Global Corporations Forum is a collaborative website for research into corporations. It is designed to enable an international team of collaborating researchers. Users with the appropriate permission can add and edit articles on this site, linking them to the Global Corporations Portal on SourceWatch, our encyclopedia-like wiki. We have two levels of user permissions:
- Any "authenticated user" can create or edit blog entries.
- An "administrator" has permission to create new user accounts and can also create other types of articles, such as help pages for this website. If you want to be added as an authenticated user, contact one of the administrators and ask to be assigned a user name and password.
The instructions below focus on how to create blog entries. If you have "administrator" status and want to know how to use those features, see our article on "How to Administer This Website."
How to create a blog entry
First you will have to log in to the website by entering your user name and password in the "user login" block in the right-hand column. Once you are logged in, your username will appear in place of the "user login" block. Below your name, there is a list of things you can do as a logged-in user. For example, clicking on "My blog" will take you to a page listing blog posts that you have written.
To create a new article, begin by clicking on the "Create content" link (highlighted in yellow in the illustration at left). This will then take you to a "Create content" page where you select what type of content you want to create. If you are an authenticated user, the only option is "blog entry," so click on that link. (Users with "bureaucrat" permissions can create and edit other types of content, such as help pages.)
Clicking on the "blog entry" link takes you to a "Submit blog entry" page. This presents you with some fields that should be filled in, and options to be set, when creating your blog post. The most important ones are the "TItle" field and the "Body" field, for the title and body of your blog entry. Below those fields are places where you can set URL path settings, add file attachments, modify authoring information, and set some publishing options.
At the very bottom of the "blog entry page" are three buttons for "Preview," "Submit" and "Delete." The "Submit" button saves your article to the web server. However, you can still edit it further after that if you wish, by clicking on the "Edit" tab that appears directly under the title of the article and looks like this:
Editing the body of your article
Enter the title of your blog entry in the "Title" field, and enter the body of the article in the "body" field. The "body" field is set up to enable "WYSIWYG" editing (what you see is what you get), which works a lot like the editing experience with common word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. The top of the "body" field looks like this:
Styling text
Simply type in the blue area to create the text of your article. The toolbar directly above the blue area provides a number of tools that you can use to change text appearance, add images and hyperlinks to other web pages, etc. For example, you can make text bold, italic or underlined by selecting it and clicking on the letters "B," "I" or "U," which appear in the second row of the toolbar. To make text subscripted or superscripted, click on the the x2 or x2 icon, which look like this:
Alignment and paragraph formatting
To make a paragraph's text align left, right, or centered, click on one of the following three choices. (The current selection — in this case, align left — is highlighted in blue.)
You can also style an entire paragraph in one of several predefined formats by clicking on one of the options from the "Format" pop-up menu. (See example at right.) To specify a large headline, select "Heading 1"; for smaller leadline, select "Heading 2"; etc.
Lists
You can create numbered and bulleted lists, using these icons:
When you click on one of them, it turns each of the paragraphs in your currently-selected text into a separate item in the list.
Adding images
You can also add images to an article by clicking on the "Insert/Edit Image" icon, which looks like this:
This calls up a dialog box that lets you either upload an image or select from an image that you have previously uploaded. It also provides options that control sizing and positioning of the image.
Hyperlinks
To turn a block of selected text into a hyperlink to another web page, use the "Insert/Edit Link" icon, which calls up a dialog box where you can enter the URL to the page you want linked:
Other editing options
Other icons let you indent a block of text; cut, copy and paste; undo your most recent change; search and replace text; insert rows and columns of tabular information; and add emoticons.
Viewing Source HTML
The article that you create is stored in the standard HTML (hypertext markup language) format that is the standard source code for web pages everywhere. If you understand HTML and wish to see and edit it directly, you can do so by clicking on the "Source" icon, which looks like this:
Adding wiki links
If you are experienced with editing wikis, you know that it is possible to create a link to an article simply by placing two square brackets around the name of an article. You can also do that here if you want to link to articles that are part of the Global Corporations portal in SourceWatch. For example, if you save the following text:
[[ExxonMobil]] is an oil company.
It will actually display as follows:
ExxonMobil is an oil company.
You can also use the vertical bar or "pipe" character (|) to create links to SourceWatch articles, while having the text in the article you are creating display something else. For example, if you save the following text:
[[ExxonMobil|A leading oil company]] has funded global warming denial.
It will actually display as follows:
A leading oil company has funded global warming denial.
Additional Fieldsets
Below the "Body" field are several links (called "fieldsets," because clicking on them opens up one or more modifiable fields are usually not displayed). You can use the additional fieldsets to set a URL path setting, add file attachments, modify authoring information, and change some publishing options. (The one you'll probably find most useful is "publishing options," which among other things lets you save something you're writing without publishing it for the world to see.) Usually you can just ignore the additional fieldsets, but here's what they do:
File attachments
Clicking on this link displays a form that you can use to upload file attachments to your blog post, such as spreadsheets or PDF documents.
URL path settings
Global Corp Forum is powered by Drupal, a content management system that saves each article as a "node" with a unique ID number. By default, the URL which points to each article begins "www.globalcorpforum.node/" followed by the node's ID number. For example, this article ("How to Use This Website") has an ID number of 54, so the default URL is http://www.globalcorpforum.org/node/54. When editing an article, however, you can click on the "URL path settings" link and specify an easier-to-remember alternative path. For this article, we have specified a URL path setting of "how_to", so the default URL is http://www.globalcorpforum.org/how_to. Alternate paths can include alphanumeric characters, underscore characters, hyphens and slashes, but should not contain spaces or other punctuation characters.
Authoring information
You can use this to change the "Authored on" date and time for your article. This might be useful, for example, if you start writing an article one day but don't finish and publish it until several days later.
Publishing options
These four check boxes let you specify whether your blog post is published and where it will appear on the website
- Published means that the article is published so other people can read it. If you save it without publishing it, you will still be able to read it and edit it yourself, but it will not be visible for public viewing when other people visit the website.
- Promoted to front page means that a "teaser view" of the article appears on the front page of the the website. By default, the front page of GlobalCorpForum.org displays teaser views of the 10 most recent articles that have been promoted there, with the most recently-authored article published at the top.
- Sticky at top of lists means that the article stays at the top of the page, even if other articles have been authored more recently.
- Create new revision provides a way of saving different versions of an article. This way you can changes but retain the option of reverting to an earlier revision if you need to.
Changing the "Break Point" for Teasers
When you save a blog post, the first few sentences are used as a "teaser" version that displays in various contexts such as the list of recent articles that appears on the front page of this website. The teaser version consists of those first sentences, followed by a "Read more" link that takes people to the full article. The website automatically decides on a break point where the teaser text ends, but you can override the default and set your own break point. To do so, however, you'll need to edit the source code of your article. To do this, click on the "Source" icon at the top of the the "Body" field's toolbar:
This will show you the HTML of your article. Then insert the following code at the break point in your article where you want the teaser to end:
<!--break-->
The code above consists of a less-than symbol (<), followed by an exclamation mark, two hyphens, the word "break," another two hyphens, and a greater-than symbol (>).
Happy editing!
