfer may type into Google when looking for information. (They have nothing to do with image keywords.)

Typically values could be 'vegan, vegetarian, Reading, Thames, food, restaurants, shopping .....'.

Keywords are not as important as they once were, and well designed content is more effective in producing high search engine ratings than keywords.

Forum Domain Details->Set forum

It is nice for an active group to have a forum where they can discuss the great issues of the day, like where to get the cheapest soya milk and where shall we eat next.

This page allows you to link to your forum. It does not need to be a real forum, it can be a link to a list-group and chat group, or what ever.

Google options

In this section you can record the various keys required to make your site interact with various free google services.

• Google Analytics - lots of great info about your site and its visitors.
• Google Maps - plot your locations on a map.

Descriptions

The description section allows you to flesh out the descriptive parts of your site, such as the text that greets your users on your home page.

Contact Details Descriptions->Contact details

These details will also be used in the Contact section on your web site.

Note: contact details are required for those who organise events. Those details are different from those given here and are set by creating contacts. A contact is not automatically created as part of the process of creating a login into LVW.

Home page Descriptions->Home page

This is the first text the user sees when entering your site. This can be something really simple, like just supply a few sentences say welcome and what your site is about, or you can throw in a bag full of HTML and images to excite your viewer.

Make your home page positive and straight to the point. Do not try to explain everything about your site here - that's what the rest of the site is for. You'll have more room to talk about your group in your About section.

See the T3V site as an example.

About Descriptions->About

This text, in your "About" page gives a broad overview of what your group believes, does and aims to do.

Generally, make your "About" page positive, informative and inclusive.

Preferences Descriptions->Preferences

These preferences change the way data is displayed on your site.

Skins

These tools allow you to change how your site looks by changing its layout, adding images and changing colours. This can, some cases with point and click tools or/and by CSS and javascript.

Choose a skin Skins->Make this my current skin

The available skins will displayed on the page (and we are always looking for others to donate more!). Each skin is described highlighting its virtues and a limitations. There will also be a list of images in their native formats the skin was made with that you can download and adjust for your own site.

A chosen skin become live on your site immediately. By default your site will have the skin "Go Veggie - upwards".

Once you have chosen a skin you can customise it.

Customising your skin Skins->Customise

A theme overrides parts of skin's design.

Default Favicon

What is a favicon? Read this to find out.

Of course, you need to create on first then load it.

If a different favicon is set in an active theme (see below) it will override the value you have set here.

Themes

Now, for many, this is the fun bit of creating a web site - making it look pretty.

LVW gives you presentation control over all elements on your site by giving access to its CSS. But there are a growing selection of pre-defined themes you can easily use. You can ask me to create a new standard theme if you give me a good idea of what you want.

A guide on how to create stunning web sites using CSS is way beyond this guide but there are plenty of web tutorial and books on the subject. Here is the smallest of introductions.

Good use of images and sensible colouring can produce great results. Using CSS you to change every thing about the way your site looks.

LVW allows you to have multiple themes for a skin. You may have a standard theme, and another just to use over National Vegetarian Week, and another for to promote an ongoing Viva campaign.

Although you can have many themes, only one is active at any one time. Your active theme is the one your users see.

A new site will have no theme. Only themes for your current skin are displayed.

To create a new theme you merely have to give it a name. Once that is done you can point it to a standard theme and customise it if you wish.

As long as your new theme is not active your site's viewers will not see your changes.

You can Clone a theme. This is merely making a copy of it.

Colours

In the web world colours are specified as HEX codes.

You will find that your art package uses the same codes.

Transparent colours

Most elements can be made transparent. This are very useful in places, such as on the navigation bar. Setting its background colour to transparent will allow the page's background colour or image to show through. Transparent colours do not work in all places because of HTML restrictions and browser technologies.

Sticking to a colour theme is an easy way to make your site look pleasant. On the whole the few colours you use the better.

Background Images

Background images can look great, but so often they make your site look like a 1990's homepage disaster area.

If you are to use images effectively on your site for presentation purposes you will need to get to grips with an art package of some kind. I use The Gimp. It is free, runs on most operating systems and is ideal for web graphics.

