We can set up special areas for research groups or other projects such as conferences, either on our regular web server or within the Physics intranet wiki site.

Wiki pages can be created for group purposes under the URL http://zzz.physics.umn.edu/groups. These pages can be edited directly within your web browser using standard DokuWiki formatting. You can also upload images or other media, and we also support some extra plugins such as basic LaTeX formatting or database queries. You cannot change the template used by the site, so its basic appearance is fixed, but since the university and college “require” use of their defined headers and footers on university-hosted sites, this is perhaps best left alone.

Once we've set up the group area for you, you as the “group manager” can control who is allowed to edit it from within your MyPhys page.

Group websites are generally set up on the server groups.physics.umn.edu.

So, for example, if your project were named lemming, the URL for the site would be http://groups.physics.umn.edu/lemming

The content for the site would be stored in the public_html subdirectory in the service account home, eg /home/webgroups/lemming/public_html

As such sites often need to be edited by more than one person, we generally set up a “service account” for the site (eg “lemmingweb”). The account can't be accessed directly, rather you would log in to your regular personal linux account, and then access the service account using the sudo command (eg “sudo -u lemmingweb bash” to obtain a shell). You need to let us know the list of usernames which should be allowed to access the account for site editing.

Using a service account like this (rather than simple unix group permissions) is necessary so that dynamic content (eg, PHP code) can work correctly.

For institutes or programs we can set up a named website, such as hstm.physics.umn.edu

We can support PHP content on both the standard and named sites. It's not enabled by default - please contact us if you need it. Named sites also support regular CGI.

For various reasons, SSL is not enabled on the standard or named sites (it is on the wiki site).

Neither of these hosting systems is appropriate for large amounts of data. If you need to serve large datasets (more than one GB), then you should talk to us about the specific requirements.

The university has a set of templates which provide required headers and footers for sites hosted here.

In addition, the College adds their own set of templates with their own set of “required” additional headers.

You can find their templates at the following URL: http://cse.umn.edu/x_hosted/branding/

You don't have to use their specific template files (for example, the Physics website does not), but you do have to reproduce the required elements.