This page contains basic information for all people working on this system on

• what background there was for this new system
• how this new system works
• how to edit articles
• how to classify articles
• how to manage users
• how to deal with common problems (FAQ)

All this information is subject to change as the system develops.

It is only visibsle to content-managers and administrators.

What was the background for the new system ?

The main issue behind creating this new system was to have a content management system which allows

• online creation of articles in order to
  • reduce the time between creating the articles and bringing them online
  • immediately see the results online and reduce errors in production
  • maintain a controlled workflow between editors, classifiers and publisher
• online classification of articles also after production to
  • allow classification by selecting from drop-down lists
  • avoid duplicates in the lists
  • allow controlled adding of new terms to lists
  • allow search through these so called vocabularies
• online management of users with the options to
  • manage your account yourself
  • have paid and free subscriptions
  • pay subscriptions by paypal
• controlled user contribution by starting discussussions on articles by
  • using a forum post system

How does this new system work ?

This new system is based on a content-management system called Drupal which allows most features to be added by the core system and some additional modules.

Due to the fact, that there is one additional layer of program (Drupal) between the data and the output it may seem somewhat slower than the old system.

This system contains all data from the old system in a new display format. Some things look different, but in essence the functionality should be the same only with a lot more options.

In order for editors to understand what we are talking about we need to clarify the meaning of some terms which will appear again lower down.

What is a post ?

A post is any type of content which can be displayed in Drupal. For general use we have different content-types for posts which are

• 3_awr : this is the format used for all AWR articles because it contains all fields necessary to create new articles
• page
• forum post
• story

If you edit a new article or post you will run into additional new terms which are explained in a separate article.

What is a vocabulary ?

One of the main reasons we chose Drupal is its very elaborate taxonomy. This allows to define terms which together form a vocabulary and assign one or more of the terms to each article.

The main advantage of the new system is that this does not need to be done by a complex and error prone process including a faulty parsing program any more, but can be done later by different people as they have time. And it can be done by selecting from predefined drop-down lists instead of having to manually add these to excel-sheets.

By restricting the adding of new items to certain editors we can avoid having duplicate entries in the list which has created a lot of trouble in the past.

The biggest advatage though is the possibility to search via our hierarchichal AWR-index which is unique to Drupal.

Check this article on how to work with vocabularies

How does the navigation work ?

AWR has two types on navigation:

• The main-menu in the left pane which gives access to all general items
• the Arab West Report content navigation in the right pane.

One of the big advantages of Drupal is to organize content into a structure called a "book".  We use this to organize the articles by years and weeks. You can navigate this structure in the right pane by clicking on the year and then on the week and finally on the article.