How to Get Started

This is a howto for new users, covering basic aspects such as howto start your own reserach journal/blog, howto work with images, and other such things.

Logging on

Once you have registered an account it is important to remember that you need to be logged in to use the site. Depending on the browser settings you use you will usually stay logged in after using the site a couple of times. If you don't and cant remember your password, you can request a password reminder on the homepage. All log-in functions appear directly at the homepage only.

Drupal speak

It is good to learn a bit of Drupal speak, the terminology that Drupal uses to describe itself. In Drupal, every piece of content is, on a basic layer, a 'node'. Those nodes can be different 'content types'. Important content types are Research Journal Entry (Blog post), Image, Audio, Biblio (bibliographic reference), page, book and comment. There are other content types, but if in doubt, don't use them. Drupal also makes extensive use of taxonomies, sometimes also called categories (Drupal is inconsistent in the naming of those). Categories are not nodes in themselves but tags that can be attached to nodes.

How to set up your own research journal/blog

What is usually called blog has been renamed on TNL to "Research Journal" for aesthetic and other 'higher' reasons. To start your own, there is no "setting up" to be done. On the left sidebar there is a menu under your name which I call admin menu all important functions are there (you also find the same functions via the black javascript bar on top). You go there and select "create content". You will then get a page with quite a variety of content types. Scroll down a bit to find the one called "Research Journal Entry". By clicking on it, you get the edit form. I hope to be able to create soon a detailed walk-through this form with images, but for now, many things are quite self explanatory.

Select a title field, don't select an author field, unless the author of the piece is not you. You have several types of categories, some mandatory (the system will complain if you don't select one of them). Please do also use the free tagging capacity. Put the main content in the "body" field and then press "Preview" at the bottom or "Submit" and you are done. One important thing is that "Publishing Options" at the very bottom of this content type is set to "Published" and "Promoted to Front Page". You may want to keep "Published" but, for some posts, untick "Promoted to front page". Now submit, and you are done, you have not just created a blog post but launched your own Research Journal. It will create its own RSS feed tied to your user name, so that people can subscribe to specific Research Journals on TNL.

How to use "Groups"

On TNL privileged users can create their own group, but everybody can join existing groups. Once logged on, click on "groups" in the admin menu. Now pick the group you want to be part of and request membership. The group admin has to approve membership. This needs only to be done once. If you are member of a group you can read and post entries specific to this groups and protected from public viewing. This is good for more closely knit cooperations where not everyone on the net needs to see everything posted. If you want to create a posting in a group there are two separate ways. One is to go into that group and then scroll down. You will find a specific group menu on the left sidebar. Choose a content type from there and post - the group settings will automatically be right. The other way is to go straight to "create content" in the admin menu, select "Research Journal Entry" and do the usual things. But now take care to not forget to select the group you want to post to under the the menu point "Groups" in the edit form. Once you have selected a group, the check box for "Public" underneath will be activated. Only select it if you want your group post to be both in the group and also public. Don't check public if you want it for group members only.

Images and Audio

You can attach an image or an audio file to a research journal entry. However, it is better to upload an image or an audiofile separately and then create a link to it from inside your text. Go "create content", select content type image, describe/tag your image, select an image gallery (you can also create a whole image gallery if you like) and upload it. Once uploaded that way, each image exists in three sizes: thumbnail, preview and original. while the thumbnail is very small, the original size may sometimes be too big. So its the medium size to be used in research journal entries. Thus, go to your research journal entry where you want to place the picture, open the edit menu, the scroll down just below the "body" field. There, and thats the crucial bit, is a menu point "input formats"; choose it and select "full html". Now, in the body field, you can use the standard html tag img=src and so on and so forth. This way, you can place the images better. You can also display images inline from other websites. If you want a caption line you can play with html tags. For instance, "pre" gives you a different font and different grey background to highlight an image caption. While it is true that other publishing systems such as wordpress give you more intuitive ways of working with images through Wysiwig and drag and drop style editing, we believe that a bit of html does not hurt and gives the user more control, while avoiding cluttering the site with dodgy scripting languages which are slow and error prone.

Video

There is a content type video but please don't use it. We do not have the space and server capacity for hosting loads of video. But you can inlcude a video in a research journal entry by hosting it elsewhere - for instance vimeo is very good and not as ugly as youtube - and then use their html code to include it in your research journal. But do not forget to activate "full html" in the input format menu point.

Your account

Once you are logged on in the admin menu there is also a menu point "My account". It offers several ways of descibing yourself, including references to your main homepage/your own blog, a field for describing your research, your social network sites, etc.. Of course we are all concerned about our privacy but, as this site grows and has more users, this offers ways of finding out about key interests of other users which may result in getting in touch directly, for instance via the content form. On your account page you can also change your username. It is generally good practice to use your full name as this site is about research, so you probably want to be identified with your research. A specific feature in this regard is that if some of your writing is included in the biblio database, those texts/books will also show up under "My publications" on your account pages. The idea is to develop this into a more social network type of thing in the medium to long term.

More
There is much more of course even on that basic level. For instance, you can add to the vocabulary of categories/taxonomies. You can use the biblio content type to work with bibliographic references. For some of those things there are separate howtos which you find below. But a good way of learning is also trying things out and being alert to all the buttons and menu options which often go unnoticed first. There is hardly anything that you can break, really in the sense of permanently breaking it, and if you are in a cul-de-sac you can always ask admin. But there are many ways of using Drupal and the specific TNL instance of it and it would be good to hear about other ways of using it or discussing proposals what to enable/include.

