The first of a set of pages on how to edit this site. These Help pages are ‘Private’ and can only be viewed by people logged in as Editor or Administrator.

Getting information

Editing this site is done using the standard WordPress system.
There is extensive documentation on WordPress. However, the information you are looking for is likely to be buried among swathes of stuff that doesn’t apply to this site. If you need to refer to the official documentation, it’s important to bear in mind that, on this site, WordPress is just being used to drive the content management system (CMS), and many of the features and issues that are discussed are not relevant here.

The same also applies to the Help content at the top of the Admin pages: if this refers to items that you can’t find, this may be because they are simply not relevant to this site and have been removed by Wingfinger.

The topics on these pages give a basic outline of some of the main procedures you will need to use – but where there are major omissions, please contact Wingfinger and we will attempt to fill them in.

If you get stuck, try contacting Wingfinger 0113 2450469 during normal working hours.

The Admin area

Warning! If you don’t know what you’re doing, indiscriminate changes here can easily break the site – particularly if you’re logged in as an Administrator. For example, updating to the latest version of WordPress might well require additional changes to some of the code underlying this site, and is best left to Wingfinger as a six-monthly maintenance job. Don’t do it!

To make any changes to the site, you need to log in to the Admin area, and you should have a username and a password for this. Whenever you are logged in, the Admin Bar will be visible across the top of the browser window – but ordinary site visitors won’t see it.

The Dashboard is the ‘Home page’ for the Admin area and gives you access to all the control functions of the site via the Admin Bar the main menu on the left.

Using the Dashboard lists: WordPress displays posts, pages and media as lists (when you click on these in the left-hand menu). If you are having trouble finding what you’re looking for, you can filter these lists (eg: by month or category) or use the Search box to look for a page/post that contains a particular word or phrase.

NB: If the instructions on these pages ever seem to refer to a panel, menu or button that you just can’t find – try clicking Screen Options (top right of the Admin window) and ticking the relevant box.

Basic concepts

What you can change

Each page on this website is made up of two bits:

• CMS-editable areas – containing virtually all the content (text and accompanying images). These include the main content area and (usually) a number of additional areas where page extras can be inserted.
• The page template – the structure, styling, menus and technical web stuff that determine the overall look and behaviour of the page. You can edit the CMS-editable areas, but not the page template.

Pages and Posts

Most of the work you’ll do in the Admin area will be in the Posts and Pages sections – both of which use the same editing panel, which is the heart of the WordPress CMS. You can reach this by clicking the Edit Page/Post link that appears in the Admin Bar at the top of the page.

WordPress terminology is a bit confusing: Pages, Posts, Snippets and Media (eg: photos) are all – er – posts! However, it’s useful to make the following distinctions…

• Pages are the web pages that are listed in the navigation menu (and a few more, like this one, that are hidden from the average viewer) – they are suited for content that’s more or less permanent.
• Posts tend to be shorter, less permanent items and are often dated (like news items or blog entries). They have the advantage that they can be grouped into named Categories and displayed as page extras in various ways (in lists, as excerpts, or in full) across the site.
• Snippets are short chunks of text (maybe with accompanying images) usually written specifically for use as page extras. Defining these as a separate type of post helps to avoid cluttering the Posts list and makes it easier to administer the site.

See the Pages and Posts page.

Page extras

The editing panel allows you to change the main content area of a page, which is invariably the widest column of text. But you can also control the other editable areas of the page by inserting one or more page extras.

A page extra can be:

• a Post eg: the most recent news item
• a Snippet eg: a short post encouraging site visitors to make a donation – possibly linking to a PayPal page
• a List of posts eg: the next three Event posts, listed by title and date
• a Wingfinger Widget eg: a slideshow consisting of a set of photos with accompanying text – each one linking to a different page on the site.