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Customising taarifa
Taarifa comes with a complete administration section to manage the general platform settings and process user-contributed reports, inherited from the Ushahidi platform. If you’ve used Ushahdi before you should be right at home, if not we’ll now go through customising your Taarifa platform.
The Administrator of the Taarifa platform has two main tasks. Firstly to setup the system, create custom forms, choose the country where the deployment takes place among other small things. Secondly to verify and authorize incoming reports so they can be published. However first, you’ll need to log in!
Once you’ve installed Taarifa you’ll be taken to the login screen, as shown in Figure Six.
TODO Fig. 6 Login Screen
Here you would enter your administrator credentials, which for new installations are; Username: admin / Password: admin
You’ll now be presented with the administrator dashboard, Figure Seven. If you’re loggin in from the home screen, click the ‘login’ button in the top right corner, or goto www.yourtaarifaaddress/admin
You should be logged in now, and be able to see the administrator dashboard, Figure Seven.
TODO Fig. 7 Administrator Dashboard
The dashboard allows for easy access to the reports, settings, user management and help for Taarifa, from a central page. On this page on the left hand side there are five tabs, Dashboard [1], Reports [2], Messages[3], Stats [4] and Addons[5]. These tabs are to manage user reports and to understand report attributes. On the right hand side, there are three main ‘tabs’ namely; Settings [8], Manage[9] and Users[10] for configuring your Taarifa installation. The top bar [7] allows you to log out, view the main page, whereas below the help section [6] directs to you to Taarifa’s help resources.
Wiki is for code documentation, as such it is hosted on Github, our source code repository. Found here: https://github.com/taarifa/Taarifa_Web/wiki
FAQs directs to the http://help.taarifa.org site, a community driven question and answer site. This acts as a bridge between developers and end users. Forum directs to our Google group site, also acting as a mailing list. Found here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/taarifa-dev. Registration is required, but is automatic.
The settings tab, allows you to configure how the Taarifa instance itself works, allowing configuration of the website, linking to Facebook apps, SMS features and map configuration among other features. Clicking the settings tab, takes to you first to Website tab, Figure Eight.
TODO Fig. 8 Settings Configuration Panel
General note: Ensure to save your settings by clicking the ‘Save Settings’ button, otherwise your configuration will be lost. Every time one of the settings is changed it is required to save the settings again.
Also, the documentation here is attempting to be a comprehensive introduction to the Taarifa platform, it is possible that a feature has not been fully described in this guide, however is documented within the Ushahidi community. Please look at Ushahidi’s documentation at http://community.ushahidi.com/resources/, or alternatively, use http://help.taarifa.org
The Website page is the one where the administrator chooses the main appearance settings of the Ushahidi platform, mainly the characteristics of the homepage, the main navigation, and the contact information.
This is the main title that appears on the right side of the your homepage and it should be the title of your project.
This is the tagline that appears below the title on the homepage, this should give a
succinct but detailed description of what the platform is about or what the platform intends to monitor or show.
This is the email address that will be shown in the Information Box on the homepage, which is the one that users will use to email you information or reports. This email address is publicly displayed on the website, so do not to use a personal address. To have this function working you need to configure the email account settings by clicking on the “configure your email account settings”.
TODO Fig. 9 Site Settings Configuration Panel
This is the address that will send the Alerts via email. It is possible to use the same address configured in the Site Email Address section above. #
The Site Message is an optional message that you can add on the top of your user page and that can be used for different purposes.
The Copyright message is where you can let your users know what kind of copyright license your platform submitted is under. This then appears at the bottom of the homepage.
Here you have the ability to change the language of your deployment, based upon the language packs available. Currently, English and French (to a varying degree) is supported.
Here is where you can decide to have the Contact Us page in the main Toolbar in the homepage.
This is where you can choose how many items will be displayed in the pages opened by the user, such as the Reports page or the News Feeds page.
This is where you can choose how many items will be displayed in the Admin page, like the Reports page or the Message page.
You can decide to have the Submit Reports in the main toolbar on the homepage to allow users to submit report using the online form. If the NO is selected, the page will not be available for users to submit reports directly on line, but they will still be able to send emails to the address showed on the homepage or to send SMS if configured.
Here is where you can decide to have the Comments function in the Report page. If the “no” is selected, the users will not be able to comments on reports uploaded in the Ushahidi platform.
This is where you can decide if you want to have the RSS Feeds Box displayed on the homepage.
Website statistics are stored on a server controlled by Ushahidi, for the time being. When enabling this option, you also gain access to hit statistics directly in your admin panel.
