Your First User and Collection

While developing FromThePage, we've tried to concentrate effort on commonly-done tasks. As a result, reading documents on FromThePage is trivial and transcribing them is straightforward, but uploading them is challenging and creating a site from scratch is beyond perplexing. This is a guide to the post-installation process, or what you do after FromThePage is up and running.

Creating an Administrative User Account.

Sign up for an account under a username which will be used for administrative tasks.

Connect to the MySQL database and find the ID for the user you just created (consult config/database.yml for the relevant username, password, and database values):

 mysql --user=rails --password=rails --database=diary_development

Once you are in the MySQL command line client, look through the users table for the record you just created.

mysql> select id, login from users;

Now look at the ID of that record and use it to make that user an admin user:

mysql> update users set admin=1 where id=100;

Creating a Collection Owner

Sign up for an account under a username which will be used to manipulate works within a collection. This will be a "collection owner" account and will be publicly visible in the "About" screen of the collections page (for public collections). For institutional transcription projects, this might be the institution name or project name, like "Jones Library" or "Jones History Project".

Connect to the MySQL database and convert that user to a collection owner:

mysql --user=rails --password=rails --database=diary_development

Once you are in the MySQL command line client, look through the users table for the record you just created.

mysql> select id, login from users;

Now look at the ID of that record and use it to make that user an owner:

mysql> update users set owner=1 where id=115;

Creating a Collection

1. Log in as the collection owner and click the Dashboard link.
2. Click the "Create an empty collection" link.
3. Type a name for the collection.

Populating the Collection

See Preparing a Work for Transcription