This is the obvious first step -- you've got to have an account before you can do anything!

This page is pretty easy. Give your team a good name and provide a brief description of the goals of the team.

Both the name and the description will be full-text searchable for readers so make sure to describe things in enough detail so that people doing a search of teams might find it.

For instance, if you're making a team devoted to an illness, be sure to specify the illness in either the name or description.

Then you need to decide whether to make it a public or private team. For the puproses of this howto, we'll make it private. A different howto will deal with public teams.

The last question -- and it's kind of obscure -- is whether or not to make the secret sign-up code visible to other members. If you do so, other members can give it to each other to sign people up. If you keep it secret, you as the team owner has complete control over sign-ups.

For our purposes in this howto, we'll set this option to keep the passcode secret.

Press the "save changes" button and you've got a team for your organization!

Now that you've saved your team, it shows up on your "teams" tab.

All teams that you belong to -- whether you are the admin or just a member -- show up here.

We've set this team up as private, which means that no one can join without the passcode.

All we need to do is find our new team on the teams page and take note of the word after the "Passcode for member sign-up," that's the code that let's people sign up.

Please notice something -- you may change this code at any time by clicking the "change passcode" link for this team. Give it a try now, you can't break anything!

Changing the passcode does not affect current members, but it does prevent any new member from signing up unless they have the new passcode.

Anyhow, note the passcode on the page -- that's what you'll give to other members of your organization.

Obviously, other people must have accounts to join the group.

The easiest way is to send other members of your group an e-mail that contains a link to join, the passcode for your team and a link to our "how to join a team" howto.

We've got a sample e-mail that you can cut and paste linked from the title of this step. This items' title cut and paste the sample text and you'll have all the links you need to get people signed up.

(Some people have asked why we don't just allow a web based method of adding e-mail addresses. We did offer one, but during beta testing people used it to send spam from out site. So we took it down... So you'll have to send your own e-mails. Sorry!)

Once everyone has joined, if you like you can lock down your team to prevent new sign-ups.

Here's how: click on the title of this step and find your team on the teams page.

Click the "change passcode" link and you now have a new passcode assigned to this team.

Existing members are not affected, but for anyone else to join, they need you to provide the new code.

..to write stories or share stories or create lists (and soon much more).

And when they do so, if they choose to assign the story to your team, it will show up when as team content.

Better still, if members allow other team members to edit the content (the button to permit this is on all content editing pages) then other members of your organization can dip in, fix things, add things, whatever.

In fact, we'll use that notion of team editing for the next several steps in this how to to imagine a workflow in a community organization.

Imagine that in an organization, several members of the staff share stories or write stories and lists.

However, they all agree that only the executive director and the press relations person have approval to publish.

With CityTools, a workflow like this is dead simple: the members of the staff assign their content to the team, permit team editing (the default) and then save the content in "draft" form.

By saving it in draft form, other members of the team may read it, but the public can't see it.

Each member of the team can see what the others are working on in their own, individual areas of the content manager under their own logins.

When the content is read to publish, the executive director or the press relations person logs in, reviews the content and sets the status button to "publish" on all the content that is ready to go!

Now the whole world can see what the team has done.

Now comes the really cool part!

So your team is working as a group and you're using our content management tools to write stories, share stories and create lists... So far so good.

Now, with a simple piece of cut and paste code, you can automatically get this content on your own website.

Go to the teams page (linked from the title of this step) and find your team.

You'll see two links there -- one that explains how to use PHP to put your team headlines on your pages. The other that explains how to do it with javascript.

Both links give you cut-and-paste code that you can put on your website to automatically include any team headlines you create.

This way, whenever you add to your team on CityTools, your own web pages are automatically updated!

Also, all CityTools teams get their very own RSS feed.

This allows people who like your content to add it to their RSS reader (most web browsers have RSS management build in now).

What this means is that when you update your team content on CityTools it is automatically pushed out to people who subscribe to your feed!