Frequently Asked Questions

Yes you can!  Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:

• You can create a look and feel more easily and cheaply than with standard approaches (maybe free)
• You will be able to edit web site content with no html skills except in very special cases
• Your site will be on an extremely high uptime server with off-site backups.
• It won't cost you any more in hosting fees from me (although of course the web design is not included)

Cons:

• Sorry I can't think of any cons. ;)

Click here to read the instructions for setting up your public site.

You can post basically any file that's 8MB or less, so small videos will fit.  If you have larger videos, you'll have to host them somewhere else (like YouTube) and link to them.  Or if you really want to post them to Groupanizer, you might split them into 8MB chunks.

Groupanizer is based on Drupal, so it checks periodically to see if there are updated versions of any of the modules involved in its implementation, or if there is a newer version of Drupal itself.  Often these are security patches that have been discovered and fixed.

There's nothing you can do about this, since you don't have access to change any module on your own.  However, the Groupanizer team is generally aware of the udpates as soon as they are released, and we'll make sure everyone is updated on a reasonable schedule.  All Groupanizer sites share the same code, so everyone gets updated at the same time.

Sometimes the updates require a database update as well, in which case it can only be done while the sites are taken offline.  It can take up to a couple of hours to accomplish this (until we find a way to automate the process, and believe me we're looking!) so we will usually do it late at night in the Pacific time zone.

The easiest way to get all your member accounts created is to use the User Import module.  If it is not already enabled, you can enable it by going to Administer > Site Building > Modules, finding the module, and turning it on.  (It's a long list, so try the ctrl-f "find" option to speed this up!)

Once the module is on, you'll be able to create new users by going to Administer > Users > User Import.  It accepts CSV files, which can be exported from Excel.

Out of the box, we don't configure any photo galleries, but it's easy to add as many as you like.  Go to Administer > Content > Taxonomy, find the "Image galleries" taxonomy and click on "add terms."  Enter the name of your new gallery and save.

Now when you go to Create Content > Image, you'll be able to put the new image into your new gallery, and when you visit the picture galleries, the new gallery will appear in the list.

You can change the default front page to any page at all by navigating to Administer > Site Configuration > Site Information and changing the "Default front page" field.  This is easiest if you have created a "nice" URL for the page in question like "welcome" or "home" rather than the typical "node/3249" pattern.

Subgroups and sections (and several other things) are managed using Drupal “taxonomy.”  Go to “Administer -> Content -> Taxonomy” and you will see the various vocabularies that can be changed.

For example, the default sections in Groupanizer SING are Tenor, Lead, Baritone and Bass, but that’s not going to work for SATB choirs.  Go to Administer -> Content -> Taxonomy, find “Sections” and click on “List Terms”.  This will bring you to a screen that provides an edit link for each existing term, plus an “Add Term” link.  If you want to delete a term, click on “edit” and look for the delete button.

American copyright law states that downloading mp3 learning tracks even from your private web site requires that you obtain a PDD (download) license.  In order to be confident that you are complying with the law, you need to know who is downloading what from your web site, and Groupanizer provides exactly that report.

Your Groupanizer web site is private, and protected by passwords.  The underlying database is also private, not shared like some other hosts, so there is no chance of a coding error accidentally revealing your data to the wrong people.

Our policy is to never release your private data to anyone else, for any reason.

There are lots of powerful tools available online, like Google Docs and Yahoo Groups, and many groups manage to run themselves using just these general purpose tools.  But because they are general purpose, there's a limit to how much they can help you.

For example, you can put your roster up as a Google Doc, but you can't control who makes changes.

Groupanizer gives you a complete and automated system for running your group.  It's probably solving problems you don't even know you have!  Your director will quickly come to depend on knowing exactly how well each song has been learned!  Suddenly rehearsals are better targeted at what really needs doing, and all because of the better information you get from Groupanizer and system it creates.

A few more things Groupanizer does for you that Yahoo Groups does not:

• You can customize the look, or even build a public web site on it
• The dashboard shows you everything important at a glance
• Project management with a distributed task manager
• Fine-grained permission and access control for different roles (and you can make as many roles as you need)
• Calendaring integrated with attendance and attendance reporting so you can follow up with people who miss rehearsal
• Attendance planning, so you know who's going to come to each even, and how many in each voice part
• Tracking each member's learning status on each song, so it's crystal clear what needs to be learned
• A recruiting tracker (light weight CRM system) to help you grow
• Polls so you can take the pulse of the membership, and help you keep them!
• Install any of thousands of Drupal modules, like a fully fledged e-commerce site

The list goes on and on.  And our policy is that if you can think of a great new feature that will benefit everyone, we will build it for you for free.  Try getting that out of Yahoo!

