Fabio d'Alessi stapeliads.net - Site Guide How to use our website Document Revision 1.0 First Edited October, 8th, 2005 Reads : 14142

stapeliads.net is a website dedicated to Stapeliads - a group of plants with quite unique and remarkable characteristics. The portal offers a wide range of services and tools - the major ones being just two click away from the homepage. To reach the portal "Homepage" just click on "Home" in the menubar up on the left. The most important sections of the site are always reachable from any page, by the top menu. Items left to right.

• stapeliads.net:: - click here to bring up the secondary menu (see below).
  
  
• Home: brings you to the "homepage" of the site, the main entrance to the portal. The homepage is important since it contains all information and news about the site as well as the secondary menu (left).
  
  
• Site Map: Map of the major resources of the site and a list of articles and article directories with a short description (browseable). Expands/shrinks according to user's priviledges.
  
  
• Documents: Index of the articles and article directories available on the site.
  
  
• Forum: enter the stapeliads.net community forum - there is a guide on the forum for further information.
  
  
• SI-Database: One of the interfaces to the stapeliads.net database - this deals with specimens and entities, photos, notes, cultivation hints and so on. You can browse by genus/species, by entity code (SI), by searching for a name ...
  
  
• PAN: Another interface to the main database, just on the nomenclatural side - PAN (Publications, Authors and Plant names) lets you browse through official publication data (journals, date, authors, published names and so on).
  
  
• Contact Us: To get in touch with the site authors.
  
  
• Site Guide: This document.
  
  
• About us: A short description of the authors and site.
  
  

As said, clicking on the "stapeliads.net" in the top left menu bar will bring up a secondary menu with more specific options. The contents of the secondary menu depend on the user priviledges. From the secondary menu you can generally access to several options (your options, change your password and other), you can access to the StapChat Chatting window (if any user is using it you will see the username listed in the menu) and many other things.


Even if stapeliads.net has been built on a very complex database and we try to do our best to maintain a high data purity on this "core" resource, the site is open to anyone not only for reading, but also and especially for contributing.

Users subscribing to the website are assigned a "rank" - what users will be able to do and to contribute depends on their rank. "Site editors" will be able to work on the core databases and edit more or less any section of the site. "Reviewers" will be able to modify the site to a less extent, but still in a considerable way.

Normal users, instead, will not only be allowed to take part to the stapeliads.net forum, but will (and shall) be able to contribute their own experiences and notes to the portal. Whenever you browse through the SI Database or PAN you will be allowed to propose your own observations, images and notes to this or that species or taxon - once verified and approved by a site editor or reviewer these notes will become a permanent part of stapeliads.net.

With the "user proposal" mechanism we hope our portal will become a living entity growing and growing by itself - thanks to the contributions and ideas of the users like you.

Start making stapeliads.net yours - now. Read contributing how to and see what you can do to become part of our project.