Managing a Community

This page explains functions available to community leaders. To have access to these functions, you have to be a leader of at least one community.

All community management features – except content moderation – are accessed through the settings page. To open a settings page, click on the link settings in the content selector bar in the upper right region of the web page. The page shows a summary of community settings. Use the green bar above the summary to access additional management functions.

Community Settings

Edit settings allows editing of basic community settings and security aspects described in Community Settings section.

If one removes any of the content contribution tools in the Tools section of the settings form, content related to that tool will no longer be accessible to community members.

Email Settings

In addition to (or instead of) standard, platform-wide email footer, you can enter your own email footer that will appear in every outgoing message.

Leave Append default footer checked to add a link back to the web site, copyright notice and a link to let recipient unsubscribe.

The footer message accepts only plain text.

Members

Shows a list of all community members and allows you to manage community membership.

Invitations

Shows a list of all pending invitations to join a community. You can select multiple invitations and re-send or cancel them.

Please note that it takes 40 days on average for people to accept invitations to join, and some people never accept.

Appearance

Change the appearance of community web site.

Heading lets you set a large title to appear above the community content, just below the standard header.

Subheading appears below the community title on every page of the community.

Footer shows at the bottom of every web page of your community. You can use plain text or embed HTML code.

Logo chooser will allow you to show your community’s logo in the header. First upload the logo file to the library folder appearance/images and then choose it from the drop down message. Alternatively, the community can inherit parent community’s logo, or set the logo to none. It is recommended to keep the logo image height equal to or less than 85 pixels. Images that are wider in appearance work better than tall images.

Welcome text will appear on the community homepage. Use it to provide guidance for new and existing users visiting the web site. You can enter plain text, HTML code, or use markdown, a better-than-wiki markup. Click on Preview button to preview your welcome text before saving it.

Finally, you have a choice of several color schemes that will determine the choice of header background, header bars on boxes, box backgrounds, and zebra backgrounds in long lists. Choosing a color scheme and clicking on Save activates the colors for all visitors of your community.

Publishing

WARNING: this feature will soon be removed from Knowledge Gateway.

Publishing allows you to show a single web page presenting your community without the need to require registration or log in. This page is useful for showing off your community’s work to donors, or use it as a first stop for pass-along invitations (that is, when you advertise the public page URL and ask members to pass this URL to everyone they know).

Check Publish this community’s content to activate the public page, or uncheck to remove the public page.

Enter the Homepage text you want to show on the public page. You can paste HTML code, use plain text, or use markdown. The text you enter will be the body of the public page. Knowledge Gateway will provide the header bar and other navigation elements.

Similarly, the footer text box accepts plain text, markdown or HTML code.

Click on Preview to preview your text in its final form before publishing.

Statistics

The statistics page shows you basic membership statistics: how many members, which countries they come from, and how many contributions are made from different countries.

Remove from My Communities

Click on Remove from My Communities link to terminate membership in this community. This will remove your name from the list of leaders, and the community will not show in My Communities list on my home page.

If you are a member of a sub-community of this community, your membership won’t be terminated due to membership inheritance; rather, you’ll demote yourself from being a leader into member role, and the community will still appear in your list of communities. To completely leave this community, remove yourself from all sub-communities.

If this was a sub-community of another community that you are leader of, the community will still be accessible via administration link on my home page.

Deleting a Community

To delete a community, edit its settings and check the check box Read Only. When you submit the changes, a new link delete will appear on the green settings bar on settings summary page. Alternatively, the message to delete, first delete sub-communities will appear if a community to be deleted has sub-communities.