Joomla User Guide

Articles are site content like help guides, news articles or anything on the site not in the notes, events, members or documents directories

If you are logged in and have editor, manager or administrator level access, every page in the front of the site has an ‘edit this page’ link at the bottom.

You can also create a new article by clicking Submit Article. In both instances you get to the edit screen.

IEdit screen visible when you edit an article.

The buttons are similar to Word. In order they are: bold, italic, underline, strikethru, align (centre, left, right), indent, remove indent, numbered list, bullet list, add link, remove link, add image, format (ie heading 1, paragraph, etc), spell-check, cut,

copy and paste and view code. Some of these have extra options which you can see by clicking on the little blue arrow next to them.

One thing to beware – common to most websites – is if you copy and paste text from MS Word it comes with weird formatting. You should use the ‘paste as plain text’ option which will strip out the MS Word – or other – formatting (right). You can then add formatting as needed.

Almost all management of members is done thru CiviCRM. To access it login into the /administrator section of the website and choose CiviCRM from the Components menu.

This loads up CiviCRM. If you are looking for details on a member, begin to type part of their name in the search box in the left hand corner. After a few seconds this will bring up suggested contacts – click on the one you want and this user’s full record will load.

On the user’s record you can view (by clicking on the tabs) membership and payment history (called ‘Contributions’), notes and contact details. Clicking the ‘Accreditation’ word at the bottom will reveal their accreditation details provided at sign-up – and if they wish to appear in the directory or receive the newsletter. By clicking on the ‘Actions’ button, you can send an email, record a note, print a letter. By clicking the ‘Edit’ button, you can edit any of the details for this member (including opting them out of newsletters and the member directory. You can of course also Delete the member. The only thing this record doesn’t contain is their login password and access level (ie if they are a website administrator).

If you click on the Membership tab, you can see the type of membership the contact has, when they became a member and when their account will expire – and edit these details. Members are currently set to be either:

• Pending – meaning payment has not yet arrived
• New – the first 3 months of active membership
• Current – normal active membership
• Grace – one month after membership has expired
• Expired – no up-to-date membership.

They can also be set to cancelled or deceased if you don’t wish to delete the record from the database in that event for some reason.

There are a few simple screens where you can view recent activity on the site.

Contributions -> Dashboard will list all recent payments including pending ones and failed payments:

Members -> Dashboard will list all Members, both by type and in order of recently paid

You can also view any form of member date thru the Search menu, in particular Search -> Advanced Search. The Reports menu also has a number of pre-configured membership/donation reports.

CiviCRM is large, but the basic functions you need to use to work it are pretty straightforward, so there’s no rush to explore the more powerful aspects like groups and mailings until you are comfortable with the basics. There is a full free book about using CiviCRM here – http://book.civicrm.org/user/ – and 9 times out of a 10, Googling, “how do I XXX a XXX on CiviCRM” will bring up a guide, explanation or forum response.

How to record a payment for a membership

If a member has chosen to pay later thru cheque or bank transfer during the online signup or renewal process, two pending transactions will appear on their account – a pending payment, and a pending memberhsip. Once the payment (known as a Contribution in CiviCRM) has been received you can record it against their account and their Membership Record will automatically become active.

To do this, bring up the member record (enter their name in the top-left search box), then click on the Contribution Tab. If the contact has already created a ‘pay later’ membership account or renewal then you will see this as a Pending (Incomplete Transaction) and can click edit on that line. If the contact hasn’t done this (maybe they posted in a form or met you in person), you would just click ‘Record Contribution’ to record a payment from them. Both of these will take you to Contribution screen:

Here you can:

• Record the payment type (credit card, cash, cheque, electronic funds transfer), amount and date
• Change the ‘contribution status’ from Pending to Completed
• Opt to automatically send a receipt to the contributor
• You can also record a note, or more info about the source of the money.

When you have done all this, click save and the Contribution and the Membership will both get updated.<

How to update a contact’s Membership

You can edit memberships in just the same way – first go to the user’s contact record, click the membership tab, and either edit their existing membership or create a new membership.

To add a new membership entirely, click the Add Membership button, which can let you record a Contribution (ie a payment) at the same time. The only thing you nehaved to include is the start date and the membership type – the rest will be created automatically – or you can add.

To edit a membership (say, if you wanted to give a member an extra year’s membership, or change their member type), click edit next to the name of their membership. On this screen you can change the date, member type and send them a confirmation and receipt at the same time if you wish.

NB: The status overide option lets you change someone, say, from Pending to New. However they will stay New forever, so it’s better to change their status by either recording a payment, or making sure their date of membership is valid (ie a member who is Expired, will automatically become Current if you change their start and end dates to cover today’s date. This screen will also include all of that member’s membership contributions.

You can export any group of members as mailing labels or a csv file that can be opened in Excel or Access.

Login to the site and CiviCRM and then select ‘manage groups’ in the Contacts menu.

The top group on the list is ‘Active Members’ which is prepared to include all current members. Click on ‘contacts’ to the right to see a list of them all with a menu at the top that lets you perform actions on the group.

Click the button next to ‘All’ to select all the records then use the menu to chose your action – send an email, create a mail-merge letter, export contacts or create mailing labels. Once chosen, hit Go.

You will then be able to make further changes. For instance for making the Mailing Labels, you can chose the Avery label type, and to merge addresses at the same address.

When you click ‘Make Mailing Labels’ you will be able to save the PDF to your computer.

Conversely with ‘Export Contacts’ the system will export basic info about each contact as a .csv file – with some options offered before the expore. You can chose to select other fields to be exported if the ‘primary info’ in that export is not enough.

As well as the CiviCRM records for every member, there will be a website User Login consisting of a username, password, email-address and access settings (ie administrator, content editor, normal user, practitioner who is able to to post a directory entry). It is the email address that connects the User Login with CiviCRM.

User records are managed thru User Manager. Login thru the back of the site and go to menu User -> User manager. Here is a list of all user accounts – regardless of whether they still have a valid membership or not. You can search for a specific member thru the search box, or click the column headings to sort members by ‘last login’ date or register date to see who is new.

• If someone has forgotten their username you can see it for them here in the column username.
• If they have forgotten their password, depending on their tech skills, you can either send them to the forgotten password page where they can reset their password by entering their email address, or go into the user records and change their password to something new which you can then email them.
• If someone has the right username and password and still can’t login, then make sure that their user account is not disabled or deactivated.
• If their user account still looks fine then check the CiviCRM record for the user. If their membership is not current then they will not be able to login. If they have a different email address in CiviCRM to the one in the User Login account, that might also be the cause, in which case get in touch with the webmaster to resolve the issue.
• It’s also possible that the problem is with the user’s computer. If they have Cookies disabled on their browser then they won’t be able to log in. Perhaps they have the caps lock on or are using a very old (ie Internet Explorer 6 or earlier) web browser. Looking at the ‘last visit date’ in the User Manager can tell you if someone has managed to login before – if they have but are struggling, then perhaps the problem is with their computer