GENUKI Glossary

Words and phrases in common use in the GENUKI documentation 

This glossary is only intended to provide 'quick glance' guidance at to what a word or phrase in the GENUKI maintenance documentation is generally used for - links to pages with more detail are provided where appropriate in the relevant section of the  Maintainers Technical Guide.

Author - In GENUKI-2, the individual currently recognized  as the Owner responsible for a given node.

Breadcrumbs – the geographical hierarchy of nodes as structured in their urls, or path,  and displayed as text in the blue bar at the top of all Place/Plain/Church/Topic nodes as a navigation aid for users.

Contributor - a volunteer who has been authorised to edit a particular node or set of nodes, but not to create new ones - (effectively a Maintainer with L-plates.)

Choose nodes - the first action to be performed when using Search and Replace/VBO  (see below). The the first part of a process is to specify the criteria before pressing the Choose Nodes button to produce the required list of nodes.  The next phase will be to select the actual nodes to be worked on from within that initial choice.

Church nodes – individual Church nodes have been created for all churches and chapels recorded within a parish; the information they provide is automatically displayed on Place nodes under the Churches topic heading.  See Maintainers Technical Guide. 

Content Management System (CMS) -  a system used to manage the creation and modification of the information content of a website by a group of information providers and editors. The CMS also generates "on the fly" the code for the web pages that the Genuki user sees when visiting the site. Virtually all modern websites, especially large ones, are managed using a CMS. Popular examples include WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet): a method of applying a consistent style throughout all the pages of a website instead of inserting the appropriate HTML instructions into every page that is to use the same format.  See also HTML and Javascript

Edit template - when a maintainer chooses to edit a node, he/she is shown the contents of the node in an Edit template (sometimes termed an "Edit page"), rather than as it will be seen by a GENUKI user. This template has a set of separate sections ("fields") for the differing types of data (information content, administrative data, etc.) which control, for example, how the node is to be shown as a page, and how it is linked in to all the other pages in GENUKI.

Database - the underlying storage facility used by DRUPAL to hold all the nodes.

Filtered html - this is an option you are recommended to set as the default for your sections via My Account, (see below). Its effect is to allow only specific html tags to be used on the Edit pages of nodes thus preventing accidental or malicious tags slipping through.

DRUPAL - the particular Content Management System now used to support and publish the GENUKI web pages (and many other large websites). Drupal is software that is continually being developed - the version that we are using is Drupal 7 which was the latest fully supported version available when we started using it. Drupal 8 has since been made available but it will be some time before we consider moving to it as the underlying code is significantly different as are the data structures. Movement to Drupal 8 from Drupal 7 will requires a migration of the GENUKI information content to a new system.

Gazetteer nodes - individual Gazetteer nodes have been created for all places recorded in our system within a parish. They are viewable by searching using the main Gazetteer Search box or via the Nearby places link on Place nodes.  See  Maintainers Technical Guide 

Gazetteers - are geographical dictionaries such as The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland 1868 . See its entry below and also Topographical Dictionaries.

GENUKI-2 - the term we use (amongst the maintainers) to describe our current Content Management System (CMS)-based version of GENUKI. The term GENUKI -1 is sometimes used to refer to the previous (pre-DRUPAL) version of GENUKI.

HTML - (Hyper Text Markup Language): a set of instructions embedded in the content of a web page to tell a web browser how to display the content. See also CSS and Javascript

JavaScript - Code sent from the web server and interpreted by the web browser that is typically used to manage interactions with the user, e.g. dialogue boxes. See also CSS and HTML

Lewis 1851 - a set of OCR transcriptions of the series of "Topographical Dictionaries" published by Samuel Lewis in the early/mid 19thC . The raw transcriptions are held within DRUPAL and although frequently used as Quotes on Place nodes, as in many Welsh counties, those for a given county can also be imported as Topic nodes upon request. Note that some subsequent work may be required to correct any remaining OCR errors and to supply missing place codes. The transcriptions used are mainly those made by Mel Lockie.

Maintainer - a GENUKI volunteer who typically has taken responsibility for editing the information content of a particular page or (more commonly) set of pages, such as those for a complete county,and thus has been authorised to access and edit the corresponding node or nodes.

My Account - every maintainer has such a password protected data page which is in four sections, first his/her personal data; then it lists all the counties/parishes that he/she looks after;  below that a list of current errors on those counties plus a comprehensive breakdown of a maintainer's counties by node type. The My Account's own Edit page also has options relating to how a maintainer's counties' content is displayed on every Place and Plain node's own Edit pages, i.e  GENUKI Topic option & Filtered html option (see above). GENUKI Topic is the one that should be deselected if you wish to work in html as the default on your pages. Both these options should normally remain selected.

