This website is designed to allow everyone in the QMC community to write their own content. If you actually wish to do so you can obtain a CASINO login ID and password by following the CASINO download procedure and ticking the relevant box requesting access to this website. If you don’t want to download CASINO but still wish to contribute please email a request to Mike Towler (
). People joining the site are assigned – at their request and our discretion – to one of the following categories (‘Contributor’ being the default):
- Administrator – can do anything up to and including deleting the entire site (the mysterious ‘vallico’)
- Editor – can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users, and do lots of administrative things (Mike Towler, Neil Drummond, Pablo López Ríos + any responsible volunteers)
- Author – can publish and manage their own posts (initially all members of the Cambridge, UCL, Imperial and Lancaster QMC groups + any responsible volunteers)
- Contributor – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them (they get moderated first).
- Subscriber – somebody who can only manage their profile (presumably so people know who you are if you write comments).
If you are not a member, then you may read everything, and you may make comments at the bottom of most bits of the site (providing we don’t get overwhelmed by spam. There is active spam protection in place – test comments including rude words were immediately trashed so we think this works). And you can Tweet (whatever that involves) and Facebook and Google+ or even email bits of the site by pressing the corresponding ‘Sharing’ buttons at the bottom of most Posts and Pages.
Note that – at least for now – membership of the Discussion Forum is separate from being a member of the main QMC site; to take part in the forum discussion you should follow the instructions here.
First login
Once you become a user (your username will be your real name with an underscore and e.g. any umlauts converted to oe noises e.g. ‘Erwin_Schroedinger’) then you can login using the form in the right hand sidebar (your browser may relocate the form fields to the bottom of the page if it considers your window isn’t wide enough). A grey toolbar will then appear at the top of the page with lots of function buttons. At first login you should edit your profile (hover over the place where it says ‘Hello Erwin’ top right). You can also have your photo or some other symbol as your ‘avatar’ – it should be obvious how to do all of these things.
What can you do?
To create content for the website, click on the ‘+New’ button top left.
If you’re an Admin, it will give you the option to add a new Post (i.e. write some content), new Media (add an image, video, or sound file, or whatever), add a new Page(create a new page for the site which will contain either static content, or the contents of dynamic Posts), add a new FAQ (add an entry for the Frequently Asked Questions page), add a Table (create a HTML Table which can either be incorporated into a static Page/Post), or add a User (as it says) . One can also play with the ‘Dashboard’ where you can configure multifarious options concerning how the site looks.
If you’re an Editor, you can do almost all of this but you can’t add a User, nor can you change the general theme or appearance of the site. There are various useful plugins you can play with – try the stuff in ‘Jetpack’ in the Dashboard. You can also moderate stuff such as Posts and Comments and you can edit other people’s posts.
If you’re an Author, the ‘+New’ button lets you do all the above except Add a Page.
If you’re a mere Contributor, you can just add Posts and FAQs and they will sit in a queue somewhere until one of the Editors or the Admin has moderated it.
Subscribers can’t do anything apart from modify their profile, since the Toolbar doesn’t appear.
What sort of things should you post?
When you write a Post, you should assign it a Category by pressing the appropriate button to the right of the writing area. The Category is currently allowed to be ‘Project’ or ‘Blog’ (with the default being ‘Blog’). A Project post is a brief article intended to give people some idea of what you’re working on at the moment (try to include at the bottom a statement of when the project started and how long you expect it to go on for – as these things can languish on a site for years and can become out-of-date). It could also be an announcement of your recent paper that people can comment on. A Blog Post may be about ‘any topic that a person interested in QMC might reasonably be interested in’, perhaps a discussion of a recent paper, an account of a meeting, a request for help, a nice story.. pretty much anything. Note that if you don’t give the post a Category, then it will not appear on the site other than in ‘Recent Posts’ lists. The ‘Blog’ button on the menu bar has been configured to show all the posts with the ‘Blog’ Category, and the ‘Project’ button on the menu bar shows all the posts with ‘Project’ Category.. It is possible that other Categories could be added in future.
How to write stuff
The writing area gives you a clever word processor with a toolbar above it. You can select text with the mouse, then e.g. make it all italic by pressing the obvious I button in the toolbar (or you can use the standard keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl-I – press the help button in the toolbar to learn what these ‘Hotkeys’ are). You’ll see there are buttons which allow you to switch between ‘Visual’ and ‘Text’ modes – it’s important to understand the difference. The Text mode allows you to directly input text formatted with HTML tags (most useful if you want to paste HTML directly off some other site); Visual mode is a quasi-accurate rendering of how the page will look in a browser which you can still edit directly. It has a much greater variety of editing buttons in the little toolbar (or at least it does if you press the ‘Show/Hide Kitchen Sink’ Button on the right – a setting that appears to be remembered between logins).
You can insert pictures and so on using the ‘Add Media’ button (it assumes these are stored locally, so you may have to Upload them first – it will give you the option to do that) .
You can write complex mathematical equations by enclosing regular Latex commands inside latex tags in Text mode, e.g.:
Any questions, feel free to ask MDT ().