Specialized functions are provided in Utility Functions menu below.
It is unlikely that most administrators will need to use these options (web-site visitors of course will never even see them!) but a brief explanation is provided below for each function.
Configure Database
NeatClubs allows you to customize the information stored about members. The setup of your membership database governs the information that will be requested from people on registration. Click here to learn more about the database field setup.
PLESK Control Panel
PLESK is a full-featured server management package that allows NeatWorx customers self-administer e-mail accounts and configure other settings for their website. for non-technical users, administering PLESK can be challenging, If you need any assistance, please contact support@neatworx.com. We're more than happy to perform these operations for you. A short overview of how PLESK can be used to self-administer e-mail accounts is provided in the manual section "Managing E-Mail Accounts".
Import Members
This option allows you to pre-load the member database directly from a CSV (comma separated values) file. These files can easily be produced from Microsoft Excel. At the time of this writing, while the import from CSV function works well, it can be tricky to use. The intent of the function is to facilitate a “one time” database load from a foreign database system. If you need to load a member database, it is recommended that you contact support@neatworx.com so that we can help you through this process. Please note that employing this function improperly has the potential to corrupt your member database so please be careful!
Export Members
This utility provides a way to export your core membership database into Microsoft Excel format. It is safe to use this facility anytime. A separate “Export to Excel” function is provided at the Event Management level as well that allows you to download registration records in Excel format that are specifically associated with an event For class registrations all registrations associated with a session can also be exported.
Validate Members
If you have enabled an integration with governing body registration services from ITSportsNet or e-Sport, this is a utility that allows you to verify that member validation is function properly before you build registration rules that rely on the systems ability to validate member status.
Test E-Mail Functions
NeatClubs.COM web-sites are design to initiate e-mail directly from the web server. It is this capability that allows the site to directly send e-mail confirmations following registrations, send newsletters and send forgotten passwords by e-mail. The E-mail setup is normally configured once under System Setup / Preferences / E-Mail Setup. The Test E-Mail Function allows you to send an e-mail from the site to verify that e-mail is being send properly.
Generate Thumbnails
Whenever a graphic image is uploaded into the Photo Gallery, thumbnail graphics in various sizes are created automatically. These small graphic images are created regardless of whether an image is resized by the user on upload. Thumbnails allow pictures to load more quickly since they are appropriately sized for applications such as photo galleries and side panel graphics.
When images are uploaded, they will appear in a directory called “uploads” accessible via the web as http://mywebsitesite.com/uploads/mypicture.jpg. Thumbnail graphics corresponding to each uploaded image will be stored in a directory called “thumbs” accessible as http://mywebsite.com/thumbs/tb_mypicture.gif. Regular sized thumbnails will be 150 pixels wide and will be prefixed with “tb_”. Very small thumbnails with a width of 60 pixels will also be generated and stored with the prefix “vstb_”. Other specialized thumbnail images will have other suitable pre-fixes.
As long as the MySQL database is intact, and the uploaded file exists in the uploads directory, thumbnails can be re-generated automatically. Depending on the number of images files that need to be processed, this function may take some time to run. Your website may appear to hang after selecting this option. This is normal since the process of rebuilding these graphics is computationally intensive. Please do not perform this operation unless it is necessary since it can slow down our web-servers and may affect visitors to your website as well as other websites that we are hosting.
Google Sitemaps
This is a convenience function that allows you to automatically generate a Google XML format sitemap. Google recommends that XML sitemap files in their own format be used to represent data to Google. Your Google site map file is viewable, and by default will be located at the URL http://mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml. As a part of our service, NeatWorx submits web-sites to Google and creates this sitemap.xml file automatically. Advanced users may wish to examine the sitemap.xml, file or engage other experts in search-engine optimization (SEO) to drive traffic to your web-site.
Bulk Delete Members
This utility allows you to delete all member profiles in a selected member category.
SQL Command
This convenience function allows Neatworx to run an SQL statement against the database instance associated with the website. Since this capability can result in damage to the database or loss of data, it is protected by an additional secure system level password. We do not currently allow our customers to manipulate the SQL database directly, although we are happy to make copies of the database available upon request in MySQL dump format if customers want to perform database manipulation against a copy of our database.
Search and Replace
This is a convenience function that makes it easy to find occurrences of a particular string in any of your documents or menu options and replace that string with a different value.
If for any reason you need to change your website domain name, this function is handy since it allows the website URL that appears in many documents and menu settings to be changed automatically to the new URL saving tedious editing. Since this function has the potential to corrupt the database as well, it too is protected by a secure system level password.
This facility is intended to be used only by NeatWorx personnel in the cource of providing customer support.
View Problems
NeatClubs.COM incorporates a simple problem tracking system - while this was developed for our own use, customers are welcome to use it for their own purposes to track problems with the web-site and allow users of their community a way to report the problems. Please see Implementing Problem Reporting under Advanced Topics for additional information on this feature.
Reset Member Password
This function is available to the administrator and allows a new password to be assigned to a user. If this function is invoked, the user will be sent a secure system generated password by e-mail. They may then invoke the “Change my Password” option after they login accessible from the “Password Related” menu to reset the password to something they are comfortable with.
Just because a user has a valid password, does not necessarily mean they will be able to login to the system. Login is a privilege that needs to be granted by the site System Administrator. The privilege may be setup to automatically allow new registrants to login (see System Setup / Preferences / ), or a policy can be configured that will wait for administrators to approve any new registrants before they can login. These types of policies are configured under “System Setup”, "Preferences”, "Default settings inherited by new members”.
Delete Server File(s)
This utility provides a mechanism to review files that have been uploaded to the server and to delete the files no longer in use. It also tells you the size of the files that you have uploaded, and how much space is being consumed in the uploads directory.
