A quick guide to editing posts and pages…

WordPress is an intuitive website platform for editing and adding new content.   Basic WP has two types of  content: Posts and Pages.  [Our WP has an extension that gives us one more type “Content Block” which is covered later on.]

Posts are often brief like diary entries but can be full articles and can be assigned to one or many different categories although BWVCT will probably only need to use the default category “news”.

• Posts contain text and/or  images, and are generated with a simple wysiwyg editor incorporating an media uploader and media library.
• Media includes images (which will be resized automatically on upload to a max size of 600×600 pixels).  Media also includes documents such as PDF files: it is normally advisable to avoid uploading Word or OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents such as doc/docx/odt/xls to websites.
•  Posts will appear on the home page in reverse date order.  You can always edit the publish date to change order if you wish and there is a publish option (only applies to Posts) to make it “Sticky” so it always stays first.
• Very long Posts should normally have a “More” tag inserted from the Editor’s toolbar (2nd from right).  Note that the 1st button from the right on the Editor’s toolbar opens up a second line of buttons.
• Content can be copy/pasted from Word and Excel either as Text-only or as formatted by toggling the Clipboard button on the second line of buttons: generally (as WordPress is developed using Open Source software), it is far more reliable to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice rather than MS Excel for tabular data.
• If you are writing a long Post that you will want to keep for a long time, consider making a Page instead and then adding it to the Menu structure.  To make sure people spot the page, create a one or two line Post to advertise your Page together with a link to it.

Pages are for more static or permanent reference content, especially that may need to be updated from time to time.  Pages can be sub-pages of a parent Page, any of which can be added to the Top Menu bar.

• The Page Editor is virtually identical to the Post wysiwyg Editor/Media Uploader.
• It is good practice to add a note to Pages saying e.g. “Updated dd/mm/yy” if any major change is made.

There is also be a third type of content that uses a WP plugin extension: “Content Block”.

Content Blocks are ideal for short messages that need to be placed in various areas on the home web page.  Editors can edit any existing Content Blocks but may need an Administrator’s help to create & place a totally new one.

• Technically, Content Blocks are “widgets”, a WP term covering items such as panels for Log-In, Search, etc which is why thay can be useful for highlighting key information.
• Content Blocks are preferable to WP’s own Text widget as it is available to Editors and uses the same wysiwyg Editor as for Posts and Pages.

WP is ideal for having multiple Editors as well as Administrators, and we can always set up an Editor with a separate Adminstrator account: it is best to keep the roles separated as an Administrator has a lot more ways of doing things wrong and will need more instruction.

For Editors, we need to ensure log-in names are different to their visible name: e.g. my posts will show chris as author while I may log-in as chrised, or chrisadmin.

Some Tips for using the post/page/content block Editor:-

Note there are two tabs at the top right: Visual and Text

Visual:

• use for most actions to get the wysiwyg toolbar (and remember to click the right-hand tool to see the second row)
• avoid using the Paragraph dropdown on the 2nd row as it does not work reliably

 Text:

• can be useful to check you haven’t left any stray html or formatting codes if you have had to delete a table or any html coding

When adding an external link to another web (chain-link symbol) always click the “Open in new tab or window” box

Finally a word on password: you can change your password via your user profile but as all WP websites are continually under attack, please never choose a password that you also use for other important tasks such as banking!