Guide

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This is a guide for those updating the St James site with new notices and new ministries. For more information, account details etc, please contact the church office.

The first thing to do is to log in and create a simple notice…

The “Login” menu item can be found under the “members” menu at the top of the St James site.
After clicking on “Login”, you should arrive at the Username and Password screen. “WordPress” is just the name of the free software that is used to administer the website. Just enter the username and password you have been given for the site.
You will find yourself at what is called the WordPress Dashboard – the control centre for administering the site. Down the left-hand side are various menu-items for administering the site. To the right of these are the specifics of the administration task you are performing. For now, all we want to do is look at all the “Posts”, which means all the notices that have been posted on the site. You can click on “Posts” in the left-hand menu, or simply click on “Posts” under “Content” in the “Right Now” section.
Now the main area of the dashboard should be filled with a list of all the previous posts. There are two types of posts. Some are simple parish news or announcements about upcoming events, like in the bulletin. These are what appear in the “Current Notices” section of the site. There are also posts that point to specific ministries. These appear in the “Featured Activities” section of the site. They do not actually contain all the information about the ministry, they just provide a link to another web-page on the site. We will look at how to create one of these later. For now, we want to add a regular notice, so just click on the “Add New” button next to the “Posts” heading.
Now you can enter the details for the notice. Firstly, you need a title at the top. This is the heading that will appear in the “Current Notices” section of the site, so it needs to be fairly short. Next, you need to enter the details of the notice in the editing area below. When the user clicks on the notice on the site, they will be taken to these details. You can enter as much as you like, but be aware that these details are public, so you should not enter personal details such as addresses or phone numbers, even though they may appear in the bulletin. You can refer the reader on to the church office if they need more details. This is done by creating a link, which we will do in the next step.
To create a link, such as a link to another website, or to the church office details, just type the relevant sentence, e.g. “Contact the church office for more details”, and then highlight the text that will have an underlined link –  ”church office”. At this stage, it would be good to have the web address for the link on the clipboard, ready to use. Just right-click on another link to the same place (e.g. right-click on the “church office” link on the right-hand side of the main site) and select “Copy Link Address” (in FireFox it will say “Copy Link Location”, and in I.E. it will say “Copy Shortcut”). Next, click on the little chain-link item, which will display the box for entering the link details.
Just type in the address for the link, or paste the contents of the clipboard (e.g. hit Control-V) if you have copied the link from somewhere. In the “Target” drop-down, select “Open link in same window” if it’s a link to another part of this site, like the church office details. Otherwise, select “Open link in a new window”. You can leave the other bits empty, and just hit “Insert”. You should now return to the editing page, and the link you created should be underlined.
If you have an image associated with the notice (not necessary, but certainly possible), you can also insert that. Make sure you have the image somewhere on your computer, and that it is of a reasonable size for uploading. For notices, try to keep the image fairly small, e.g. less than 50KB. The dimensions are not such an issue, because you can choose how big to display the image after you upload it. Generally you’ll want the image at the top left or right, so move the cursor to the very start of the post, and then click on the first icon to the right of “Upload/Insert”. This will display another box to help you select and upload images.
At the top of the box that appears, you’ll see a “Select Files” button. Press that to choose images from your computer to upload. If you’ve previously uploaded the image, you can hit the “Gallery” tab at the top and just select from a list of existing images. Either way, you’ll then see a list of images. You may need to click the “Show” link to see its details. The only options you need to think about are where to place the image (normally either “Left” or “Right”), and what size. Normally you shouldn’t insert an image more than 300 wide, because it will fill up too much of the screen. If it’s less than that, you can choose “Full Size” to just use the image’s own dimensions. If it’s larger, or if you just want a smaller image, choose “Thumbnail” or “Medium” to get a smaller picture. When you’re done, just press “Insert into Post” and the image should appear back in the editing area. If you need to change the image settings, you can just hover the cursor over the picture and you’ll see an icon for editing (and one for deleting) the image.
Once you’ve finished typing the details of the new notice, you have to tell the site where it should appear. This is done by categorizing the post using the “Categories” section on the right-hand side of the Dashboard. For a post that should appear under “Current Notices”, check the “Notices” box. If the notice is for an event on a particular date, you should also check the “Events” box. The rest of the boxes should be unchecked. This is particularly important, because if you fail to select categories, the default category might place your notice in an unexpected place on the site. Of course you should always check the site after you’ve added a post, just to ensure it has displayed as you expected.
At this point you have a notice ready for publishing to the site. If there are other details you still need to gather, you can just press the “Save Draft” button at the top-right of the Dashboard. Otherwise, if the notice is complete, you can hit “Publish” and the notice will immediately appear on the main site (you may have to refresh your web-browser to see it, if you already have the page loaded in another window). Check that the notice has displayed under “Current Notices”, then click on the notice, and ensure it displays the details correctly. If there are any problems, just return to the “Posts” section in the Dashboard, click on the notice, and you will be able change it.

The next thing you might need to do is create a page for a new ministry…

In WordPress, pages are very similar to posts. The only difference for our purposes is that pages are generally permanent, and accessible using the site’s menus, whereas posts are only relevant for a short period, and are just visible under “Current Notices” (or as one long list under the “Notices” menu). So the general rule is that pages are for ministries or church details, and posts are for notices. The only exception (as we’ll see below) is that posts are also used by the site as a link to other pages (e.g. the “Featured Activities” list are all posts, but each of them points to a ministry page).