If you can going to use a background image either on the page background, of behind the menu, make is subtle or ensure it does not interfere with the readability of your site. Here are some simple LVW sites that make good use of background images:

Fading an image

If you want an image behind your text it is normally required that you fade it to increase the contrast between the image and the text colour.

Original Image
Faded Image

Art package tip: The fade is created by creating a white layer about the original and then reducing the opacity level.

Repeating images

If you wish to have the background image repeated, then make it the image repeatable first. Most good art packages have an option for this - perhaps its called "make it seamless".

Image made seamless
Displayed using repeat-x

The LVW navigation menu image (the gold pole) is a one pixel high by 80 pixels wide image using repeat-y. Its pretty and is very fast to upload.

Blending images

Use a background image, do not repeat it, but blend it into a colour of the page background. Position the image "top left". The HEX codes shown on the colour bar tools are essential for doing this correctly.

Badly blended image
Much Better

Art package tip: Do a 'colour exchange" between the background colour you have chosen for your site and the background colour of the image, then you may need to use an airbrush tool to make good any wayward bits of the image.

Transparent images

Using transparent images such as a .gif and .png will give you a lot of freedom to change page colours without having to edit your images as well.

Fonts

Fonts are a difficult area with web design as you have no way of knowing which fonts are on your users' browser or how big they will really be. Do not be surprised if the font you have chosen does not seem to do anything, or what you thought looked like an interesting font, looks very plain on your friend's machine. LVW will automatically give default fonts for the browser to use, if it can not find your preferred one.

Images

Refer back to the tutorial for a fuller discussion on images.

Load an image

Images are automatically scaled down to a reasonable size. Images are restricted to a maximum of 1000 by 800 pixels, It is in everyones interest that you scale your images down to an appropriate size before you upload them to save your upload time and my bandwidth. If you try to load a image over 1M LVW will abort.

If you load an image and then discover it is too big, you can resize the image from your Display Images .

Editing an image

When you edit an image, you have access to the above fields plus some other options.

Image Templates Images->Configure templates

Image Templates are a convenient way to record standard image sizes. Consistent image sizes can improve the presentation of your site. Overly large images can make the site look terrible.

Templates consist of a name, a width and a height. The width and height are maximum values that an image must abide by.

You can apply a template when you load a image or on a previously loaded image.

Bulk editing Images->Process selected images

You can also add keywords, apply templates and remove from menus to selected images on the main image selection page.

Galleries

Galleries are a place to show sets of related images. They may be pictures from a particularly good veggie night out, from your very popular vegan festival or you in your favourite animal costumes.

Galleries are very simple to set up as they are merely a collection images with a common keywords. The keywords are typically set when you load the image but can be added anytime.

Be selective in the images you use in a gallery - more is not always better. Invest sometime in making your images look good (cropping, good lighting) before showing them to the world. You may wish to seek permission from those in the pictures, or at least explain on your web site that promotional pictures may be taken of your events etc.

You can create lists of images with the Lists tool.

And remember to keep on topic - LVW is not the place to show your holiday photos!

Preferences Galleries->Preference

These preferences change the way data is displayed on your site.

CSS Galleries->CSS

Locations

These are the details shown for each location you describe on your site. These may be restaurants, shops, accommodation or other places you need to refer to.

The details held on each location are fairly rich so as to make the creation of events simple.

Any email address displayed will be spam protected.

If you have a valid Google maps API key (see Domain details LVW will automatically create maps of your local area showing your published locations, such as restaurants and hotels. See T3V for an example.

You can create lists of locations with the Lists tool.

IDs and web friendly names

You will notice when you view a location on your web site it has a URL (web address) made up from it's name and it's town name. But that is not the location's real name. It's really name is that constructed from it location ID e.g. /locations/345.html. The name style URL is merely an alias to this ID name. The ID name is guaranteed to be unique and unchanging, where as the name style is human and Google friendly, but can not be guaranteed to be unique (as you could have two location with the same name in the same town), and also the URL will change if you change the locations name.

To ensure you get a unique name style URL be sure to name your location sensibly- such if you have two Holland and Barrett's in your town then append something to their names to create uniqueness, e.g. "Holland and Barrett's (London Rd)".

