How to Post Shows and Auditions

Overview

There are two lists of upcoming events - an Audition list and and Show list. These lists can be updated by an authorized person in your theatre group (eg your webmaster) to include your shows or audition notices. These postings will then be available for display on this website. Each posting is dated with an expiry date, after which the listing is automatically removed from the list.

Each listing consists of a short Summary that becomes the information displayed in the listing. The Summary typically has a ...more link after it, that sends the user to your website (or a page on your website). Optionally you can enter a full description and have that displayed directly to the user when they click on the ...more link.

You (your webmaster) can either link to this website (www.communitytheatreottawa.com) from your website, or can embed the posting list right into one of your web pages. See the Embedded Postings section below for more details.

How to Post Information

You must first have a username/password to log onto the system. Send an email to info@communitytheatreottawa.com to request a user/password for your theatre group. We'll need your Theatre group name and an email contact person's name and email address. Typically you'll want your webmaster to sign up.

To post a message, go to the CommunityTheatreOttawa's About Us web page. You'll see links for the Auditions listings and the Show listings. The process is the same for either one. You'll need your user name and password to log on.

Once logged on, you'll see a page showing your current postings. Select a current posting from the Postings list at the top, or you can use the Add New Postings button to start a new posting. The Start Date defaults to today, but you can choose a future date if you don't want the listing to appear right away. The End Date is the last day that the posting will appear. The Summary is the "one liner" summary that appears in the list of all postings. Try to keep it short. If you provide anything in the Details section below, a ...more link will be added at the end of the Summary when it is displayed. The Details section is where you either put a link to your website or enter a detailed bit of information will be displayed to the viewer when they click on the ...more link.

The Save button saves any changes you've made. (Note that the information is immediately "live" !) The Copy button allows you to take an old posting and make a new copy of it. Delete deletes the current posting.

Hint... You might want to keep a second browser window open to the www.communitytheatreottawa.com web page while you are editing. You can then refresh that page after you have used the Save button above to see what is posted to the world.

Embedding vs Linking

The easiest way to add any of this information to your website is to Link to it - a simple link to the www.communitytheatreottawa.com website. However, there is also a way to embed the list of theatre groups, shows, or auditions right into one of your web pages. This makes the list a direct part of your web page - visible whenever someone goes to your website. The list is automatically updated to show the latest information whenever the page is visited or refreshed. You can see an example of this on the www.itrtheatre.com website, or in fact on the home page of www.communitytheatreottawa.com.

Embedded Postings

The simplest way to make this information available from you website is to link to www.communitytheatreottawa.com. A person viewing your website just clicks on the link and goes to the communitytheatreottawa.com website.

As an alternative, your webmaster can embed the postings directly into your web pages. The embedded list of postings goes right into your webpage. It can be styled to fit your website's look. You can also customize the list heading and even designate the subset of theatre groups that you wish to display.

See the www.itrtheatre.com as an example of embedding the postings. On the ITR main page there is an embedded Other Theatre section that contains the current show list from the communitytheatreottawa website. The ITR Auditions page has an "Other Auditions Around Ottawa" section that show current auditions, again pulled from the communitytheatreottawa website. These list are current. They appear as part of the ITR website, yet they get updated from the communitytheatreottawa.com website whenever the page is displayed.

To embed a listing into one of your web pages you must first include the following in the <head> section of your web page:

<script src="http://www.communitytheatreottawa.com/tools.js"></script>

Secondly you'll need a place where the information will be inserted into your web page. Put a <div> entry at that location with an html id name of either "Auditions" or "Shows" at that location. So for example, this:

<div id='Auditions' style='width:400px'></div>
<script>getAuditions();<script>

The list of Audition postings will be inserted into that <div> when the page is displayed or refreshed. You can use your website's usual style settings (like the width setting) to fit this into your web page layout. To display the Shows list, just set the id to 'Shows' and the script function to getShows instead of getAuditions.

You can also fetch the list of all the Ottawa area community theatre groups by setting the id to 'Groups' and use the GetGroups script function. (If you look at the source file for www.communitytheatreottawa.com you'll see an example of embedding the Groups list.)

Here's a complete sample page that fetches both the Auditions list and the Shows list.

<html>
  <head>
    <script src="http://www.communitytheatreottawa.com/tools.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    Sample theatre group web page that displays the Auditions listing and the Shows listing.<br>
    <div id='Auditions' style='width:400px'></div> 
    <div id='Shows' style='width:500px'></div> 
    <script>
      getAuditions(); 
      getShows();
    </script>
  </body>
</html>