The Help Manual for C3NOLA.org
Vision Statement for C3-concern, community, compassion
C3 is a grassroots community, New Orleans-based organization that advocates affordable housing as a human right, a truly democratic, accountable government that secures that right, and the rebuilding of New Orleans to include all its citizens. C3 champions the shifting of federal resources away from the imperialistic wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and into programs designed to achieve the above ideals. C3’s activities include demonstrations, press conferences, public education, informational forums, workshops, networking with local, national, and international activist groups, social aid, lobbying legislators, and fund raising.
Implementing the C3 Vision
C3 has recently joined forces with the New Orleans Housing Emergency Action Team (N.O.H.E.A.T.) to stop the evictions of New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina and to force the reopening of affordable housing units among the City’s public housing developments, with particular emphasis on the Iberville development on Basin Street. Bringing Iberville to 100% occupancy was a pre-Katrina goal of C3…Katrina forced the debate on C3’s fight on housing to an international audience.
C3 members participated in the (November 14th) march across the Mississippi River Bridge with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney to challenge the authority of the Gretna Police Chief to deny access of any citizen from seeking a secure escape from dangerous conditions as existed on August 31, 2005, when scores of New Orleans citizens walking toward Jefferson Parish and the City of Gretna, were shot at and turned back to the Convention Center.
Many more events are scheduled in the upcoming months to keep up the political pressure for social justice, and give locals a forum to seek individual equity from the disaster that hit New Orleans and which continues to hit it in the storm’s aftermath. We intend to wage the fight for the right of every citizen of New Orleans to return to their City and restart their life.
C3 Workshop on Equitable Governance
New Orleans needs to have an equitable system of governance whereby sufficient public revenues are provided to secure the ideals of affordable housing. C3 advocates rebuilding New Orleans with pre-Katrina demographics, with short and long-term programs to raise medium incomes and lessen the spread between the poor and rich.
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Content is the primary intention of C3nola.org. The goal of C3nola.org is to present a powerful but user-friendly approaching to publishing content on the world wide web.
The secondary goal of this site is to provide an online community. A primary requirement of powerful content is the ability for it to be criticized. C3nola.org is focused on providing a forum for the exchange and criticism of facts and opinions.
A third goal of C3nola.org is to effectively organize and disseminate content so that it is accessible to people.
C3nola.org is based off of the content management system (CMS) Drupal. While there are a wide range of CMSes their primary use is to organize, manage, and publish large amounts of information. The goal of any CMS is to hide the underpinnings of website development so that the user can focus on creating content.
But this does not mean the user should be unaware of how the site is structured. In order for C3nola.org to be an affective community, its users should understand how the site is organized and structure, both on the surface and in depth. Users that understand how the site works are better able to aid in the development of the site. They know which features they enjoy, what features they want, and what doesn't work.
Structurally, there are three directions to approach C3nola.org.
One approach is from the perspective of the web surfer. C3nola.org has three classes of websurfers: the anonymous user, the registered user, the moderator, and the administrator.
The drupal CMS controls the interaction between the users and the database.
The database. All of the content of the C3nola.org is stored in a database, as well as user and site preferences.
Each piece of content is stored as a node in the database. A common problem with websites based on databases is that all of the content is as the same level. Each piece of content is identified an ID number. This makes searching and organizing the content difficult. Of course, this can also be seen as a huge advantage, since on function is able to provide access to all of the data in the same way. With all of the data sharing the same basic structure, the amount of coding overhead is drastically reduced.
The magic of drupal is that it attempts to provide the best of both worlds. The intelligent design of Drupal allows C3nola.org to affectively organized nodes based on taxonomy. But the real power is in the mixing of different kinds of nodes with different taxonomies.
All nodes share a basic structure. This is what Drupal has to say about Taxonomies:
Content on Drupal websites is usually organized using categories through a system called "taxonomy". A taxonomy has different "terms" that are used as categories for articles. When you're adding an article, you might find a drop-down list of topics. By selecting one, you choose where on the site to categorize your article. If this seems hard to relate to, you can think of topics as being like folders on your hard drive--they help to organize content, so that you can find similar things in the same place.
The Drupal CMS allows the C3nola.org to create different kinds of nodes for different kinds of content. Consider how we might want information stored differently for blogs, events, and pictures. All three will share the structure of the basic node, but Event nodes might include fields to answer "where" and "when". A picture node would need a field pointing to the picture file that is uploaded to the website.
