thedirt.org uses a web application called Civicspace and this book is on how use Civicspace. More importantly how to login, submit events, edit your own events, ...

Before going into the details of how to use Civicspace it would useful to touch on what is Civicspace. Civicspace is a version of Drupal, which is a "content management system". This means it's a system for managing website content--like articles, photos, or other files. Drupal is a "dynamic" rather than a "static" system. Instead of being in pre-generated (static) files, content like the text on pages is stored in a database. When visitors bring up a page, a script runs on the web server, querying the database and putting the content of the page into a template. (Sometimes, to save time and resources, these scripts are run ahead of time and the resulting pages are "cached" or stored on the server instead of being generated afresh with each visitor.) So to create or edit pages, you as a user don't have to write web pages. You don't have to know HTML (the language web pages are written in). Instead, all you usually have to do is:

• register with a Drupal site
• log in (type in the user name and password you got by registering), and
• type content (articles, etc.) into forms that you submit.