Creating a Website for a Chapter

If you are serious about starting a geographical, class or departmental chapter, this writeup describes the work involved in setting up the website for the chapter.

This document outlines the steps to create a chapter site (or also called a blog) under ITBHU.org. Most of the work is done by the core group ITBHU.org volunteers that does system administration and blog management while the rest by the chapter owner(s).

Don't let the details faze you! Most of the details apply to the core group of volunteers while you, the chapter owner, are to focus only on the posting content to your site using a simple web interface.

If you love working on blogs and would enjoy joining the core team that does a yeoman's job to empower all sites, we would love to hear from you!.

  1. ITBHU.org administrator creates a a new chapter blog.

    In this example, we create the blog for the chapter class of cse87.

    1. Superuser (root) creates a unix account for the Chapter Owner 
      # /export/home2/chapters/addchapter.pl class cse87
      Other examples for the arguments are "dept library", "geo bangalore", etc.

      The command gives an option to automatically transfer the contents of a remote website and install them as http://www.itbhu.org/chapters/class/cse87/. This can be a temporary non-blog website until the chapter is ready for the next steps.

      The chapter owner can ssh or ftp to www.itbhu.org using the username. The blog owner gets the password from the administrator separately.

    2. ITBHU.org Blog coordinator configures the Chapter Blog

      Sigup up at http://www.itbhu.org/cgi-bin/mt.cgi as the editor and create a new MT blog:

      Blog Config->Core Setup: 

       ITBHU.org: Class of CSE87
 /export/home2/chapters/class/cse87
 http://www.itbhu.org/chapters/class/cse87/
 /export/home2/chapters/class/cse87/archives
 http://www.itbhu.org/chapters/class/cse87/archives/
 UTC-8 Pacific Time

 Blog Config->Preferences-> make "draft" to "publish"
 Blog Config->Preferences-> make "html" to "php"
 Blog Config->Archiving
      Enable Category Archives by checking out the Category Archive Type.
  2. Customize the blog's templates to match with the ITBHU.org look and feel.

    The idea here is to have a single set of templates under the "chapters proto" blog, http://www.itbhu.org/chapters/ that are managed by theITBHU.org blog coordinator. They are shared by all chapters so the chapter owners don't have to create their templates from scratch. Sharing in this context means a chapter blog would define each template or module by creating it but for its contents link to the respective template file from the "chapters proto" blog. (Contrast this with defining the body of the template by typing the template content in the text window)

    FAQ ON TEMPLATE SAVE: When you are editing a template or a template module, you map that template to a block of movable type code that is used to generate the actual HTML for the corresponding web page or page module. The template/module edit menu allows you to name a template or a module, a large text window to define the MT code and optionally a file to save that code into. If the file name is not specified, the code is saved in the internal MT database. Naming a file gives us the flexibility of sharing the same code across similar modules in multiple blogs.

    The SAVE option does one of the following two when the file to link the template to is specified: a) if the template body is blank, it pulls out the contents of the file specified, making it the new template. b) otherwise it saves the whatever is in the text window overwriting the file in the parent space!! You WANT TO AVOID b) by making the text completely empty.

    1. Templates

      1. Click on "Index templates->Main Index" Link:
      2. Check entire Template Body with Ctrl-A and deletet it! Make sure there is not even a space in the body. Next enter ../../templates/index.tmpl exactly in the Link This Template to File input box above. Go down and SAVE. That will pull up the contents from the index.tmpl file. Save Again.
      3. Go Back to Templates and repeat the above two steps for the following Index and Archive-Related Templates ((REMEMBER TO BLANK OUT THE TEXT BEFORE ENTERING THE FILENAME AND DOING SAVE!): 
         Click on Links        Link this template to a file

 Stylesheet        ../../templates/itbhu-chapters.css   
 Category Archive    ../../templates/category.tmpl
 Date-based Archive    ../../templates/datebased.tmpl
 Individual Entry Ar    ../../templates/indentry.tmpl

        Next we do the same thing by definining Template Modules shared between our chapters.

      4. Go into Templates-> scroll down to Template Modules.
      5. Click on Create new template module.
      6. Repeat the following steps to link a Template Name of the module to a corresponding file: 
         "template name"        "link this template to a file":

