This guide is intended to orient editors of the Classroom Technology and Public Computers pages (https://ltsfacilities.lehigh.edu), which exist to communicate to students, faculty and other staff about the equipment and services offered in the locations described there. Those descriptions should let the readers know both about what equipment and services are provided in the room and who should be contacted with regard to each of the types of services. Different users have different roles on the site:
'Content Contributors' are able to:
- Create new:
- Rooms
- Equipment Types
- Contacts
- Hour Sets
- Edit the ones of those that they create,
- Edit any existing rooms (pictures, features present, contacts, description, etc).
'Content Administrators' are able to do all of those things and:
- Create:
- Buildings
- Room Types (a.k.a. Facilities)
- Articles (Upgrade Announcements)
- Edit any of those types of content on the site, including ones they themselves _didn't_ create.
'Administrators', which include Dan Brashler (dab406), Ashley Ryan (alr214), and
Doug ReeseGlenn Piper (
dsr1gsp2) are stuck with doing everything else that needs to be done to make the system do what it does. If you have any trouble editing what you want to edit, contact one of them.
1. In order to add or alter content on the pages, folks will need to log in using the login link in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Doing so will automatically take you to your profile page.
2. To edit existing content, you'll need to navigate to it, then refresh your browser (they frequently retain cached versions of the page from before you logged in), and then click on the Edit tab down in the content area of the page.
To create new content, you'll need to hover over the 'Content' menu item in the black navigation bar at the top of the page, further hover to 'Add Content', and then further hover to select a content type, and finally click to be taken to a blank 'edit' page for that type of content.
3. Once in the edit mode, you're presented with what is essentially an online form, with text fields, pull-downs, and select lists for the content that is displayed on the page.
For most fields, there is help text describing the intended contents of the field. Many fields allow selecting multiple values from a list using control-clicks or shift-clicks. For example, a room can have many 'Room Types', e.g. an 'LTS Public Site' can also be a 'High-Technology Classroom'.
As a point of style, try to start the titles of types of equipment with a general name, and use commas set off additional description. Also, use that technique in lieu of parentheses.
Definitely remember to scroll all the way down and hit 'Save' to have any changes or additions actually saved to the server.
4. Hour Sets for buildings or individual are, themselves, a separate content type, and are referenced by both Buildings and Rooms.
To create one, select 'Content > Add Content > Hours' from the admin menu.
By default, a room displays the hour set of its building. If a room has its own specific hour set (or sets), they take precedence, and are displayed instead of the Building's hour set(s).
5. Maps appear in the Room and Building pages when you enter a correctly formatted value in the 'Facilities Building ID' or the 'Facilities Room ID' field. To find this value, search for the room using the RoomFinder. If you log in there, select the building, then the floor, and enter the room number, it's displayed as the 'Space ID'.
Note: This feature is dependent on links to systems maintained by the Lehigh Facilities department. The system linked may be out of date, and not contain all of the current campus buildings.
6. Note the difference, in the fields of an Equipment Type, between the 'Information Link' field and the 'Instruction NID' field.
An 'Information Link' is a fairly free-form, absolute link to any other web page that might have worthwhile information about that type of equipment.
An 'Instruction NID' is very specifically a reference to an instruction page on the LTS Drupal site.
This is how instructions for equipment end up associated with a Room, and appear in the 'Full Details and Instructions' page for that room:
Each Equipment Type can only be related to one stepwise instruction (or other type of page) on the LTS site. Doing so requires being able to edit that instruction on the LTS pages, and view the NID (Node Identifier) for that page on that site. When you click the edit tab, look up in the address bar, and there, between '.../node/' and '../edit' you'll see a number -- that's the NID of that instruction. Enter that into the 'Instruction NID' field in the Equipment type, and then, when a user hits the 'Instructions' button on the room page, they'll be taken to a customized view showing all of the instructions for the equipment in that room.
Note: with the 2023 update to the LTS Site all of the NID instructions no longer function. Stick with the 'Information Link' field.
7. If you edit more than typos, please take a moment to edit the 'Revision Information' field to let others know what you changed and why. This will become more important when we implement automatic revision requests. Numerous other fields will occasionally appear in the system as we develop it and extend it. We hope to add tighter integration with 25Live and the LUIS software pages, and we'll need to accommodate additional equipment types and contacts as they're added. We hope to add Report pages with statistics about the rooms and equipment as well.
