ACLUG (Air Capital Linux Users Group) is defunct, and has been since 2005 or so. The domain name, aclug.org, is evidently still registered, by a company in Japan. This file was written in 2003. It is probably useless now, even if someone wanted to reboot a Wichita, KS Linux Users Group. (As of 2019, there does seem to be a Wichita State University Linux Users Group, WuLUG.)
The ACLUG website is at www.aclug.org.
It is implemented using the PostNuke PHP-based toolkit.
The default home page is the News module. This is described below. The page top, bottom, and left column are consistent through all webpages.
The top has a banner, the date/time the page was served, and a search widget. If you are logged in it will also say "Welcome" followed by your nickname. If not, there will be a login widget.
The bottom includes three links for "Report Bugs," "Tasks," and "Developers." All of these are links to the postnuke project at Sourceforge, so they have nothing to do with the ACLUG website.
Much of this is implemented through "blocks", which are areas on webpages attached to various procedures (modules). The software provides a crude mechanism for laying out webpages as columns of blocks.
The left column consists of the following blocks:
Once a user has logged in, that user's view of the website can be changed by My Account settings.
The Calendar widget appears in the left column of all pages. It provides a graphic calendar with yellow highlighting events, and lists of Today's and Upcoming Events. Click on an event for more information.
Module appears in Main Menu but clicking it reveals that there are no download categories, and that downloads have been disabled.
The FAQ module can be used to manage sets of Question/Answer pairs. A user can ask a question; another user can answer it. The Q/A pairs are organized in categories and subcategories.
Current setup of categories:
The "Ask a Question" dialogue asks for the user's email address (why? -- if the user is logged in the email address is known), a question category, and a question. (Not sure what happens next; probably goes to a moderator.)
The Members List module provides information about registered users. You can search for a member, or browse alphabetically (based on nicknames). Selecting a user lets you access public information about the user: webpage, email address (fake if provided, else real). This also shows the last 10 comments and 10 news submissions by the member.
The News module is in fact the default homepage. The middle column consists of the latest News items that have been submitted.
The right column consists of RSS feeds from other news sources:
The implementation only allows one RSS source for each webpage block, so the choice of newsfeeds is limited, and no info is available other than titles.
News items are grouped into topics. The following topics have been set up:
Each topic has an icon, which appears to tag the news articles.
Two more links on the Modules list are used by the News module:
You can (and should) preview your submissions before final posting.
Photos are organized in "albums": there is currently one album (Aclug Event Photos) with 31 photos. Click on the photo to select an album. Albums are organized as slideshows. They are presented in menus of up to 9 photos each. Click on a photo to see a larger version. Since the photos are ordered, you can also click your way through the sequence.
You can add comments to photos. Those comments can then be searched using the search widget.
This provides a widget whereby you can send a piece of email to someone recommending the website.
This is a peculiar module, currently unused. The webpage provides an alphabetic browser, as well as two lists: "10 most popular reviews" and "10 most recent reviews."
The website stores info in various database tables. This provides a fine grained search capability and some search options.
Just using the search widgets on the top banner and left column searches everything.
Given that no sections have been defined, accessing this is totally pointless.
This provides a nice general summary of website usage, as well as some general statistics about the website (how many users, articles, comments, etc.).
This presents several lists based on statistics may be helpful for naviation:
This manages a list of recommended web links.
The dialogue to add a new link asks:
This is a module which lets users collaboratively construct a set of documents. The current document is called the "Aclug Documentation Project."
Some users have Administration permissions. When they log in, there is an Administration menu option. This leads to the Administration page, which starts with a menu -- a couple dozen icons, mostly corresponding to modules.
Allows a few options beyond those in Submit News, such as to allow/disallow comments. Provides a Notes option. Asks "Do you want to program this story?" (Whatever that means?)
Provides a widget to for administrators to post messages (title, content, language, active?, who can view this?).
Autolinks are URLs that are inserted into News stories when certain words/patterns appear. Configuration options are:
The Add Autolink dialogue asks for:
Currently we have no autolinks defined.
Blocks are the basic components that are put on webpages. View Blocks shows a table of available blocks with various attributes. The order of the blocks determines the placement order.
| Position | Title | Module | Name | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Left | User's Login | Core | login | Active |
| Left | Main Menu | Core | menu | Active |
| Left | Events Calendar | PostCalendar | calendar | Active |
| Left | Incoming | Core | menu | Active |
| Left | Who's Online | Core | online | Active |
| Left | Users Block | Core | user | Active |
| Left | Search Box | Core | search | Active |
| Right | Slashdot | Core | rss | Active |
| Right | Linux Security | Core | rss | Active |
| Right | Linux Today | Core | rss | Active |
| Right | Other Stories | Core | stories | Active |
| Right | Poll | Core | poll | Active |
| Right | Today's Big Story | Core | big | Active |
| Right | Past Articles | Core | past | Active |
Downloads are organized by main category. Some additional dialogues are available, but without main categories there's nothing here.
This allows the administrator to update information on users, or to arbitrarily add new users or delete old ones. The Update user dialogue provides access to a subset of the information available in the user's own My Account dialogue.
The User Configuration dialogue supports:
The Dynamic User Data dialogue controls how the form in the My Account dialogue is set up. In particular, we can add new data information, and remove unwanted information (like your MSN Messenger address). Adding a field requires hacking some code.