No - many groups using Groupanizer today have one or more members with no internet access.  They have created a "buddy" system to help the technology stragglers participate.

This isn't included in the default configuration because most groups just want to keep things simple, but it's not too difficult to configure either.  Here are the instructions:

1. Go to Administer > Site Building > Modules as turn on two modules:
   • ACL
   • Forum Access
2. Now that you've got a new permission module in your configuration, you will need to rebuild the content permissions.  Just click on the link in the glaring red warning box, then on the "Rebuild Permissions" button.
3. At this point if you have Content Access or another permission module enabled, you'll have to make sure they don't interfere with each other.  Forum Access posts glaring red messages about this all over the place, so if this is a problem you will not fail to notice.  First step is to go to Administer > Content > Content Types, Forum Topic, Content Access and revoke all the permissions granted therein.  Also open up the Advanced Settings tab, lower the priority of this module to -1, and save.
4. From here on it's intuitive to set the permissions for each forum under Administer > Content > Forums, giving read and edit permissions to the roles you choose.

It's pretty easy to create pages that aren't linked to any menu items, or to put a page somewhere in the menu that you can't easily find again.  Not to worry - you can always go to Administer > Content Management > Content to see a list of all the "nodes" in the whole site (pages, profiles, book pages etc.).  The list can be filtered by type, to make it easier to search through.

This even works if the page was set to "unpublished" even though unpublished pages will never show up in menus.

Once you find your content, you can edit it to add it to a menu somewhere.

There's a standard, automatic password-reset facility described in gory detail in the user manual.  Click here to read it.

Replies to a forum topic are done using comments, so you're looking for the "add new comment" link.

Song Status states are a workflow rather than a taxonomy.  You should find it at Administer -> Site Building -> Workflow.  If you don't, you might not have permission to see it for some reason.  But don't worry, if you're the site administrator, you can give yourself permission.

This depends entirely on your browser!  In some browsers, clicking would actually cause a download.  Try right-clicking on the link and selecting "save target as..."

If you click on the “Log out” link in the main navigation menu, you will be properly logged out.  Closing your browser won’t necessarily do the trick, and neither will turning off your computer – depending on the settings in your browser.  If you want to make sure that your account is safely locked out when you leave the computer, always click “Log out!”

You can upload a picture of yourself by clicking on “My Account” in the main navigation menu on the left side of the screen, then clicking on the “Edit” tab button near the top of the screen.

Groupanizer includes a subscriptions module that gives you a lot of options.  Let's start with some basic terminology for the various kinds of subscriptions:

Content Type - subscribe to all content of a given type, like all blog entries, all pictures, or all new pages.

Thread - subscribe to all comments on a particular article.

You can often subscribe or unsubscribe by clicking on a link in the content.  For example blog entries have a "subscribe to this type of content" link.  You can also manage your subscriptions on your "my account" page, by clicking on the "Notifications" tab.  On that page, notifications can be added, deleted or edited to suit your needs.

You can also decide how often to get notifications: immediately, once an hour, once a day, etc.  Finally you can also decide to have them batched up and sent to you as a digest!

Out of the box, Groupanizer is configured to send all users a notification when a new blog entry is created.

One note: your might have some subscriptions set to be sent by "mail" but that probably won't work, because Groupanizer has been upgraded to use "HTML Mail" instead.  Make sure if you have any old "mail" type subscriptions lying around that you change them to HTML Mail instead.

Basically a "book" in Drupal is a container that can have pages in it.  So you can add "book pages" to a book - so far so good, right?

It gets confusing because you can also creates pages inside other pages.  So for example you can have this situation:

• Documents (a book)
  • Policy Documents
    • Member Handbook
    • By Laws
    • Audition Procedures
  • Other Documents
    • Scanned Awards
      • Divison Championship Certificate (attachment)

So as you can see, it's a great way to organize a whole bunch of documents into a hierarchical structure.  In this structure, a "parent" page contains "child" pages.

Also you can attach files to any page.  In the example above, there is a page called Division Championship Certificate that has a file attached, which is a picture of the actual certificate.

The first book called "Documents" is created for you, and that might be all you ever need.  If you like, of course you can create new books and create new menu links to point to them.  That's more for the advanced users.  :)

The issue is with the "Input Format" - a feature of Drupal that allows for filtering of user input, generally for security.  Some input formats disallow some HTML tags.  You might try switching your article to use "Full HTML" instead of "Filtered HTML".  You'll find it under the "Input Format" tab, just below the article.

You can also edit the formats in all their gory detail, or make a different one the default.

Your browser may be "caching" the picture, because the name of the picture does not change when you upload a new one - it will always be picture-1 (with your number in the 1 spot).  Every browser is different, but if you're using Firefox you can force it to download the new picture by holding down SHIFT and clicking on the reload button.