If you change the name of your location then its URL will change and anyone's book marks of it will be out of date. Thinking ahead with your names will ensure this will not be an issue.

I recommend that when you link to a location from other parts of your site manually, you always link using the location's ID, e.g. /locations/345.html rather than its web friendly name. That will reduce your maintenance. Let LVW deal with web friendly names.

User suggested locations

LVW provides a spam proof form for user to suggest locations for your site to list. The form sends an email with the suggest to the site owner's email address as well as creating an unpublished location on your site.

If the location does not excite you then just delete the location.

User suggested location update

LVW provides a spam proof form for user to suggest locations updates. The form sends an email with the suggest to the site owner's email address. It makes no changes to your site.

It would be courteous to personally thank the poster if they left contact details.

Preferences Locations->Preferences

These preferences change the way data is displayed on your site.

Web Partner Location->Web partner - location review mutual linking

A web partner is a local restaurant review web site (non-veggie) that you have agreed to swap links with. Your site will have a link to their site's review of a particular restaurant, and they will have one to yours. This increases the popularity of both sites.

Why would that site want to link to you? You need to approach them a convince them that a link swap with your site will increase their traffic and a recommendation from your site will add much validity to their review of a veggie friendly restaurant.

The web partner link appears at the bottom of your sites review.

Location Reviews Location->Location reviews

Your users can submit simple reviews for your listed locations. These reviews will become available on your site once you have reviewed them. A copy of the review will also be sent to your email address to notify of its existance .

You may wish to edit or delete any posts that are inappropriate. You want posts that are reflective of their customers experience, but you should guard against abusive and libellous comments. You may just want to correct the poster's English. People will put more faith in your site if they see the negative as well as the positive. But remember, it your site and you are under no obligation to display anyone's review. An outstanding positive review has most probably be placed their by the restaurant's owners. You may want to seed your reviews by adding a few yourself (under a pseudonym) to encourage others to submit some.

The form that accept the review attempts to deter spam postings.

Contacts

Contacts are the people who organise your events and their details appear on your event pages, not yours, unless you are also an event organiser. When an event has passed into history, the contact details will automatically disappear from the event page.

Not supplying an email address or a telephone number is a good way to have a nice quiet event.

Contacts are also your group members who contribute to your site in other ways and should be credited as such. Find as many ways a possible to make your site look more than just you.

Events

You won't be much of a group if you don't organise some events. Events link to locations so you will need to create them first, as with Contacts. Thus, repeating an events at the same location takes very little time to do.

You can clone the details of an old event on to a new event.

Links are of two types. Off-site events are little more than a fancy type of "link" to someone else's event. These should rarely be used. On-site events are what you want lots of. Make them varied, try different venues, change the day of the week you have them on, get the venue to create special-menus for you. To make events popular, you have to give some reason for people to come. If they get the same bog standard menu at your events that they could get any time, why bother. Of course, events need not be food based, they can be anything from information stalls to running events. The Thames Valley group have written a guide to organising events and using LVW, you may want to have a read.

You can remove this section from your site's navigation menu in this sections preferences. You can also make LVW display your events start time in the calendar. This is normally only useful if you have multiple events on the same day, like a festival.

Any email address displayed will be spam protected.

On-site and off-site events

Events come into types. An on-site event is an event where you control the details of it, such as a meal out with your local members, and an off-site event is one controlled by someone else, such as the London Vegan Festival.

Your event calendar will automatically create links so your users can filter on which types of events they want to see.

There are limited things to say about off-site events so not all the below fields will be displayed for one.

About Events Events->About

This text tells your readers what your typical events are like, in term of what you do make them special, typical group size, where you like to have them, the make up of the group etc. Basically, what ever you feel we make people want to come along.

You can also ask here for other event ideas and maybe appeal to restaurateurs to make their menu good enough to make a trip to their restaurant worth while.

You can describe the food policy, may be you insist on vegetarian food at all events except "bring and share" events where every thing should be vegan.

The users will see this text as a link off your main events page.

Press at Events Events->Press

This text is shown as a link off the bottom of your event listing. This are your guide lines for how your group interacts with the press if they attend any of your events. This is also an ideal place to explain how you will treat photographs taken at events. If you plan to use those images to promote your group, it is best to inform people of your intentions.

