Helpdesk

This page is for Administrators. If you are not one, then you shouldn't be reading this. We will check our logs periodically and if (I mean when) we find out you were reading something you weren't supposed to, we will make your life very hard.

Note: always keep in mind that the Helpdesk and Howtos are cross-department. While sometimes a HOWTO has to contain department specific information, please do your best to keep it general when possible

Note: do not ever use Word in any authoring of content. At no time should text that ends up here have ever been in Word. Don't think I can't tell.

Now, I assume you are logged in. In the navigation menu, probably on the left, look for the create content link. Click it.

The HOWTOs are organized in a Drupal "book", so click book page.

Now for the real work. Give your HOWTO a descriptive name. This will appear as the main heading of the page, at the top. The path alias is important, too. It is used as the URL for the page. NO SPACES. Just letters and underscores if you need them. Something like howto_howto, for example.

The Parent setting is important for organization. Pick a section under which your HOWTO will appear. If you are creating a new section, then this will be a section page and then you have to create another page for the actual HOWTO.

If you have images to attach to your HOWTO, now is the time to do it. Do it before you enter anything in the body. First, make sure your images have sane names - they go into one directory, so use naming such as "topic_picture1.png" so that all of the images for a given page can be easily discerned and will be less likely to collide with others. Once they are ready, go to the bottom of the edit page and Browse and Attach. In the table that appears listing the attachments, turn off the check box under "List". It is annoying. Your body now has junk appended to it. Ignore it for now. Just keep browsing, attaching, and unchecking that little box and watching the body junk grow and grow. Ponder why the Drupal devs did it this way, overloading the body field. Maybe you can think of a reason why this is not dumb.

Now for the body of the HOWTO (if you have attached images, you'll need to delete all the accrued junk). You have a choice of 2 different input methods - Filtered or Full. Full means all the HTML you want to use. Obviously it is powerful, but it takes a bit more work. Filtered means that you don't have to type in HTML if you don't want to (though a select few tags are available), and Drupal will try to format for you. For absolute control, use Hardcore. Unlike Full, not even line breaks are touched when you use Hardcore. This, btw, is a custom input format I created for myself.

Unfortunately, it looks like you have to use Full mode if you want to embed images. Anyway, try out either, using the Preview button. Notice that Drupal actually changes stuff and sticks <br> tags and condenses white space. Notice how annoyed you are that it is doing that. Oh well.

As always, it is good practice to use properly structured/semantic HTML. So use <h2> for major headings, <h3> for minor, etc. <h1> is for the title, so you shouldn't use it in your body. If you have images, make a note of the URL Drupal has given the image (in the table of attachments at the bottom) and drop the top level of the URL and use something like this:

<img src="files/file_name.png" class="screen" /> Blah

The class="screen" will make it float to the right of the paragraph and give it a nice border. You may have to use style="clear:both" on subsequent paragraphs to break the float - play around.

Some other CSS snippets you may want to use:

• <span class="cmd">Some text the user should enter</span>
• <span class="code">Some text the user may see</span>
• <span class="gui">Some GUI element, like a menu or a button</span>
• <pre class="code">
  

  A big, multi-line block of text the user may see

  </pre>

Once you are done with the body text and satisfied by the preview, submit it. Make sure you have removed any of the extra junk Drupal keeps appending to the your body.

That should do it! If you have questions, it's good to go look at one of the others that are already done. See this one, for example. It has pictures attached.

Finally, you should check that your HTML is valid. The validator is at http://validator.w3.org/.