Running your community site
Your site has a public side that everyone sees, and an admin side for the people who look after it. Signing in as an administrator gives you a dashboard, with everything below in the left-hand menu.
You do not have to set it all up at once. A site with a few members and one page of information is a perfectly good start.
What you can do
Everything here is in the admin menu once you sign in. Start wherever is most useful.
Members
People create their own account and ask to join your community; you approve them. You can see who has joined, approve or decline requests, and remove someone if you need to.
News, blog and articles
Three kinds of writing, each with its own section on your public site: news for announcements, blog for informal posts, and articles for longer pieces.
Posts can wait for approval before they appear, so a member can contribute without being able to publish unreviewed.
Events
Publish your gatherings and festivals with a date, a description and an image. Members can see what is coming up, and events can also be put forward to appear on the UK-wide site.
Groups
Smaller circles inside your community — a youth group, a music group, a football team. Each has its own members and its own discussions, and someone can be made a moderator to look after one.
Your committee page
A page showing who runs the community, with photographs, roles and contact details, grouped into categories such as executive committee or advisors.
The look of your site
You control the parts of your site that make it yours: the home banner, the highlight cards on the front page, the About page, the footer, and which sections appear in the navigation menu.
Approvals, settings and ownership
Anything waiting for a decision — posts, events, membership requests — collects in one approvals queue.
Community settings hold your organisation’s name, address and branding. If the committee changes, ownership of the site can be transferred to a different administrator.
If you get stuck
Get in touch and ask. It is better to ask than to leave your site half set up.