Website Instructions

These are the instructions to maintain the pages on the website.

“Website Instructions” page itself

This page is a “Private” page and can only be seem by website administrators.  It cannot be seen by external readers.  Ensure that it remains this way.

  • Currently (4/7/2017) I can’t figure out a way to stop the page title/link from showing up to external people, but they get a 404 error when they click on the link.  Stupid way to do it, but it works for now.

Front Slider bar

To make a “Post” page show up on the front slider bar, edit the post, set the “Tag” field to include “Front Page Slider”, save the post.

  • “Featured Images” for Posts should be 880×290 pixels, or else the slider bar moves the rest of the page up and down… which I find very annoying.
  • To take a page off the front slider, take off the “Front Page Slider” tag, and save the page.
  • “Pages” cannot display on the front slider bar, only blog “Posts”.  Stupid, but that’s the way it is.

Events

  • Create a “Post” for the event with all the relevant information for the event. With the category of “Event”.
    • The “Event” category is the key used to make events show up under the calendar on the “Events” page.
  • Copy the URL for the blog post.
  • Go to Google Calendar page for “WillHolcombAuthor Website Calendar”
  • Create event there with the description of the event a link to the Event blog page.  Something like:
  • When the event has passed, change the “category” from “Event” to “Past Event”.  This will stop the passed event from showing up on bottom of the “Events” page under the calendar.

Books/Poems/Songs/Plays

  • Create a “Post” page for each one individually.
  • Set the appropriate Category.  If you pick two categories, it will show up on the lists for both categories

Blog Posts

  • Create a “Post” page for the blog entry
  • Set the “Category” to “Blog”.
  • If you add another category, it will show up on the pages for that category.  For instance, if you check both “Blog” and “Song”, the page will show up in the blog and it will also show up on the Song page in the list of songs.
  • The default is the “Uncategorized” category… this won’t show up in your Blog, so make sure to check the “Blog” category.

General Thoughts and Annoyances

  • It can take up to 15 minutes for an update to actually show up (be reflected) on a website’s page.  This is especially bad if you’re editing pages in one browser that’s logged into the site and viewing the pages in a different browser that isn’t logged in.  The “not logged in” browser pages can take a very long time (relatively speaking) to update.  Apparently they have some kind of cron job running that updates the database after changes are made and changes aren’t necessarily implemented immediately for the outside world.
  • Given that it’s really hard to tell when it’s updated or not, if you’ve only done formatting things, do something obvious, too.  Like put in an extra word, or change something that makes it obvious that you are looking at new version vs. old version.