Using Preferences and Customizing OWLS 1.0

OWLS can be customized according to the needs of the educator. By clicking on the "Preferences" link from the workshop homepage, various features may be activated or customized.

Site Title - You may indicate the title of your language workshops by changing this form. For example, the title of a class or a web page may be entered here e.g. "Italian 101"

Administrator Name - Enter the administrators name here. While currently few of the pages make use of this, later this will be a way for the author or maintainer of the site and its exercises to display there name throughout the site.

Email Contact - This should be the email address of the administrator who can be contacted for help.

Encoding - The OWLS software works best with Unicode but if you need to deliver all the web pages with a particular encoding for your web pages for non-Roman languages, enter the exact HTML encoding here. e.g. "UTF-8" is used for Unicode.

Active Workshops - Here is a list of currently installed workshops. You may deactivate certain workshops in this list to prevent them from being displayed in the list of the workshop index or their exercises from being displayed on the exercise page. This does not affect the files themselves and re-activating workshops will cause those exercises to be displayed once more on the exercise page. Also note - if individual workshops have their own preferences or options, such as the glossary workshop, these will be accessable from an "Options" link next to the name of the workshop here.

Front Body / Exercise / Reading Page Contents - By default OWLS puts a small introductary paragraph of information on the front page, the exercise page and the reading index pages of the site. Some educators will want to customize the contents of these pages. If they can write HTML or can use a program such as Dreamweaver, GoLive, or FrontPage to create formatted HTML and copy this raw HTML, they may replace the default contents of these pages with their own content. Note there is currently no built in method for returning to the original default so consider copying and saving the default content elsewhere if you think you might with to return to it later.

Changing the Password - The password for the site is not highly secure and all educators should keep their site backed up in the unlikely case someone tries to tamper with the site's contents. However, the password will keep most students and viewers from deleting or modifying content on the site. If you need to change the password, as you should on occasion for security, you may do so by entering a new password, then confirming this new password.

Manage Workshops - This advanced option is for use by programmers who wish to completely delete or add new workshops to the OWLS software. Additionally if an educator finds that a programmer has designed a glossary workshop far superior to the one contained in the OWLS software that educator has installed, they may use this function to delete the glossary workshop in the site and replace it with the the one they have found elsewhere. See Adding or Deleting Workshops for more information.

Finally, to save any of these changes, enter the password (the old password if you have submitted a new one) and click on the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page.

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OWLS is a free open-source project created by Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Visit the OWLS homepage for more information.
owls@foolsworkshop.com

Last Updated: October 28, 2002