CMS Tutorial: Posting Minutes

Here is how to post minutes to the city's web site. This procedure assumes you have a word processing document or similar file and are going to paste it into a new page on the city's web site.

One-Time User Setup

1. Register if you haven't already so that you have a user account.
2. Get a system administrator to grant you the permissions you need to edit "your" part of the web site.

Post the Minutes

1. Open the document that contains the minutes you wish to publish.
2. Select all (CRTL+A) and copy (CTRL+C)
   
3. Open the city web site and log in.
4. Navigate to the folder the minutes should be added to. Council meeting minutes go in the current year folder inside Government/Council/Meetings. Committee minutes go in Government/Committees/yourcommittee/meetings/ currentyear .
   
5. In the green bar click Add New and choose Page. If you don't have a green bar it's because you are not logged in or don't have author privileges for the folder you are in.
   
6. Give it a title like General Meeting Minutes 1-11-2007. The description is optional and has not been used for Minutes.
   
7. Click in the body section, then paste (CTRL+V) to put in the contents from your document.
8. Optionally, make any needed editing changes, but keep in mind the formatting will change when you save.
   
9. Optionally enter a change note (example: corrected and approved per 2-11-2007 meeting) then click Save to create the page (or Cancel if you want to start over). This will create the page and re-load it with the CMS formatting applied.
   
10. If further editing is needed to clean up formatting, etc., click the Edit tab in the green bar and make your changes, then click Save again.

Publish the Minutes

. If you are still working on the page that is the correct state, for example if minutes have not yet been approved. But when you are done you should submit the page for publication.

1. Click on the green bar where it says State: and select Submit for Publication. This will change the state to Pending Review and the page will be listed prominently for anyone who logs on to the CMS with reviewer privileges. Note: in case the document is finished but should not be visible to the public, you may publish internally.
   
2. When a reviewer logs on to the site, they should go to the pending page and look it over to see if it meets the city's standards for publication. At this writing no specific standards have been set, so use your judgment. Factors to consider include:
3. 1. Is the information accurate, readable, and appropriate?
      
   2. Are there grammatical or spelling problems?
   3. Is the page in the correct location on the site?
   4. Do the links work?
      
4. Optionally, edit the page to fix any problems.
   
5. Depending on the reviewer's findings, various actions are possible.
6. 1. If the page is ready for public consumption, click State, then Publish Externally.
   2. If the page is done but should not be visible to the public, click State, then Publish Internally.
   3. If the page needs more work, click State, then Send Back to return it to the author. You would probably want to e-mail the author with the reason for the rejection.

Tips

When pasting into the CMS from Microsoft Word and other programs, the CMS re-formats the content to work in a web page with styling consistent with the rest of the CMS. Some formatting in other programs is incompatible with web pages and will be lost, requiring extra work editing pasted pages to fix their appearance. Here are some ideas for reducing the work of re-formatting after pasting into the CMS. They all have to do with how the original document is formatted.

1. Keep it simple. The plainer the source document is, the better it will transfer into the CMS.
2. Use heading styles. The heading for this section of this page is "Tips." Notice how it is formatted to stand out and make the page more navigable and readable. The CMS can even make a table of contents automatically for a page if it has headings. To make the headings automatically when pasting into the CMS, apply heading styles in your source document (often: Format - Style). You can use Heading 1 for the main headings, Heading 2 for subheadings, and so on.
3. Use tables. The formatting of tables may be changed when pasting in, but the rows and columns will still line up.
4. Avoid these as they will break when pasted into the CMS causing strange appearances.
5. 1. Tabs and spaces for positioning text. Use tables instead, or possibly bullets, numbering, or indented paragraphs.
   2. Paragraph borders, special characters, colors and highlighting, different fonts. Use heading styles instead and don't worry too much about how they look in the source document.
6. These are OK: bold, italic, tables, hyperlinks, bullets, numbering. This formatting will be preserved when pasted into the CMS.