Site Documentation

Basic concepts below
To Fix list

Specific posting instructions

Sermons

Each sermon gets a separate new “Post” entry.

Change the “Published on” date to the date of the worship service.

Put the sermon title as the post title.

Put the speaker’s name – date in the first line of the body content and mark it as Bold.

For transcripts, copy the speaker’s name,  the date, and the first paragraph or so in the the “Excerpt” box (our current theme shows the whole post anyway, but this is high on the “to fix” list)

For audio files, use the “Add Media” button to upload and/or insert the audio player into the Post.

Category: “Events” (?we may change this later?)

Tags: “sermon” “worship” and “sermon_transcript” or “sermon_audio” as appropriate.

Once saved, go check the sermon tag listing page and the appropriate “recent” page (test recorded sermons page)

Events

Since we do not yet have a proper calendar, some creativity is needed for events.

Use a “Post” type. Use the category “Event” and tags as appropriate, including “Happenings” for inclusion on the Happenings page.

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WordPress basic concepts

Page – much like a post, but usually of more permanent type of information, included in navigation structures instead of time-ordered lists.

Post – a basic entry in WordPress (WP) – generally is time-sensitive and time-limited – usually  categorized and/or tagged and included in time-ordered, most-recent-first lists.

Posts have categories and tags:

Categories – Think “WHO” – limited in number – large “bucket” items, mirroring existing administrative organization. Our Document Repository has three levels of categorization, all of which must be set: Audience, Division, Business Process (always “College of Law” for now). Categories can be “nested” into a tree structure.

Tags – Think “WHAT” – Perhaps more numerous, reflecting functions or area of interest. Tags are not hierarchical, but could be represented as a “tag cloud” with more popular tags in larger font. We used tags generally only when we to make a list of the posts in a given tag.

Another conceptual approach:  Categories are the table of contents, Tags are the index words  *

The key is to tag sparingly and efficiently. *

Using Categories and Tags

Because we all share these lists of categories and tags, care must be exercised in creating new ones.

ONLY CREATE A NEW TAG OR CATEGORY IF YOU HAVE AN EXPRESS REASON TO DO SO.

If you cannot state why you are creating or assigning a tag or category, then don’t.  The main reason for creating or using a tag or category is so the post can be included on a list of similar items. See the display posts shortcode for how this is done.

“MORE” does not equal “BETTER” – in fact, the smallest number of tags and categories to achieve the goal is the best route to go. The point is to organize not to clutter. You want to help people find what they are looking for, not generate multiple listings for them to wade through.

There is no reason to tag for search engine optimization (SEO), in fact, too many tags can hurt your search rankings. The internal WordPress search returns results based upon title and content, with tags and categories contributing *no* improvement to the search results.

Categories should be more limited, and possibly added only by consensus. Tags should only be added if more than one item is to have this tag *and* there is a needs to generate a list of items sharing that tag. The practice of using tags for search engine optimization should be discouraged, as it just clutters the tagging system and dilutes true functional tagging.

 

Media

The Media Library is intended for images or video that will be embedded inside a page or post. Unfortunately, we will also be storing documents (hopefully sparingly).

Media Library – images, video and possibly other files that are usually attached or embedded in pages or posts. WP does not have a good management system. Using YouTube,a photo sharing site, or Google Drive may be the preferred solution for hosting videos, images, and other files.

PDF files

  • Use PDF files only when:
    • the document is intended to be printed, and the printed version needs to be in the same layout format as the original document,
    • or, the document is historical in nature and some reasonable assurance of originality is needed.

The WYSIWYG editor in WordPress is very good at making attractive pages out of material copied/pasted from a Word document. This is much better for searching purposes, and make maintenance of the information much easier going forward.

To Fix

The Sermon Archives

PDFs all need to be converted to WP Posts. Converting these documents can be tedious and prone to formatting problems.

Here’s some tips:

  1. Don’t get too worried about beautiful, perfect formatting. Most of these will get scant traffic, but they are valuable in getting search engine traffic. Make them readable, but learn/remember the 80/20 rule.
  2. First try: Open the PDF in any viewer, mark all contents (CTRL-A), copy (CTRL-C) and then try pasting into WP Post edit box. Use the “”Preview Changes” button to open a temporary version of the page to see i f it looks okay., if not, try step 3.
  3. Alternate try: Use Google Drive – upload the PDF, then open with Google Docs. It is one of the best converters. Once in Docs and somewhat cleaned-up, use File => Publish to the web… => click “Publish” => click “Ok” => copy or right-click the URL and open the web version of the document. Copy that resulting page and paste that into the WP edit content.
  4. Sometimes, using a text editor like Notepad (old Windows program) will clean up the text, although at teh expense of any formatting.
  5. Remember to tag “sermon_transcript” as well as “sermon” and “worship”

Audio sermons

The audio sermons are mostly uploaded, and just need to have individual post pages created.

Use the sermon title as the Post title.

Put the speaker’s name – date in the first line of the body content and mark it as Bold.

Use the “Add Media” button to insert the audio file player into the page (below).

If there is any description, that will go in the content body below the “audio” tag:

[audio mp3="https://hswet.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/2016-02-28-saying-yes-and-saying-no.mp3"]][[/audio]

 

Note that you do not need to craft the above tag, it will be made automatically if you paste in the URL of an MP3 file *OR* use the “Add Media” button to do it for you!