Newsies Team: Working with WordPress
Our website is built in WordPress, a blogging and "Content Management System" software. Simply put, WordPress makes it easy to update our website, and anyone can learn how to use WordPress in about 15 minutes.
This tutorial assumes that you are a new, or inexperienced, member of the Newsies team.
Logging in to the system
Upon joining the team, you will be provided with a URL to log in to the WordPress system. If you don't receive it, simply e-mail the Newsies Yahoo! Group and request assistance finding the log in page.
Note
If you were a UFOP: SB118 member before November, 2010, you should have received your user name and password automatically from the system when it came online in that month.
If you joined after November, 2010, you should have received your user name and password after you graduated from training.
Your Display Name
When you log in to the system and look to the upper right-hand corner of your screen, you should see your user name listed. The user name displayed in that location is the same user name that will be displayed any time you post something on the news. As such, you'll want it to be descriptive enough so that people know who you are, when you post.
To change your display name, follow these directions:
- Access your User Profile
- Change the value next to Display name publicly as under Basic Details
- It's best to use your primary character name here, i.e.- Tristan Wolf. Whether you use your rank is up to you.
- Click Update Profile
Understanding the Queue
After you've written a post, it will not actually appear on the website immediately. Instead, it enters a queue where it will be reviewed by an Editor on the site. The editor will review your post, proof-read it, and then schedule it to be posted automatically on a convenient date. We try to post one piece of news a day, at least.
You should be aware that if you've written a "feature length" article that it may be held for over a week, or more, to be used when the site is particularly low on news content. This often happens at the end of the month, so we sometimes hold longer pieces for those "dry spells" when good content is needed.
On the other hand, if you've written a piece which is time sensitive (i.e.- it references current events OOC or IC), then you'll want to e-mail the Newsies Yahoo! Group and notify the team that there is a time sensitive piece waiting in the queue to be reviewed. That's the only way an editor will know to review your piece and schedule it in a timely fashion.
Creating and Editing Posts
Once you're ready to create a new post, you can view the video below to learn more about how to the nuts-and-bolts of posting work:
Important note
Pay special attention in the video to previewing how your post will look, once it's published. You should see a button on the right-hand side of the "Posting" page that says "Preview," and you should use that before submitting your post to be reviewed.
After clicking "Preview," a new window will pop open to display your post. Review the content and formatting of your post, looking for these issues:
- Grammar and spelling
- Proper formatting of the image in your post
- Unusual fonts or font sizes
- This is only important if you've copied and pasted content into the post window. WordPress will save the same formatting you had wherever the text came from, and you'll want to make sure to remove that extra formatting, so that our posts all appear uniform in nature.