Maintenance

The maintenance section is used to manage interactions with users and view search statistics. The Contact Messages subsection displays all messages sent via the contact form. NDR Core can be set up to forward all messages to an email address but in order for this to work, an email server has to be configured. The easiest way is to store the messages in the database and provide the with a web interface to view them and process them. Messages can be archived, deleted and exported for further processing.

The Corrections subsection displays all correction suggestions made by users of the configured database. This is a feature which allows users to suggest that a certain data entry is wrong or has errors. The feature can be deactivated in this subsection; when activated, each search result entry features a small button to mark it incorrect. Currently, this requires only a click but in the future, a ReCAPTCHA or similar will be added to prevent abuse. All marked entries are displayed in this subsection with their respective id. The entries can be exported as a CSV file and processed further. This functionality is preliminary and will be improved in the future.

The Search Statistics subsection displays the search statistics of the configured search configuration. If the feature is enabled, every time a user searches for something, the search term, the time of the search and the number of results is stored in the database. The statistic option is disabled by default. NDR Core uses a simple file database (SQLite) by default which is not made for large amounts of data and will considerably slow down your system if a lot of searches are made. You might consider switching to MySQL or PostgreSQL before enabling this feature when your site expects a lot of traffic. NDR Core tries to pinpoint the location of the user via the IP address and the GeoIP service. This is not always possible and is not very reliable, but it allows for a crude overview from where the users access your database. At the same time, no user data is stored and the GeoIP service is not used to track users. The IPs themselves are not stored and the django session cookie does not store any user data.

The last maintenance subsection is Search Engine Optimization. This subsection is used to configure the SEO of the website. SEO is a complex topic and there are many ways to optimize a website for search engines. NDR Core provides two ways to optimize the visibility of the website. First, it creates Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml files which are used by search engines to index the website. Second, it allows for the NDR Core installation to be connected with ndrcore.org. This is the website of the NDR Core project and is used to display a list of all NDR Core installations which have been connected to it. This is useful for users to find other projects and for the NDR Core project to get an overview of the usage of the software.