Operations and Maintenance Manual

Transcription

1 CUED Online Computing Help Systems Project Operations and Maintenance Manual Revision 1 (June 2010) Pavee Tansirikongkol CUED Online Computing Help Systems Technical Documentation 1

2 Introduction The current pilot system is located at It is a WordPress installation customised to meet the needs of the CUED online computing help system. This document is designed for system and site administrators who will be responsible for setting up the pilot tested system in a production environment. It attempts to give adequate information for an experienced administrator to setup and maintain the system. Basic understanding of PHP, HTML, CSS and general server administration is assumed. It is useful to have had played with WordPress before. This document does not give information about how to extensively modify a WordPress theme, or further customise the installation. Such information can be found on the WordPress Codex at System Setup The WordPress basic requirements are outlined in The current pilot test system is running Apache 2.2.8, PHP and MySQL on OpenSuSE. In addition to the default setup, the following have been enabled because they are required by WordPress, its optional features or extensions: Apache mod_rewrite (for custom permalinks) PHP zlib extension (for automated updates) PHP curl extension (for WP Stats Dashboard extension) UTF8 (Unicode) collation is used on the database. File system structure By default OpenSuSE uses /srv/www/htdocs as the directory which Apache serves files from. Hence, the WordPress files may be found on /srv/www/htdocs/wordpress/ of the pilot system. The files which have been modified are in the wp content/themes/cam/ and wp content/plugins directories. House style The house style files are in wp content/themes/cam/. The files on the pilot system have been heavily modified from the package from kla21. More information about the work on the house style for WordPress can be found on the UCS Web Support wiki at The main files are: homepage.php the home page file single.php the display posts file header.php included on all files CUED Online Computing Help Systems Technical Documentation 2

3 footer.php included on all files search.php the display search results file searchform.php included on all files which has a search box tag.php the display all posts with a particular tag file loginpane.php included on all files which has a login section functions.php a file which is automatically included by WordPress and contains customised functions for building customised navigation menus, etc. This file is commented. info_for.php a template to display each of the Information for pages page.php the default template which pages without specially assigned templates default to (unmodified from house style skeleton and needs tweaking before using, e.g. for operators pages ) news.php a template to display the news posts wwwh custom.css the CSS file which contains all the modifications from the default house style template from kla21. CSS files which are linked to later in the page (wwwh custom.css is the last CSS file to be linked to in the header) take precedence. See the WordPress Codex for more information on how to customise the theme. Adapting the House Style Layouts have been modified from the house theme skeleton to be cleaner and more suitable for use with the CUED help system. Currently, things work this way: The home page (homepage.php) uses buildinfoformenu() function (a customised function defined in functions.php) to build up the list of Information for menu. Pages which are listed here are child pages of the Information for page (see next section on WordPress basics and the training documentation for content writers). The functions.php file has been commented to make the understanding of Wordpress easier. The latest post with category Homepage message will be displayed on the front page (currently no posts are defined with this category, hence no message is currently present in the centre area of the home page). The latest 2 posts with category news and events messages are displayed on the top right of the home page in the News and events area. The latest post with category Live support message will be displayed under contact live support on the home page. Currently it is Please call xxxxxx and talk to or click here to file a support form. The house theme has a default display:block CSS definition for images, meaning they go on a new line. To override this, display:inline is needed. The tagline (found under administrative backend > Settings > General) should be left blank as having one will cause the theme to not display correctly. Understanding WordPress See Chapter 6.1 of the final project report for the outline of the main features. CUED Online Computing Help Systems Technical Documentation 3

4 Similar to other CMS, WordPress uses the concept of posts and pages. A post is designed for more dynamic contents which can have keywords, categories and dates associated with them while a page is intended for more static contents. Individual help articles (e.g. Prerequisites for Offsite access ) are published as posts while portals (e.g. Information for staff and Site Index ) are pages. Pages (including the home page) have the ability to list other posts and pages matching a certain criteria, and to include custom PHP codes. Backend introduction The screenshot below shows the site backend. All the administrative tasks (e.g. writing new posts, pages, moderating comments, elevating users permissions, etc.) are performed here. Currently no Raven linked accounts are marked as site administrators. Hence, the way to access the administrative backend as an administrator is to navigate to login.php and login using the username administrator, which is a local administrator account not linked to Raven. Clicking login from the main site will redirect users to the Raven authentication. It is then possible to mark other users (generated by Raven) as site administrators under Users. Logins by Raven authenticated users can be done by the login link from the main site. Users are to be assigned to one of the following roles: CUED Online Computing Help Systems Technical Documentation 4

