Nonprofit WordPress

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A Free Manual for Nonprofits

  • About
  • Search
  • WordPress Basics
    • What is WordPress?
    • Creating Content
  • Types of Content
    • Pages
    • Posts
    • Media Items
  • Content Management Basics
    • Write for the Web
    • The Perils of Poor Formatting
    • Help People with Disabilities
    • Linking to External Sites
    • Linking Within Your Site
    • Adding Images
    • Adding Documents
    • Adding Videos
  • Content Management Mastery
    • Editor Tips and Tricks
    • Linking to Email Addresses
    • Linking Within a Page
    • Redirecting Links
  • Administering Your Site
    • The Admin Bar
    • Managing Users
    • Managing Menus
    • Backing Up the Site
    • Updating Your Software

Posts

Overview

Although the Post content type is separate from the Page content type, the process of adding, editing, and deleting them is nearly identical.

So in general, when editing posts you can use the instructions for editing pages.

There are two main differences between editing Posts and editing Pages:

  1. By default, Posts do not have the Page Attributes box, though some themes add this box for Posts.
  2. By default, Pages do have categories and tags as discussed below, though some themes add this box for Pages.

Categories & Tags

Categories and tags are settings to classify your posts. These are often referred to as “metadata”. In other words, categories and tags are data about the data. They tell us something about the post or page.

You set these values with the Categories and Tags boxes to the right of the main editor:

post editor - categories and tags

Some WordPress themes make use of categories and tags; others don’t.

For GHI’s theme, categories and tags appear on the detailed page for each post (news item). People records also have their own special metadata to describe the person’s relationship with GHI (Person Types) and their interests (Person Tags).

Opinions vary on how to use categories vs. tags. A common guideline is:

  • a post or page should be classified into one category
  • a post or page may be described by multiple tags

How posts are used

Posts (news posts) can appear in three places:

  1. On the home page under the Global Health News heading.
  2. On the home page as a featured news item to the right of Global Health News.
  3. On the About > GHI in the News page.

You determine where the post appears by checking options in the Featured? entry box, described below.

In addition to these news item summaries, when a visitor clicks a post’s title or image they go to a dedicated page for that individual news item.

Excerpts

On the home page, complete news items aren’t listed. Instead each gets a brief summary (for GHI in the News) or a photo with a caption (for the featured news item).

By default, the first few words of the story will appear as a text summary/teaser. You can override this default summary by entering text in the Excerpt field below the post editor box:

page editor - excerpt

If the Excerpt box doesn’t appear in your editor, open the Screen Options panel at the top of the screen:

page editor - screen options button

and check the “Excerpts” box if one appears.

External stories

For stories hosted outside of GHI’s site, you can supply the external URL in the Custom Title URL entry box below the post editor box. When you do this, people clicking the post’s title or image will go to the external news source rather than to a dedicated page for the story on GHI’s site.

UW-Madison CALS originally developed the WordPress plugin that makes this possible. This plugin has been customized for GHI’s use. The customized version is not available through the WordPress public plugin repository, but is installed on the testing and live sites as UW GHI Custom Post URL.

In the News, Global Health News, & Featured Story

You can determine where a post will appear by checking options in the Featured? entry box.

ghi - post editor - featured news item entry box

Make this a featured news item?

If a post is marked as Featured, on the home page it will appears in the box on the right. Because it appears in large featured form, it will be omitted from the normal list of news items on the left of the home page.

When creating a Featured news item, be sure to provide an Excerpt below the main editor area. This Excerpt will be used as the image caption on the home page.

If more than one post is marked as Featured, the most recent one will be highlighted, but none of the other posts marked as Featured will appear in the standard listing either.

When you mark a post as Featured, un-check the previously featured post if you would like that older post to appear in the standard new listing on the left of the home page.

Is this a “GHI in the News” story?

If this box is checked, the story will appear on the GHI in the News page (within the About menu).

Omit this post from “Global Health News” on the home page?

If this box is checked, the story will not appear on the home page. For example, you might have a GHI in the News story that should appear only on that page and not on the home page.

Featured Images

The WordPress featured image on the post editor page is used wherever the post is references. That includes:

  • On the home page under Global Health News as a tiny thumbnail image
  • On the home page as the large image for a featured news item
  • On the About > GHI in the News page
  • On the dedicated page for each news item

To format a photo so that it will work well in all of these contexts, use the following guidelines.

Featured image formatting

If a featured image is wide, but not wide enough to fill the site’s content area, it can lead to ugliness: the article’s text will try to wrap around the image, and it will be forced into a narrow, ragged column of words:

ghi - post example of text forced into a narrow column

The following guidelines avoid this problem by avoiding widths between 450 pixels and 673 pixels.

For featured news posts (large news photo on home page):

  • Orientation: portrait
  • Ideal aspect ratio: height must be at least 1.2 times width
  • If it’s shorter/wider: empty space will appear below the image
  • If it’s taller/narrower: image is cropped, preserving top of image
  • Minimum size: 269 pixels wide  x  322 pixels high
  • Width: less than 450 pixels or greater than 673 pixels

For all other news posts:

  • Orientation: portrait or landscape
  • Ideal aspect ratio: any
  • Recommended widths: 150 pixels to 450 pixels; 673 pixels or larger
  • Width: less than 450 pixels or greater than 673 pixels

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Creative Commons License
Nonprofit WordPress by Andrew Giesler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://nonprofitwordpress.info.