Proper care and feeding of your WordPress site
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This is also the page from which you can reset your password if you lose it.
Posts and events: transient text
Transient content goes onto the site in addition to what is there: news items, meeting minutes, reports. Your site has two types of transient content: posts and events. Events are transient content tied to a date: a notice of a meeting, party or deadline of some kind. Posts are for everything else.
Tasks:
- Create a new post
- Using the visual editor: More, clear formatting, headings, links
- View the list of posts: Sorting, filtering, quick edit
- Edit an existing post
- How to put it on the front page
- How to add a PDF to it
- How to add an image to it
- How to put it at the top of a category page
- Create an event
- View the list of events
- Edit an event
Pages and widgets: permanent text
Content is considered permanent if updates or changes replace what is there. Lists of executive members, mission statements, logos. For most things, permanent content on your site is found in Pages. Some widgets also hold permanent content. A Widget is a discreet chunk of content that can appear on one or several other pages. For example, the listing of OPSSU executives is a widget (actually three widgets).
Tasks:
- Create a new page
- View the list of pages
- Edit an existing page
- Special pages: news, home
Media: content that isn’t text
Not all of the content on the OPSSU website is text. In fact most of it isn’t. Most of it is in some non-text (aka binary) format, namely PDF or a graphic format, like JPEG. WordPress treats these files differently because storing binary data in a database is hard. Instead it calls these Media.
Tasks
- View the list of existing media
- Add new media
- Edit images: resize, crop, replace existing media
- Add PDFs to pages, posts or widgets: filename hazards
- Add images to pages, posts, widgets: size, alignment, link, featured
Metadata: categories, tags
WordPress uses metadata (data about the data) to figure out where to put content (be they pages, posts, events or media) on the site and to organize the display of content. It keeps track of a fair bit of metadata about each piece of content on the site: author, creation date, publishing status, stickiness. But the main type of metadata that we care about is the Category. Categories are used to group content together in a particular place — the front page, a page dedicated to that category etc.
Tasks
- Assign a category to a post
- Make a post appear on the home page
- Make a post the top item on a category page
- Add a new category
Users
The site can have as many editors and administrators as you require. And each user can be assigned a level of access appropriate to their level of responsibility/involvement/competence.
Tasks
- Show the list of users
- Add a new user
- Giving a user a new password
Menus
The site has two menus, the Top Nav and the Secondary Nav. The secondary Nav ‘persists’ (it stays with the user as they scroll or swipe down the page), the Top Nav does not. The ‘Secondary Nav is meant to be for functional items that everyone users (benefits booklet, contact us etc) where the Top Nav is full of awesome stuff that is important to most but not always used by everyone.
Tasks
- Add an item to a menu
- Rearrange items on the menu
The Carousel
The large image on the front page, below the Secondary Nav and above the Home Top Area is called the carousel. It has two images that rotate. There can be more. Or fewer
Tasks
- Add a new image to the carousel
- Edit existing images in the carousel
Home Top Area
This part of the home page has content that all members of the union refer to frequently, or that the site’s administrators consider to be significant enough hold space on the front page, above the flow of transient content.
Tasks
- Edit Home Top Area Widgets