This is the function that combines the individual report markers in the same area on the map to display as a clustered dot displaying the number of individual reports in said cluster. This function allows one to see how a certain area is affected as compared to other areas. Once the user zooms in on the map the clustering disappears, while the more you zoom out the more the dots get clustered together.#
This is the color of the All Categories tab. As default this color is set to #CC0000 (red). To change the color just click on the tab and use the pop up window that will appear to choose another color.
The administrator may decide whether to cache# pages and reports on the website. This is particularly helpful when working with low-bandwidth internet connections, or in areas where internet connection may be patchy.
If caching is enabled, here the administrator may set how long the pages are cached for before users visiting pages on the website should be served a new version of the page rather than the cached version saved on their computer.
This function allows the administrator to make the platform visible to Google Analytics by inserting the proper ID. For more on Google Analytics see here: http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html
This tab allows you to enter the Twitter hashtag(s) connected with the platform. It is possible to choose more than one hashtag, separated by a comma. Your chosen hashtag(s) will also appear on the Information Box on the homepage so that people can use it to tweet messages related to your platform. These tweets then appear in the Messages tab for the administrator to transform into reports.
The Akismet Key allows the administrator to have Akismet pre-screening the messages coming in to look for spam. To be able to use this function the administrator needs to be registered for a WordPress account and get a free API key.
The map configuration panel, configures settings related to maps and geospatial location. The default base map for the Taarifa platform is Open Street Map, focused on Kenya, as an homage to where the Ushahidi platform was written, however can be easily changed to any country or location of your choice, as shown in Figure Ten.
The Map Setting page has three main components:
- Default Location
- Map provider
- Configure Map
TODO Fig. 10 Map Configuration Panel
Here is where you can set up the country that you want your map to display in the homepage. The scroll down menu allows you to select a country, and the function to say whether the deployment spans multiple countries. It is strongly recommended that this feature is set to [YES]. Below the scroll down menu you can set up your Taarifa instance to include different countries, also retrieving cities from the web service ‘Geonames’ - http://www.geonames.org/ - to have them displayed in the scroll down menu in your report form.
This section allows you to select which type of base map you want for your project. This section guides you step by step in the setting up of the base map. There are four default providers: Google map#, Yahoo Map, OpenStreetMap and Bing Maps. The Taarifa community recommends using OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the map provider. We do this as OSM is a freely, editable map of the world, a wiki for maps in effect. The level of detail and quality of data, in our opinion, surpasses all other map providers. However we recognise that choice is a good thing, hence the provision for other map providers.
This section of the Map page allows you to choose the default zoom level of the map appearing in the main homepage. Use the slider to select your zoom level, and click on the map, to place a marker for where you wish the centre to be, the latitude and longitude will then be updated.
The manage tab allows the administrator to adapt the site to their particular purpose, creating categories, custom forms, pages and integrating news feeds into the instance. The
TODO Fig. 11 Manage Categories Page
The Categories page is where the categories of the reports can be set up. The default Ushahidi page has default categories set up which can be deleted and substituted with the ones chosen by the administrator of the project. 18 The categories list shows the name of the category[1], the description below the name[2], the color of the category on the side or the icon[3] and on the far end of the raw the actions that could be done: Edit[4], Visible[5], and Delete[6]. To delete a category just click on the Delete tab, and a confirmation message will appear: by confirming the action the category will be permanently deleted. To edit a category click on the Edit tab, and the characteristic of the selected category will appear on the far end of the page, in the section called Add/Edit. It’s possible to change [7] the name of the category[7], the description[8], the color[9], the parental relationship with other categories[10] and icon[11]. Click on Save to save the new characteristic of the category[12]. To create a new category fill the boxes in the Add/Edit section and then save the settings. It is also possible to do this by clicking on the Add New tab on the side of the Category tab on the Toolbar[13]. All the fields are required except for the Icon one. The Parental Category tab allows you to create sub-categories: if left on “Top Level Category” the category will be a main one, and be shown as such in the homepage under all categories. If you want to create a sub-category, you need to select in the scroll down menu the Top Category under which you wants to add as sub-category. The subcategories will not show up in the category list on the homepage automatically, but only when the user selects the Top Level Category under which the sub-one is listed.
See section 4.1.2 for info on how to see reports by category in the Homepage You can add as many categories or subcategories as you wish, but only one level of subcategory is allow. The Ushahidi platform will list the categories in alphabetical order: to choose a different order, add a number in front of the category name, or a letter, and the system will automatically order the numbers/letters in ascendant order. After having inserted, deleted or edited the categories on this page, save the settings by clicking on the Save tab at the bottom of the page.