There can also be different kinds of taxonomies. We may have one taxonomy to organize the content based on what its about and another taxonomy to organize the content based on where it came from. Some nodes, like pictures, will have their own private taxonomy that organizes the pictures into Galleries. The taxonomy might called "Gallery" and include the terms "Anti-war March", "Meetings", "People", etc..,
But those pictures can be associated with second taxonomy so that they are also organized by their content and associated with articles of that kind of content. So there might be a taxonomy called "Categories" which includes terms such as "Environment", "Politics", "Society", etc...
One of the powerful features of Drupal is that we can also associate terms in the taxonomy. For instance, rather than having a user associate a picture with the gallery taxonomy "Anti-war Marches" and a second taxonomy's category "Marches", we can internally associate the Gallery taxonomy term "Anti-War Marches" with the Category taxonomy term "Marches".
An anonymous user approaches the site without being logged in as an official user. For the anonymous user, the approach to C3nola.org is just like approaching any other website. The pages appear as static webpages that can be browsed and explore. The anonymous user is allowed to comment on some of the content.
The registered user is able to view the content like an anonymous user, but also has the power to organize it based on their own needs.
The moderator is able to control what content is displayed on the main pages.
Adminstrators fine tune the organization of content based on the options made available by the CMS.
Posting a 'blog' is how you, the user, add content to the website. Blogs often include articles, personal reports, commentaries, and discussions. Blogs are your primary method for adding content to the site. You can control how and where the content appears by associating it with terms in the taxonomy. Primarily, this will involve categorizing the blog by its subject.
To create a blog login into c3nola.org. You will know when you are logged in by the presence of your block on the left side of the page.
Under "Create content" select "Blog entry".
On the blog entry page, there are a number of fields that allow you to adjust the content of the page and how it is organized. Fields marked with a red * are required for any and every submission to the site. For a standard blog entry you are only required to give the post a title and body.
Title: In the title field you want to give a brief summary of the subject of the post. Some people prefer using 'witty' titles while others use the field to categorize the content of the post. C3nola.org does not require you to use descriptive titles, but we do recommend it. While the content will also be organized based on the categories you associate with it, most readers rely on titles to filter through the sea of information on the internet. A well associated title will also increase the article's google ranking.
Category: Categorizing blogs helps associate posts of numerous bloggers based on the content of the post. You can associate an article with more than one category by holding down the control key (the apple key on a mac) and clicking on more than one category. Currently the organization of the categories is very broad, but as the site grows, we expect to offer more options for categorization. By giving your post a category, it will allow it to appear not only on your blog page, but on the main page of that category as well.
Body: This is where you will insert the content of a post.
We strongly recommend that you do not simply cut and paste content from another source. You are responsible for your postings and plaigerism will not be tolerated. The best method to avoid this is to always add personal commentary to every post and to prove a link or citation of the source of any copied matertial.
Refer to the Formatting guidelines for the HTML markup options your account includes. Future plans include allowing you to add img tags to a post.
Also be aware that pasted content often does not format in the way you would expect it. Look for irregular linebreaks and strange characters. Irregular formatting makes your blog posting less easy to read and understand. Using the preview key is the best method to avoid these problems.
Attachments: You can use attachments to associate your blog post with files. These files will be uploaded to a (at the current time) general folder on the surver. Future plans include creating personal file folders and allowing you to upload picture files not associated with the picture gallery.
Finished: We recommend using the Preview button to proof your blog posting before you submit it. Once you've carefully editing the post, click on the Submit button and you're finished!
The image galleries are a publicly accessible image database for C3nola.org. Like other aspects of C3nola.org, the image galleries are organized into a heiarchical taxonomy so that pictures can be categorized for easy browsing.
We recommend placing images in their most relevant category, though categories can be added to the hierarchy as groups of pictures are added. For example, add images from a recent anti-war protest under 'events' until a more specific gallery is added to the site. Feel free to email the administrators to request new galleries.
How do I upload an image?
Log in to C3nola.org
From the menu, select User / create content / image.
In the title field, fill in a caption or description of the image you want to add. You can add more information in the description field.
Under the Image Galleries pull-down menu, select a gallery that best fits the content of the image. Each image only gets one gallery.
(In the future, we plan to add the option of associating images with the same categories as blogs.)
Use the Browse... button to browse your computer to select the image you want to upload.
Click on the submit key to upload the image and add it to the selected gallery.
(In the future, we plan to add a module that allows more convenient image uploading and sorting.)