 BlogHeadBody            ../../templates/mod-BlogHeadBody.tmpl
 CatHtmlHead             ../../templates/mod-CatHtmlHead.tmpl
 Comments              ../../templates/mod-Comments.tmpl
 Copyrights             ../../templates/mod-Copyrights.tmpl
 DatHtmlHead              ../../templates/mod-DatHtmlHead.tmpl
 DropDownMainMenu   ../../templates/mod-DropDownMainMenu.tmpl
 EntryHead               ../../templates/mod-EntryHead.tmpl
 EntryTail               ../../templates/mod-EntryTail.tmpl
 HtmlBanner              ../../templates/mod-HtmlBanner.tmpl
 HtmlHead                ../../templates/mod-HtmlHead.tmpl
 IndHtmlHead              ../../templates/mod-IndHtmlHead.tmpl
 JavaScripts            ../../templates/mod-JavaScripts.tmpl
 Links           ../../templates/mod-Links.tmpl
 LinksArchives           ../../templates/mod-LinksArchives.tmpl
 LinksHistory           ../../templates/mod-LinksHistory.tmpl
 LinksSyndPow            ../../templates/mod-LinksSyndPow.tmpl
 Logo            ../../templates/mod-Logo.tmpl
 MenuBar         ../../templates/mod-MenuBar.tmpl
 PostReviewComments ../../templates/mod-PostReviewComments.tmpl
 PreBlogbody             ../../templates/mod-PreBlogbody.tmpl
 PreBlogIntro            ../../templates/mod-PreBlogIntro.tmpl
 RecentComments          ../../templates/mod-RecentComments.tmpl
        Enter Template Name and Link this template to a file. Save. Make sure it loads something into the template body.
      7. Click on Templates->Template Modules -> Create New Template module and repeat the above steps.
      8. CUSTOMIZE A FEW TEMPLATES for your particular chatper. Customizing means making a change to the template code AND saving that code into a LOCAL FILE for your own chapter. This is typically "templates/*" area as opposed to "../../templates/*" above. Remember to go through the content of these templates as you can edit them and they will be specific to your blog. Also, please DO NOT do the above for too many files. The only templates which need to be modified, and that too, only lightly, are as follows (REMEMBER TO REMOVE THE ../../ PART IN FILE NAME AFTER LOADING THE TEMPLATE BEFORE YOU MAKE THE FOLLOWING CHANGES): 
         Links
  Uncomment the $$MTInclude module="Logo" line.
  Comment out, using "!-- ", the ChaptersListing and YahooGroupsListing
  MTInclude lines. Also change the text "THE FAQ" to "CATEGORIES" SAVE.
 LinksHistory
  Change "ITBHU.org Chapters" to "Chapter Milestones".
  Change the links below to specific milestones for your chapter.
 PreBlogIntro
  For future customizations.
 PreBlogbody
  Change the entire announcement to welcome visitors to your chapter.
  Give coordinators' joint email address or itbhu group name or simply the
  coordinators. Make sure your visitors don't write to the editor at itbhu dot org.
    2. Categories ->

      Create Categories. One required category is Announcements that would always keep rolling on the main page as and when things are posted. Others could be anything you like such as Academics, People, Organizations, Research, About Us etc. anything that is relevant to what the chapter does. Under each category you will have a few entries posted. The category names and entries will help with navigation. Each entry is like a "page" that is viewed at any given time.

  3. To copy contents from one blog to another, i.e. articles and comments and not templates or stylesheets: a) use the import/export menu on the old blog to export it into a text file on your desktop. b) FTP upload that file in the /cgi-bin/import/ directory of the MT area, you may have to do ssh for this purpose and/or get help from the corewg at itbhu dot org mailing list who have the password for the user itbhu. Then go in the new blog, use the same menu this time to import that file. Rebuild.

    SSH FAQ: ssh(cygwin) and ftp(WS_FTP) worked but F-Secure didn't. Most probably, it was sending a wrong username. You want to manually type the username. The best is the publicly available, lightweight, free ssh client "putty". Google it. You can even download to a cybercafe computer and get going in two minutes when travelling.

  4. Rebuild and Create entries

    Create a test entry under one of categories, giving it a title. Save it. Then rebuild the blog and view your site.

  5. Trackbacks to post under ITBHU.org chapters events

    As the pinger, or sender of notification of specific types of posting for visibility on the main ITBHU.org page, the chapter blog designates a category named "Announcements". The attributes of this category is such that any newly created entry in that category results in automatic ping notification for listing under "news from chapters" on the main ITBHU.org page. The category attribute will use the following URL:

    http://www.itbhu.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1/up2itbhu

    In general, any chapter blog may choose that its specific new entries generate a notification for listing under the main ITBHU.org page. These listing categories and notification URLs are: 

    1. Trackback URL to post news from Chapters on the main site:
http://www.itbhu.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1/up2itbhu

2. Trackback URL to post IITization articles announcements on the main site:
http://www.itbhu.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/7/up2itbhu

3. Trackback URL to post Events announcements on the main site:
http://www.itbhu.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/8/up2itbhu

4. Trackback URL to post announcements from the Institute
http://www.itbhu.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/9/up2itbhu
  6. Maintenance and Customizations

    Email editor at itbhu dot org notifying that you are now using templates for chapters and would like to be notified when the templates change. All you would do is click on Templates-> and the specific template or module name and it will load the latest template that you can then save. Then you rebuild your site and it has a new presentation with your own contents.

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    Oct 3, 2003 by ITBHU.org Editor
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   This page last updated at June 08, 2007 05:04 PM GMT -08:00
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