5 Administrator perform WordPress and module updates, modify source codes and build templates (2 3 IT staff responsible for managing the help system) Editor globally publish, edit and delete posts (IT staff who are of the editorial policies) Author publish, edit and delete own posts (IT staff who are new or rarely write) Contributor write (pending moderation) and edit own posts (assigned to non IT staff and some keen students) Subscriber comment and read contents marked as local users only (all Raven authenticated users are automatically given this privilege level by default) Writing content The screenshot below displays a page which is for writing a new post. WordPress extensions in use WordPress has the ability to install additional extensions to add (or modify) the functionalities of the CMS. The current pilot system extensively uses extensions to make the system suit the needs of CUED. From the backend, plugins can be installed from the plugin pane. The tools and settings panes give access to some features enabled by plugins. The following plugins are in use: Auto Anchor List CUED Online Computing Help Systems Technical Documentation 5

6 Breadcrumb NavXT Custom Field Template Front end Editor HeadSpace2 Link to Post Search Unleashed Session Manager Shibboleth This module provides support for Raven authentication over Shibboleth. Raven authentication is enabled by the local Shibboleth SP daemon and a WordPress plugin. The plugin forwards the login request to the daemon which communicates with Raven. At the first login, a user account is automatically created in WordPress with a random password. The next time the same user logs in, the plugin automatically uses the stored password to login to WordPress. Shibboleth authentication requires the configuration of the server to become a Shibboleth Service Provider. There is an official repository for OpenSUSE 11.0 (as used on the pilot test system server). The plugin will cause the whole Wordpress directory to give an error 500 if there isn t Shibboleth Service Provider software installed. This can be corrected by the settings it adds in.htaccess. o Installation instructions here: and o For OpenSUSE, configuration files are: CUED Online Computing Help Systems Technical Documentation 6

7 o /etc/apache2/conf.d/shib.conf The paths which needs to be Shibboleth protected will need to be specified in the shibboleth.xml configuration. This is in the <path name= secure authtype= shibboleth requiresession= true />. The WordPress module may require lazy something. It is possible to automatically give Raven authenticated users roles other than subscriber. This is done by using the attributes released by Raven over Shibboleth. After logging in, the particular attributes available to the server can be listed: By navigating to, the following is shown for an undergraduate student belonging to St Catharine s college: affiliation: member@cam.ac.uk;member@eresources.lib.cam.ac.uk instid: CATHUG jdinst: CATHUG misaffiliation: student ou: St Catharine's College Undergraduates There are still some problems. Tiny Tags TinyMCE Advanced WP PageNavi WP PostViews WP Print WP AutoSuggest WP Hide Dashboard hide dashboard/ CUED Online Computing Help Systems Technical Documentation 7

8 WP Hide Dashboard plugin hides the backend dashboard (a page which gives the status about latest comments, posts, pages, etc.) from users with subscriber role. This is so with the control panel, the only thing they can do is edit their own profile. Moving to the real web server All the administrator/root passwords on the pilot system are known to Tim Love. The following steps are needed to create a working installation on the real system: 1. Make sure that the real web server meets the WordPress requirements outlined earlier, including all the Apache and PHP modules required. 2. Copy across all files in /srv/www/htdocs/wordpress to the real web server. 3. Exporting the database from the current pilot system 4. Importing the database to the MySQL server 5. Modifying the wp config.php file accordingly (namely DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_HOST). The pilot system is designed so that the files can be copied and the database exported. Other known issues and points These are additional issues which have been noted with the pilot test system. Should this system be implemented, this information may become useful to the users and administrators. The WYSIWYG editor sometimes has a display problem. A refresh of the whole page will fix this, but do not forget to save your work before pressing the refresh button. er_place is useful CUED Online Computing Help Systems Technical Documentation 8