The default text given for this fields covers most eventualities.

If you clear the text and submit it, you will see the default text appear in the resulting screen. At this point the text stored for your site is blank and the press link on your event listing will not appear. If you submit again you will apply the default text to your site and the press link will reappear.

Leaving Tips Events->Tips

This text is shown as a link off the bottom of your event listings. It explains how your group handles the difficult issue of leaving tips at meals.

If you clear the text and submit it, you will see the default text appear in the resulting screen. At this point the text stored for your site is blank and the tips link on your event listing will not appear. If you submit again you will apply the default text to your site and the tips link will reappear.

User suggested events

LVW provides a spam proof form for user to suggest events for your site list or perhaps them or you to organise. The form sends an email with the request to the site owner's email address and normally creates an unpublished event on your site.

If the event does not excite you then delete the event. If the event was only an "idea" then LVW did not create an event for it and you need do nothing.

RSS feeds

LVW automatically creates a number RSS feeds for each of the event types but only listing future events. You may find pasting the text of the RSS feed into an email as a handy way of sending your upcoming event details to your group etc.

Preferences

These preferences change the way data is displayed on your site.

News

Your news can optionally appear on your home page aswell as your news page. When the news appears on your home page it is displayed in a condensed form.

Each news story appears in one or more categories. Use the categories to allow you viewers to find related stories more easily. Typical categories you could create are "Health", "Products", "Environment", "Animals" etc.

News is of two main types. First are thopse stories written by you and then there are others which are little more than links to news else where.

The Editor's desk allows you to mark certain stories (or events) as important so they appear, or stay, as your headlines. You don't need to use this but it is highly recommend for those with lots of news to manage.

RSS Feed

At the bottom of your news section is an RSS feed of your last 10 news stories with in the last 28 days plus all your upcoming events.

Preferences News->Preferences

These preferences change the way data is displayed on your site.

Utilities News->Utilities

Update news categories en-mass

This tools allows you to change the news categories for all your stories in one operation.

News formatting check

This tool reports and does some changes to news stories whose format may not be ideal for using as headline news.

Pre and Post News and Events bar HTML News->Pre/Post News and Events HTML

You can eject extra HTML to be inserted before and after the news and events bar.

CSS News->Customise

Articles

Articles are a key tool in LVW for expanding your sites contents.

They are very simple in that they consist only of a title and a body of text.

They have two uses. One as a place where you can write web pages about anything you wish and have it listed in your articles section, like a magazine feature. These are called "published articles".

Secondly, articles are a general purpose facility to add extra content to your site that is not natively supported by LVW. In fact, most general purpose content management systems are just ways of connecting articles together. LVW is unusual in that it provides pages that are already structured (such as locations).

IDs and web friendly names

You will notice when you view an article on your web site it has a URL (web address) made up from it's title plus it's ID. But that is not the article's real name. It's really name is that constructed from it's article ID e.g. /locations/345.html. The name style URL is merely an alias to this ID name. As the ID is included in the title style both style of names are guaranteed to be unique.

The title style is human and Google friendly, but can not be guaranteed to be unchanging. If you change the title of your article then its URL will change and anyone's book marks of it will be out of date. Thinking ahead with your names will ensure this will not be an issue.

I recommend that when you link to an article from other parts of your site manually, you always link using the article's ID, e.g. /articles/345.html rather than its web friendly name. That will reduce your maintenance. Let LVW deal with web friendly names.

Articles can be addressed by referring to them as a simple HTML link, such as "/articles/5.html", where the number is your articles Id. This can be seen on the Articles edit page, the Articles list page, and in your browser address box when you view that article on your site. This means you can link to your article from nearly every part of LVW and, of course, articles can link to other articles. (Both editors give you a button to make insert articles very easy). Therefore articles gives you great scope for building a very rich site.

For example, if you wrote an article about a cherished recipe and its Id was 15, then you would merely write something like this in the HTML editor:

On the picnic we, of course, had Dad's favourite <a href="/articles/15.html">Salad</a>.

using the Article link button in the editor.

Article are can be placed directly into your navigation menu. See Navigation Menu Entries to discover how articles and menu entries work together.

