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.
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Team Co-Facilitators Team Deputy Facilitators |
This tutorial assumes that you are a new, or inexperienced, member of the Newsies team.
Logging in to the system
Every new member receives a login to WordPress upon graduating from the Academy. Please look for yours, and use it to log in. (If you can't find your login information, simply e-mail the Newsies email list and request assistance.)
Now that you're a member of the News Team, you should have access to new options on the sidebar that allow you to add news stories.
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. If you don't know how to log in, ask FltAdml. Wolf for the exact URL.
- 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
Your Gravatar
Gravatar is a WordPress system that allows you to have an icon that displays whenever you post or comment on WordPress blogs across the internet.
Note: Gravatar uses email addresses to match your login to each WordPress site, so if you want to keep your StarBase 118 image different than the image you would use when commenting on other blogs, you will need to change your email address in our WordPress system. You can check what email address you have on our WordPress site by going to your profile and looking at the "email" field. You can change that email address to something StarBase 118 specific.
Now, to set your Gravatar, follow these instructions:
- Go to the Gravatar website
- DO NOT sign in. Instead, put the same email address from your StarBase 118 WordPress profile into the box near the center of the page which says "Enter your email to get started". You should see a green button next to this box that says "Get your Gravatar".
- Gravatar is not "connected" to our site and can not see the password you have set on our WordPress site. You can only "sign in" to the Gravatar site after you've completed this registration process for the first time.
- Click the green button that says "Get your Gravatar."
- You'll now be on a page that says "Sign in to Gravatar with WordPress.com Connect". Click the "sign up for free" link a few lines below this button.
- Use the same email address from your StarBase 118 WordPress profile. Pick any user name and password that you'd like -- they have no effect on our site.
- You'll receive a confirmation email. Look for that and click the button in the email.
- It will take you back to Gravatar. Sign in using the account you just created.
- Follow the instructions to upload an image of you or your character (or your RL image, if you want -- it's totally your choice!) and follow the prompts. (Click the "Add one by clicking here!" to start.)
Once you return to our WordPress site, and you log in, you should see a tiny version of your Gravatr in the upper right-hand corner. You may need to wait up to 15 minutes, reload the page, and/or log out of our site to make it appear.
Your Author Bio
Under each post you create, your Gravatar and a small author bio will appear. You need to set that author bio before you can begin posting. You are free to use an In Character or Out Of Character bio, but we recommend that you match the bio to your Gravatar -- so if you choose an In Character Gravatar, you should write an In Character bio. If you use an Out Of Character image for your Gravatar, you should use an OOC bio.
To set your bio, go to your profile, edit your "Biographical Info" field on the profile page of our WordPress site (click that link to go there directly), and make sure you save your profile!
Here's an example of FltAdml. Wolf's bio:
- Tristan Wolf is the founder of UFOP: StarBase 118. He served as the Commanding Officer for a number of the group's simming installations, notably the first ship -- the USS Phoenix-B -- and the first iteration of StarBase 118 Operations. His real name is Jordan, and his interests include science fiction (natch) and progressive politics. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his partner and their dog.
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.