Hide

Technical Advice for Maintainers

hide
Hide

          Help and Guidance 2021: New Page: Version 1.1

Hide

Introduction

What's here

This technical advice for maintainers sets out

Finally for completeness you can still see  details of the transition to the initial implementation of Drupal (version 7) and the upgrade to version 8.

Related sections

There is advice on improving content.

The How to.. pages give simple step by step information for the most common tasks maintainers need to do.

Implementing GENUKI through Drupal

Nodes and Pages

The web pages that you see as you navigate through GENUKI are dynamically produced by the Drupal Content Management System. Within the Drupal system they are described as nodes. It is the node that maintainers edit.

There are four main node types:

  • Place
  • Plain/Topic
  • Church
  • Gazetteer Entry

The key features of each and the main aspects of editing them are given in detail  in the Nodes and Pages section.

Media and Images

There are a variety of possible media types that can be included in pages. How images display in the final page depends on the original format and size of the image and on the setting applied to the inserted media item. This is explained here

Maintainers view and options

Once you are logged in you will see a blue menu bar at the top of the window with your login name and other options. The detail of these options is explained here

Glossary

Here is a Glossary of the main terms used throughout this guidance

Relationship between the GENUKI elements

You will see throughout the GENUKI site that there are references to three distinct elements:

  • GENUKI (which for clarity on occasions we descibe as  core GENUKI),
  • the Churches Directory, and
  • the Gazetteer.

Historically these have grown up in parallel and have often had different maintainers in each area. With the transition to Drupal they are more superficially similar, including in the main approach to entry of new items and editing existing ones and in the use of a common approach to the presentation of maps. They therefore have both an independent role, notably in being capable of being searched separately, and a supportive role in which parts of core Genuk are dependent on the information in both the Churches Directory and the Gazetteer.

The main functions of the three element are fairly self explanatory:

  • core GENUKI is based around the 4 level hierarchy of places and the list of topics. It contains the vast majority of the information organised around  topics in each place;.
  • the Churches Directory shows entries for all churches (places of worship for any religion and defined by  the congregation rather than the physical building)  that have been identified and recorded so far. Some information about the church including pictures, the presence of cemeteries and key dates of founding or closure is usually recorded and information on any of the standard topics can be added about a church.
  • the main Gazetteer contains locational information (varying from the approximate to the precise) about named places, mainly towns and villages and the relationship of that place to the 4 level hierarchy (especially parishes). 

The key relationships are:

  • information under the Churches topic in a parish place page will be sourced from the Churches Directory and automatically show a link in the standard view of that parish page.
  • all locational information in place pages (eg the reference under Maps topic) depends on the corresponding entry in the Gazetteer.
  • The "Nearby" links  in all three elements rely on the Gazetteer.

Searches of each element are separate. For Core GENUKI this is mostly generated from the central top box on all core pages. There are  separate start pages for the Churches Directory and the Gazetteer. There is also access to a more detailed gazetteer of smaller places from the "Place Search"  link on many pages.