The top option bar in your editor will give you a list of all your articles, together with the relevant code to insert links to them .

Articles also inherit the standard LVW way of including images and email addresses - LVW_EMAIL and LVW_image IDs.

You can create lists of articles with the Lists tool.

Preferences Articles->Preferences

These preferences change the way data is displayed on your site.

CSS notes

• The page body is given a class of "article".
• Within the #content id a div is created with an id of "article_" + the article id and a class of "article" plus any class you have specified in the article.
• The body of the article is wrapped in a div with a class of "article_body".
• The author is wrapped in a div with the class of "author" and an inner div with a class name derived from the author's name. E.g. "Stephen O'Connor" becomes "Stephen_O_Connor".

Navigation Menu Entries

Navigation Menu Entries allow you to add navigation to parts of your site not natively supported by LVW. A menu entry is no more than a name that links to an article, a URL or a place to hang other menu entries from - in the same way the "Eating Out" hangs off the "Locations" option on your site's navigation menu.

For example, you may wish your LVW site had a section about school catering, but LVW does not directly support it. First you would create an article about school catering, and then create a Menu Entry called "Schools" and link it to your article.

You may then wish to make your Schools section more exciting by talking about the pros and cons of each of your local schools. To do this, just create a few articles, one for each school, and then create a number of menu entriess, setting each ones Parent Menu to Schools.

If you wish a menu entry to just be a place holder for other menu entries to hang from you should set its Article to "None".

Your site will be easer to use if you create a few new menu entries and turn off the Article section in it's preferences.

You can also link a menu entry directly to a URL. This may be used to link to pages off site, or to other parts of your site that can not be addressed as an article - such as placing your FAQ ("/faq/") on the navigation bar.

Ordering

Ordering is a two stage process, first by the parent menu items, and then their children.

This is simply done by pressing the appropriate Sort button and then dragging the menu item names to where you wish and hitting the Reorder button.

You should also have a read of Lists which provides another way of adding entries to the navigation bar.

Lists

The lists tool was inspired by trying to get the Vegan Bristol web site to look more like the Vegan Guide to Bristol booklet.

Mostly LVW creates a whole web page for each thing you are concerned with such as a location, an article, an event etc. Lists allow you to list multiple things in a single two column page. Currently, lists of locations, articles and images are supported.

Lists automatically create an entry in your navigation bar. Lists come in two flavours: "NAVIGATION" and "INPAGE". NAVIGATION simply adds a list of names to your navigation bar with a heading, very much list the standard navigation tool. INPAGE is the interesting one, it which creates the above 2 column pages, with in the standard LVW skin. One other skins it might not. Have a play.

Lists can be marked as "features" like articles can. This will make them a visible navigation item on your site.

Links

Remember you are creating a local veggie site so filling this up with all the well know national places will be of little interest, instead use your local knowledge to make your links special.

You get links to the other LVW sites for free! This mutual linking massively increases your Google rating.

Short Cuts

No one likes long web addresses. They're hard to say and email clients often wrap them in the wrong place and frustrate your use of them.

Long and strange web addresses are a by product of database driven web sites, like LVW. They produce web addresses that are predictable for computers but are unfriendly for humans.

LVW recognises this problem and uses web address short cuts to make thing easier for you humans.

Imagine you are organising a vegan new years party. In LVW you would create an event and it would end up with a name like 'www.veganaction.com/event/567.html' - nor too catchy and is not going to look too good on the posters you are sticky around town.

Your solution would be create a short cut called party and point it at your above web address. On you poster you now write 'www.veganaction.com/party'. Much, much better.

Locations automatically produce web friend URLs.

FAQ

Your FAQs or Frequently Asked Questions, is where you placed those questions someone might typically ask you about your site or your group or whatever. FAQs are divided into sections to aid their readability, therefore you must create at least one FAQ Section before you can create some questions and answers.

A link to your FAQ will automatically appear on your About Us page, but you may also wish to give your FAQ more prominence by creating a menu entry to point to it.

FAQs and their sections may be sorted. This is only a matter of dragging the items into order on the sort page.

Note: Do not put links in the FAQ question. Leave those for the answer.

