dotCommunity Documentation

Welcome to the dotCommunity documentation.

dotCommunity is a toolkit that provides large numbers of websites for whoever the site owner allows, centralised and administered within the same web service. The toolkit was developed by Cambridge Open Systems. For information on the purpose and features of dotCommunity refer to the about dotCommunity page.

The documentation for dotCommunity is provided as a reference manual which comprises most of the sections of this site, and a set of short guides, also available on this site. To view the available quick start guides and get help with the more common tasks users usually try to carry out in dotCommunity read the Helpsheets section.

The reference manual is broken down into a number of concepts.

The first section provides information about dotCommunity and an explanation of the associated concepts and the terminology used in the service and this documentation.

There are sections dedicated to each kind of administrator, covering their role within the site and the functionality they have available to them:

• Community Website Administrators - Users who own and manage a website within dotCommunity should read the Community Administrators Section.
• Section Administrators - Administrators who have responsibility over a sub-section of the site but are not sitewide administrators should read the Area Administrators Section.
• Top Level Administrators - Owners of an entire dotCommunity instance who have the most capability to configure it should read the Sitewide Administrators Section.

Within dotCommunity every website has access to a large number of pre-configured web applications, all of which are documented in the Applications section.

All websites also have the ability to create free-form custom web-pages, which is documented in the section covering the Content Management System.

At the bottom of each page is a listing of the sub-areas within that section, as below.