How to Edit This Site
About the Site
Some of the webpages are wordpress “posts” while the others are “pages” — the difference is that “posts” are items you will want to update, such as photos, newsletters, and calendar events, while “pages” are not likely to change over time (although they are still editable).
Posting New Events, Newsletters, and Photos:
These all work the same way.
- Go to “posts“ in the dashboard, and select “add new“
- Enter your post in the “Visual” tab of the text editor.
- You can create headers by highlighting text and then going under the “format” pulldown menu and picking Header 1 (the biggest), Header 2 (2nd biggest), and so forth. For Search Engine purposes, it’s best to have only one Header 1 level heading per page. (Note — if you can’t see the “format” pulldown menu, click on the button on the far right to “show kitchen sink” which shows you all the formatting options, instead of just the basic set.)
- You can insert images by clicking the “add an image” icon that appears next to the upload/insert label above the text editor.
- To add a link, highlight the text and select the “insert link” button (looks like a chain link).
- You can create headers by highlighting text and then going under the “format” pulldown menu and picking Header 1 (the biggest), Header 2 (2nd biggest), and so forth. For Search Engine purposes, it’s best to have only one Header 1 level heading per page. (Note — if you can’t see the “format” pulldown menu, click on the button on the far right to “show kitchen sink” which shows you all the formatting options, instead of just the basic set.)
- It’s important to remember to select a category before posting (lower right part of the screen): events, newsletters, photos — so that the post shows up on the proper page. If you don’t select a category, the post will be classified as “uncategorized” and it won’t show up on any page. (note — if you ever “lose” a post by forgetting to do this, you can go to “posts –> edit” to see a list of all your posts, you can select the one you want and “edit” and change the category that way).
- You can add tags to any posts, these tags will show up in the tag cloud in the side bar.
- New posts will appear at the top of the page, above the older posts. Posts appear in reverse chronological order — most recent first.
Editing a page
If you need to edit one of the static pages, just go to “pages” in the dashboard and click “edit” to see a list of all the pages.
Making an event, photo, or newsletter post appear on the home page
To make any of these items appear on the home page, enter the post as described above, and then apply a custom field to it. Look under the text editing window for the “custom fields” area of the screen. Under “add a new custom field” select “event_type” from the pull down menu. Then, in the value field, type “front_page” (without the quotation marks, and publish. The first part of the post will appear on the home page, with the link directing the user to the full post, which will appear at the top of the events, photos, or newsletters page, depending on what category it is.
To remove a post from the front page, just remove its custom field.
There can be multiple posts pushed to the front page, but more than two will probably start to look weird.
Sidebar calendar widget
To make items appear in the sidebar plugin go to events calendar –> add event (very bottom of dashboard menu). If you want to click through to the events page, you can add the link there. Then you’ll need to enter the content on the events page by entering a “new post”.
RSS Feed
Any new posts (events, photos, newsletters) will automatically be added to the feed. You don’t have to do anything.
Editing the Home Page Content
Since we are using WordPress as a CMS instead of as blogging software, I had to build a custom home page so that we could display static content on it. If you need to edit the home page static content, you can do it through the editor: Go under “Appearance” and select “Editor”, and then from the left hand column select “home.php”.
Warning: you are editing the .php code here, so be very careful. I highly recommend that you copy and paste a copy of the code before you do anything, and save it somewhere, so that you can reverse any changes you make.
Remember, you can push any new post to the home page by adding a custom field to it, as described above – -you should only go into the editor if you need to change the static content of the home page AND if you are reasonably sure you know what you are doing.