Node - the structure within DRUPAL that holds the data, e.g. pertaining to a particular parish or county,  that is to be presented to GENUKI users as formatted information in web page. There are various types of node, namely Place, Plain, Gazetteer, Church or Topic (see separate entries).   See  Maintainers Technical Guide.

The two most frequent node types that a maintainer will use are:
Place nodes - which contain data on places such as countries/counties/parishes/townships, etc.
Plain nodes - which are subsidiary to Place nodes and contain additional data relating to them.

OCR - Optical Character Recognition, often used in preparing transcriptions from scanned texts.

Own/Owner - In GENUKI-2, to Own, to be the Author/Editor of a node and hence page.

Page - the visible representation, in a user's browser, of the data held in a particular node, such as for an individual parish or topic. However, some pages are dynamically generated by code that searches the database holding our information. This is typically achieved by using a View.

Place code - a short text e.g. CAIThurso which uniquely identifies a given place or location within GENUKI-2. See Gazetteer nodes.

Preamble - on Place nodes this section can be used to insert additional facts or clarifications about a parish which is not a direct quotation from a Gazetteer, for example; also see Quote.

Quote - on Place nodes this section is used for an introductory complete or partial quotation from a Gazetteer, or a Topographical Dictionary such as Lewis 1851.

Revisions -  revisions allow you to track differences between multiple versions of the content of a node, and to revert back to older versions, should this prove necessary. Access the Revisions page from the menu bar at the top of Edit pages in all nodes. We currently keep the last three revisions made to each node.

Rich Text – think WYSIWYG, the actual text  displayed in a topic’s content section when on the Edit page of a Place/Plain node.

Search and Replace (S/R) - see VBO below.

Searching - the Search box in the top right hand corner of each page is a DRUPAL-provided facility that enables all GENUKI users (not just maintainers) to do case-insensitive searches on the displayed information content – not the HTML encoding - of all the GENUKI-2 pages    See  Maintainers Technical Guide.  

Section - when editing a node, the edit template shows the node as a set of separate sections, or "fields".

Source – when on the Edit page of a Place/Plain node, this is the underlying html code viewed via the menu bar of a topic content section when in rich text mode.

Support tickets - the Support Ticket facility is used to document and discuss maintenance problems, and proposals for new or changed maintenance facilities, rather than by email. See  Maintainers Technical Guide.

Tags - tags are HTML codes that define structures on HTML pages, e.g. pieces of text that are headings, or are to function as links, or are to be shown in italics. Such tags are hidden when editing text in a node using WYSIWIG-style editing.

Teaser - a short piece of text, often a brief description or the first few lines of an article, that is used to encourage a user to view the full content, which can be reached by a link.

The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland 1868 . A geographical dictionary which has been extensively copied onto GENUKI’s pages using transcriptions produced by Colin Hinson

Topic node – with a capital T, comprises a single GENUKI topic entry for a place where the author is not necessarily the county maintainer and where they have a lot of information for a specific local topic.  An auto-include flag within the node type can be set such that a teaser of the node content is included in the related topic type in all pages containing a specified place code. This can then be expanded to see the full text by  clicking a suitable link, e.g. ["See more"].  See  Maintainers Technical Guide. 

Topics - with a small t, are the section headings used on Place nodes containing data relevant to that subject e.g Church History. We have chosen to use headings taken from the set of subject headings that the Family History Library catalogue uses for its British Isles information.

Topographical Dictionaries - very similar to Gazetteers with  slight differences in emphasis as to content. see Lewis 1851.

VBO (Views Bulk Operations) - a very powerful collection of 'facilities' within DRUPAL to enable maintainers to carry out bulk changes to their nodes. A View is the top layer which provides the capability to provide a list of nodes on which to perform actions. You then select the nodes on which to perform an action, and the specific action you wish to perform. The main facility is Search and Replace (S/R), with which you choose which nodes to target, select topics within the chosen nodes, and then specify the html code being targeted and the html code to replace it with.   Using VBO you can also change a maintainer's name, the category of care, Save content and  Delete nodes.  Great care must be taken with S/R and Delete as there's no reversing the process if running another S/R process to make a further change isn't possible, apart from by using Revisions, see above, on EVERY affected node separately.       See Maintainers Technical Guide.

View - the Genuki content is held in a database, selections from which can be searched for and shown using a drupal feature called a View. The search results can be displayed in a variety of formats.

WYSIWYG - "What You See is What You Get" -  a type of editor where the user is able to see their edits displayed as the Genuki user will do when the page is displayed to them. Formatting of the content of the field is achieved by means of using buttons, e.g. to set Bold type face, paragraph alignment, or heading styles. It generally avoids the need for the editor to edit or even to view the underlying HTML code when editing the content of a node. The editor is written in JavaScript code that runs within your web browser and the one that we use is called CKEditor.