Members

Members are privileged users that can view private information in your members area. This facility is aimed at allowing you to publish forms of information that you would not want to be viewed by everyone.

An example situation for this would be, say your group is run by a few committee members, you may want to published the minutes of your meetings in an article but you also will not want everyone on the planet to be able to read them.

The LVW's members control is very flexible and may appear a little complex at first. Membership control consists of three things: Members - these are the individual users, Roles - these describes what sort of thing a group of members does, and permissions which is away of marking files that a particular role can access.

By default a member can not see any private files.

We will run through an example to demonstrate how it all hangs together:

• First create an article and mark it as private.
• Next create a permission. Call it "All Articles", make it active and set its Regular Expression to /articles/.*.
• Next create a role called "Committee Member" and make ensure it is active.
• Add a new permission to that role - "All Articles".
• Create a new member, make it active and fill in the other details.
• Add a new role to that member - "Committee Member".

For other new members who are also committee members you only need create the member and add the committee role.

If you need to change what committee members can access, you just change the role and the permission associated with it.

If you want to stop all users accessing a particular file then change a permission, perhaps de-active it.

If you want to stop a particular member accessing a file then either de-active the member, or change their role to one that has limited access.

At the moment only articles can be made private. Soon events and news will adopt the same functionality.

Custom modules can be built that may also adopt the membership functionality but that is beyond this manual.

Members and Distribution Lists

Members can be placed on email distribution lists. The distribution list is then used to send a email to each of those on it. You can send the messages either from the "Send Messages" navigation option or from the Email link next to the distribution list name in the "Distribution Lists" section.

The list can be compiled in two ways. One by adding members (see above) or loading them from a comma delimited file (details of relevant configuration page.)

Stats

Your stats page will give you an increasing amount of information about your site.

Web logs

Your web logs will tell you who has accessed your site. You will also notice you can read the other LVW sites web logs. Have a look at the other sites and see what parts of those sites generate the most traffic. You maybe able to change your site to achieve similar success. Pay particular attention to keyword searches. Check which sites are linking to the other LVW sites, perhaps you can get linked there too.

LVW also give you a historical view of the number of visitors to you site over time, including a nice little graph.

User Preferences

This page allows you to change the way LVW displays information on the LVW configuration pages, it does not change how your site looks.

The default values are good for new users, but you may wish to change things once you are familiar with how to use LVW.

Administrators

Administrators are those who can change your web site. The site owner, e.g. the one who created the site can change anything on the site and is the only one who can create administrators.

Once an administrator is created they must then be given permission on what they can change. By default they have none.

The permission currently just map to the different configuration sections for your site.

If you use the members section for your site you should be very guarded who has access to it.

Administrator account names at are unique across all LVW site, hence you would do well to adopt a naming convention to limit the number of name clashes. E.g. If you run Vegan Bristol then create user names like "johnvbr", "bertvbr" etc.

Using email addresses

Placing email addresses directly on a web page is a bad idea because they will be found very quickly by automatic programs scanning the web looking for addresses to spam.

LVW attempts to provide some protection for email address. Use the LVW_EMAIL(address) tag.

E.g.,

LVW_EMAIL(someone@fakeaddress.cxm)

Which will look like:

By consistently using the lvw_email tag it will allow LVW to to continually provide protection for your email address as spamming techniques change. Both editors have a button for creating a protected email link.

LVW automatically opening new windows

LVW will automatically open a new browser window on your site if your user clicks on an external site link.

LVW determines this by examining the href in your HTML link (<a>) mark-up. If it starts with http:// LVW will added a target="_blank" attribute when the page is shown. If a target attribute is already present LVW will not add another nor override its original value.

LVW creates relative links ( e.g. /articles/345.html) when referring to other parts of your site. If you want to force your link to open a new window use the target attribute rather than using a absolute link (e.g. http://www.activeg.org/articles/345.html) as internal absolute link are a maintenance burden if you change your domain name.

Custom Modules

LVW can have wild and crazy modules bolted onto it that could do anything you can think of - the ActiVeg site has a very fancy address book and mapping module attached to it. These modules can not be created by normal site owners as a vast amount of IT and inner workings LVW knowledge is required to create them. But if you have a need then please ask and we'll see what we can do.