St. John’s United Methodist Church

Note: This article has been superceded with our Editors Guide. The following reflects some early experiences with the WordPress 2.0 “visual rich editor”, which we’ve since decided is better avoided.

This article in the “tech” category is for the good folks who are editing our website. Scroll down to read some guidelines and ideas including:

1) Do your formatting in the web site editor

2) Using the Web Site Editor (Write Post / Write Page)

3) Where should I write?

4) What categories should I assign for a post?

5) How do I post an Event?

1) Do your formatting in the web site editor -

• Please do not cut and paste formatted text directly from tools such as Microsoft Word, Outlook or Internet Explorer into this web site. These tools do not generate HTML code that conforms to the site theme and styles.
• If you want to get text from a word processor, mail program or browser into the web site: Select and copy the text into a simple text editor (e.g. Windows notepad), and from the text editor copy & paste it into the web site. The text editor acts as a “clean room”, discarding the original formatting. Odd as it may seem, that is what we want, to keep a consistent style on the web site. See below for more detail.
• Apply formatting in the web site’s editor.

2) Using the Web Site Editor (Write Post / Write Page) -

The WordPress built-in editor encourages you to stick to the basics, and let the site theme provide special formatting and colors. The editor offers basic formatting options: bold, italic, strikethrough, bullets, numbered lists, left/center/right alignment, indenting, links, and images. If you can get your message across using just these features, life is easiest!
One quirk of the built-in editor: when you insert a new paragraph in the middle of your article, or add text at the end of a paragraph in the middle of your article, it’s common to end up with a line break instead of a new paragraph - i.e. missing whitespace between paragraphs. I find it easiest to join the two “run-on” paragraphs, and then separate them by pressing Enter.

Above is what it looks like before it’s fixed! “One quirk…” is supposed to be a new paragraph.

It’s only when you hit “Enter” to end your first paragraph that it actually becomes a paragraph - i.e. something demanding whitespace separation from the block following it. So be sure to establish a paragraph (hit enter) before selecting the text to be centered or specially aligned. Watch at the bottom of the editor for “Path: p”. This indicates you’re within an html paragraph.If perchance you forget to hit that enter, and instead apply formatting like “centering” first, you can end up without any html paragraph tags in your article, which means: no whitespace between paragraphs.

Advanced: In this case you’ll probably end up with html div’s instead of paragraphs. You can replace the div with p in the raw html, if that’s easiest.

3) Where should I write?

To keep “everyone” happy who might read your article via email, our subscription mailer converts most extended characters, such as fancy quotes, to plain ASCII text (straight out of the 70s.) If you hear of people receiving odd characters (”greek”) in their St. John’s email, please forward it to webservants at stjohnsdover dot org, so we can improve our mailer.

As mentioned above, never paste directly from Word, Outlook or a browser into the web site. To my way of thinking, the sure-fire way is to write either
a) in the web site editor itself, for very short articles, or
b) in Notepad for longer articles that take a bit of editing. You can find Notepad under Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad. When you write in Notepad, you can then cut & paste safely into the website editor.

If you have material in a word processor, mail program or browser (e.g. Word, Outlook or Internet Explorer) that wants to be on the website, just
a) Copy & paste the text from Word into Notepad
b) Cut & Paste the text from Notepad into the website

It’s not bad once you do it a couple of times. You might want a shortcut to Notepad on your desktop or quick-start bar… it’s a pretty handy little tool for producing plain text. By the way, Notepad is just an example of a plain text editor - you could use any text editor you like.

Once the text is in the website editor, you can apply any formatting there (bold, italic, list bullets, centering, etc.)

4) What categories should I assign for a post?

Categories are the key to helping readers find articles they’re interested in.

Age-based categories: ask yourself whether kids, youth and adults might be interested in the article. Select foradults, forkids, and/or foryouth if appropriate. You might select one, two or all three of these. If you’ve selected all three, then also select forallages.

Topical categories:

• General: use this for weekly announcements, Bellwether, and other news & announcements that don’t fit other topics
• News ‘n Notes: all registered users of the site are setup to receive articles in this category by email, so we’ve promised to keep it “low volume” — primarily Pastor Mark’s weekly letter, plus urgent notices
• Opportunities: this is for any announcement that needs “helpers” — a chance to volunteer
• Education, finance, hospitality, music, outreach, PSPR, sermons, trustees, witness, worship: use these as needed, and contact Mike Capern if you see a need for other categories

5) How do I post an Event?

The items that show up in the front page’s Event Calendar are just normal “posts” that have an associated date & time. You set the Event date & time in the “Write Post” page, just below where you select Categories, on the right side under “RS Event.”

Watch out for the 24-hour clock! You may not want to hold your event at 5am

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 8:43 am and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.