Howto create a Forum Topic

To create a new forum topic go into 'create content' on the left hand side bar on the home page, then click on forum topics. Its pretty straight forward from there as regards the subject and the language options*. The forum topics are limited, but if you wanted to add another category eg copyright, then you would click onto content management on the black bar at the top of the home page, click categories, then click add term on the forums. This gives a few options such as the parent category, which you may want to put under the term 'site building' for example.

Back to creating a forum topic. if you look at menu settings, here you can link the forum to other topics. Therefore for example if you want to link your forum into the taxi to praxi main menu, you select the parent category as Taxi to Praxi from the list and your forum topic will become a child of that parent. Another setting is the publishing options; if you want your post to go to the front page, you tick the box under that says 'promote to front page'. To add a comment to an existing forum, just click 'add comment' at the bottom of the main forum posting.

Howto create and use 'Organic Groups'

The organic groups module allows you to create a working group where a number of people with shared interests can create content which is non-public, visible to group members only.

To be able to create and moderate a group, you need to get 'group moderator' permissions. To get this you need to ask the Administrator.

To create a new group you first need to create a new content type.

In the navigation bar under your name on the left side bar, which I call the admin menu, go to 'content type', then select 'add content type' choose a name and a type (same as name but machine readable), tick 'published' but not 'promoted to front page'.

Under 'organic groups usage' tick 'Group Node', this is mandatory, everything else select to your liking and save content type.

Then go to 'create content', you will find your new content type there, select it and everything else is pretty self explanatory, by creating the first content node of this type you set up the group. Select
'private' maybe and 'moderated', do not offer it for 'selection on registration'

You can decide if your group should be listed on the 'groups' homepage. I would suggest to say 'yes' to that.

Now, to create content for your group, click on groups, and then on your group. Once you are 'inside' your group, there is a new 'groups' menue on the lest sidebar; you will probably have to scroll down a little bit to get there. Select one of the content types offered there.

You can then decide with each article if you would like to publish it only in your group or visible to all.

Here you go. Enjoy group life;)

note of caution: as a group moderator you are given quite a few rights. please use those rights with caution.

There is some more information here:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/og

Howto create structured research documents with 'Books'

A 'book' in Drupalish, the Drupal slang, is a content type which allows you to create static pages which are linked to each other through a hierarchical navigation system. On a book page you can use all the things that you can use in a Research Journal Entry (which is called 'blog' page in Drupalish). The content type book is useful for longer texts where you want to split content into different pages. As the navigation control is created by Drupal, this comes in very handy.
This howto explains how to use Books but also integrate this with 'footnotes' and 'biblio' the Drupal module for bibliographic references. Together, thos em modules allow nicely formatted text with links to footnotes and references, so that TNL can be used for 'serious' text production.

In the left sidebar, in the navigation menu under your name, go to create content -- book page http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/add/book

You can create a new book page either on the top level of navigation or under some existing second layer such as 'Documentation' or 'Readers' or 'Waves and Code' which are at the time of writing the three top level links for books.

A book page is nothing else than a static page which is linked in a hierarchical structure to other static pages. You give it a title, select one of the categories and / or create a new one under the 'topic' vocabulary and then put your actual content in the body of the book page. Here take care to select the right Input format. For a beginning, filtered html will just do fine.

If it is your first page, the 'weight' pop-up menu can be kept at 0. Later this will take on a crucial function.

If you want to add an image or a 'related link' then just do so. You can also ignore those menu options. scroll to the bottom, the only menu option you should look at is 'publishing options'. Here you can decide if your book page should be published on the front page or not. If you are certain that you want to share your page with the wider public, then go ahead. Otherwise un-tick the 'published to front page' option. Then choose preview or submit and here you go, you have created a book page.

Once you have created your first page, you can scroll to the bottom of it and simply click on 'add child page'. You will get a menu which is exactly the same as the one you got via create content -- add book page. If you add now a second page, this page will automatically show up in a navigation menu below the first page.

However, if you have a more complex structure with nested hierarchies between pages, you will have to consider the weighting. by selecting a weight from -15 to +15 you select where the page shows up in the navigation. if you have a lot of pages which need organising this will probably take some trial and error. However, in principle this is easy and you cant break anything which cant be repaired equally quickly.

So far we have just used the built in book function. Part of the fun is that you can invite other people to edit your book pages for collaborative writing projects. If you make significant edits to a page, either your own page or the page of somebody else, select 'create new revision' at the bottom menu under 'publishing options'. This will later allow you two things: to move backward in time through revisions of the page, and to 'diff' revisions. Diff means that you can compare changes between the last two versions, which comes in handy if you do some collaborative text editing.

Howto integrate 'Footnotes' and bibliographic References with your texts

If you are used to complex text editing programs such as MS Word or Open Office, you will probably enjoy the Footnote and Biblio functions. In your text in a book page (but also other content types such as Research Journal or 'story'), you can us the fn tag <fn>and what you write in between the tags will appear as an automatically numbered footnote, but don't forget the end tag </fn>

Almost analogue to that works the bib tag. If you want to refer from within your text to a bibliographic reference, use
<bib> and </bib> whereby in between the tags you have to put the citekey.

You can only use bib if your reference exists in the biblio reference database of tnl. To do that, go to create content -- biblio and add a reference, which can be anything from book to article to journal, etc. Once you have entered your reference a citekey will automatically be generated (you could also enter one by hand). the automatically generated citekey is just a number. Put this number between bib tags and it will again create an automatically numbered endnote which will contain your reference.

However, entering references one by one is slow, if you have many. There is also a way of doing batch upload of references. You can try here http://www.thenextlayer.org/admin/settings/biblio/import
If you manage your references with endnote, RIS or bibtex you can batch upload into biblio. Make sure you get the import of tags right. If not, go 'recent posts' after upload and you will see all the recently uploaded references and you can tag them so that you will be able to find them later.