Website
From The Star And Shadow Cinema Wiki
The Star And Shadow Cinema website has recently been updated. This involved a complete re-write of the site, including the styling and the functionality. Here are some instructions on how to use the new version, from a couple of different viewpoints.
Contents |
Data Structure
The site database contains several different types of item.
Pages
The simple pages of unchanging text, for example the "The Venue" and "Get Involved" pages.
Simple Programming Items
Films, Gigs, Meetings and Events are simple items. Films, Gigs and Meetings are self-explanatory. Events are generic events that are not gigs or films.
Complex Programming Items
A Festival is an item that covers a particular period and is associated with several simple programming items. For example a Festival might run over a weekend, from a Friday to Sunday, and contain three Films and a Gig.
A Season is a thematically linked set of Films, running over a particular extended period.
Statuses
Programming items are either confirmed or not. Unconfirmed items do not appear in the publically visible sections of the site, they are only visible to logged-in users under the programming section.
Items can also be flagged as private. This is intended for events that will not be open to the public. They are visible in the public sections of the site but will show as "Private Event".
Visitor
Visitors to the site will arrive at the home page. This contains some basic information about the cinema, including where it is and how to get there. It also contains a list of "featured" upcoming events. They can click on those events to see more information.
There are several other pages, linked to on the main menu on the left. For example there is a "Sign Up" page with information about how to join our various email lists. There is an "Our Work" page which contains links to other content on the site which has been produced by volunteers, for example film reviews.
To see what is on at the cinema there is the "What's On" menu on the left. This contains links to pages which list the events for several periods: "Today", "This Week", "Next Week", "This Month" and "Next Month". Each of those shows a box for each day in the period, and each box contains a box for each event on that day. Clicking on a box takes the visitor to the page for that event. Some of those pages will have links to other related events; for example to other films in the same film season.
Volunteer
Volunteers can register to create an account on the website. Once they have done this they can log in and edit and create content on the site. There are two types of account: normal and admin. Normal users can add content and edit their own content. Admin users can additionally edit all content, mark events as "confirmed", and change the ownership of events.
If a logged in user can edit a given event there will be an "edit" link on the event's page, next to the title. This will take them to an edit form where the various fields on the event object can be modified.
The Admin menu on the left is only visible to logged in users.
Programme
From the "Programme" page a user can add new events, or see a report of the current programme for a given month. The current month and year is highlighted in the table on this page.
The monthly programme report shows a row for each day in the month, and a sub-row for each event on that day. Mondays and Tuesdays are highlighted on the table to indicate the fact that the cinema is normally closed.
The "confirmed" and valid status of the events is indicated on this table. "Confirmed" indicates whether or not a programming meeting has approved the event. "Valid" is currently unused (and always set to true). In future the "valid" status will depend on whether the event has a valid budget form associated with it.
The monthly programming info can also be viewed in a plain text format for copying and pasting into other software. This is reachable from the "View as plain text" link at the top of the report table.
Volunteers
The volunteers page shows information about the registered users on the site, with a summary box for each user. Clicking on the box will take you to a more detailed page, which also lists all of the events that that user is responsible for. The user's details can be edited on this page by the user themselves, or by an admin user.
Meetings
This page lists meetings and their associated minutes. This section is currently empty, but will be populated soon.
My Profile
This link takes the user directly to their own volunteer profile page. This is the same page that is linked to in the Volunteers section mentioned above.
Technical
The site is written in Django, a web development framework written in Python. It is hosted on a server belonging to one of our volunteers.
The code is hosted on google code. If you would like access please submit a request through that page. You can also view and add bug reports.
The site is using Google Analytics, and our traffic stats can be viewed using the Cinema's Google account.