But despite this distinction, the way we add and edit pages is very similar to posts. So on the left-hand menu you’ll see a “Pages” item which you can click to see a list of existing pages. You’ll see the list contains all the menu items from the site’s main menu, along with some other things. You’ll also notice that there is a hierarchy. Some pages have a dash in front of them, which means that they are “children” of the page above them. That is how the site knows which items belong under which menus.

For now, let’s imagine a new ministry has started, and it needs a page. So we click on “Add New” to start, and then give the page a title and some content, just like you would for a post. All activities should have at least one image, to help the reader envision what the activity looks like. You can also open up other pages to see their content, and even cut-and-paste from one to another. This is very useful if a new ministry is very similar to an existing one. If cutting and pasting does not work very well (perhaps due to complicated formatting), you can also click the “HTML” tab to see the underlying web-page code, and just cut and paste the whole thing, which should give an exact copy of a page.
Once you have finished creating the page, like a post you need to categorize the page. In this case you need to specify it’s parent. The drop-down box on the right-hand side of the Dashboard should clearly show you where the page belongs. If it belongs in more than one category, just put it under “Activities”. Later we’ll see how you can create another page that points to this one, so that it can appear under two different menus at once (see the tip at the end about adding items to the carousel – this uses the same method of pointing one page to another).

Once you’ve selected the parent, you can publish the page just like you would with a post. This will make it appear under the relevant menu on the site’s main page, and this would be a good time to check that it has displayed as we expect. However, if we want it to appear in the “Featured Activities” section (which randomly displays different activities each time the page is viewed), we need a couple more steps.
The first thing we need is a couple of details from our new page. You’ll see just under the title of the page, there is a web address labelled, “Permalink”. What you need is the number from the end of this link, as this is the I.D. of the new page. Write this down. Next, you need to find the link to the image for this ministry that you inserted (as above, each ministry should have an image associated with it). This image is needed because a thumbnail version will display next to the page in the “Featured Activities” section. So you need to hover the cursor over the image in the editing area, and click the icon to display the image properties.
What you need is the contents of the “Link URL” box. So highlight the full length of the text and copy it (e.g. press Control-C). Just hit “Cancel” to exit this window without changing anything about the image. Now that we have the image URL and the page I.D., we need to create a new post (see the first section above). So click on the “Posts” item in the left-hand menu, and then press “Add Post”. The title could be the same as the title for the page, or its more specific title. For example, under the menus we have “Seniors Activities” because it is more consistent with the other items in that menu. However, when it appears in the “Featured Activities” section, it’s title is “Seniors Fellowship”, because that is it’s proper title, and all the items in that section are different anyway.

Once you’ve chosen a title, you should also add a very brief (i.e. 10-15 word) blurb that will appear next to this ministry in the “Featured Activities” section. This is just a teaser to give enough information that the reader can then click on the link and be taken through to the proper ministry page we have prepared.
Now that you have your new post with its title and blurb, we need to link it to the ministry page. This is done by checking the “Make Redirect Active” box, and then typing in the page I.D. (which we wrote down from the ministry page) into the “Redirect URL” box, further down from the editing section. This tells the site that whenever someone clicks on this item in the “Featured Activities” section, it should take them to the page for this ministry.

Next, further down there is a “Custom thumbnail image location” box, into which we paste (e.g. press Control-V) the link to our image that we got in the previous step. That tells the site to display a tiny version of the same image next to our link in the “Featured Activities” section.

All that’s left, then, is to select the right categories for this post. We need to put it in the “Featured” category to make it appear in the “Featured Activities” section. We should also check the “Activities” box (so it can appear on the master list of activities if someone clicks the “Activities” menu item rather than just selecting from the pop-up menu) and optionally the “Courses” or “Groups” boxes if that is what type of ministry it is.

At this point we can publish the post, and our page will now be available to be randomly selected in the “Featured Activities” section. We can test it by clicking on the “Activities” menu item and ensuring it appears in that list, and that when you click on it you are taken through to the main ministry page.

Finally, a few other tips and tricks…

  • If you are looking at a post or page you have changed, and something unexpected has changed from the previous version, you can always restore an old version by going down to the bottom of the editing page and looking for “Revisions”. Every time you save or publish a page or post, the old version is saved. This is very handy for fixing something you don’t know how you broke!
  • If you need help, at the very bottom of the Dashboard is a link to “Documentation”, which includes guides for anything and everything. WordPress is also very widely used, so you can easily search for help on different tasks just by searching in Google.
  • If you need to add a ministry to the scrolling carousel section at the top, you need to add an additional page (not just a post) that points to the ministry page, under the “Carousel” parent. The formatting of these pages needs to be more precise to make it look right, so it is recommended that you cut and paste the HTML from one of the existing carousel pages. Then you need to copy the whole “permalink” (see above) from the original ministry page, and paste it into the “Custom Button 1 Destination” box under the editing area on the new page. Finally, once you’ve published the new page, you need to add your new page I.D. to the carousel. This is done by going to the “Appearance->GRACE Theme Options” on the Dashboard left-hand menu, opening up the “Front Slider Settings->Pick Pages” section, and adding your page I.D. there. When you next view the main page, your item should appear in the carousel. Check the appearance carefully (on different browsers, especially Internet Explorer), as the length of the details and the size of the image may not display well, or may push the button too far down.
  • If you need to delegate some of the editing for the site, you can add a new user under the “Users” left-hand menu, and make sure to grant them the minimum role necessary. E.g. if they are just adding notices, they should only need “Author” or “Contributor”. The “Administrator” and even “Editor” roles should be very grudgingly granted.