Working with pages

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). For items not in the navigation menu the site uses Posts and Snippets.

Making a new page

  1. Choose New Page from the Admin Bar.
  2. In the field at the top enter the title.
  3. If necessary, adjust the Status, Visibility, Parent and Order of the page (see below).
  4. If a second column is required select the Two column template in the Page attributes box to the right.
  5. Press the blue Publish/Update button to save your changes.

At this point, the page has no content – but it’s worth saving it at this stage so that it’s established in the site hierarchy and – unless you’ve set the Visibility to Private or the Status to Draft – will appear in the navigation menu(s).

You can now start typing the main content in the Visual Editor (or the HTML Editor, if you prefer).

Adding extra content to regions

Although the main meat of any page will be in the main content area, it’s often the extra content in the regions that add visual interest. A set of Wingfinger Widgets allows you to insert extra content in these regions of the page. There are two widgets used on this site for handling page extras the Post Widget and List Widget. This enables you to place any Post(s), Mosaic Post(s), Events Post(s) and Snippet(s) in one of the regions of the page eg region right (the one you will probably use most).

A post widget worked example

In the page/post editing area below main content text area is the Wingfinger widgets area.

  • Click the Region right tab.
  • Use the Add widget pull down menu to select Post widget.
  • Add id of post required to ids field (reference list of posts available is shown at bottom of the Wingfinger widgets area.
  • Use the Add parameter pull down menu to select Show_title.
  • Use the select… pull down menu to choose True.
  • Use the Add parameter pull down menu to select Type.
  • Use the select… pull down menu to choose Excerpts.
  • Click OK button to confirm parameter
  • Click OK button to confirm and exit Wingfinger widgets
  • Update the page/post

A list widget worked example

In the page/post editing area below main content text area is the Wingfinger widgets area.

  • Click the Region right tab.
  • Use the Add widget pull down menu to select List widget.
  • Add category number of category required to cats field (reference list of categories available is shown at bottom of the Wingfinger widgets area.
  • Use the Add parameter pull down menu to select Type.
  • Use the select… pull down menu to choose Excerpts.
  • Use the Add parameter pull down menu to select heading and enter heading.
  • Click OK button to confirm parameter
  • Click OK button to confirm and exit Wingfinger widgets
  • Update the page/post

Important things to know

Each time you add a different widget they will get stacked up behind the existing ones. To change the order, drag the appropriate line.

To edit the widget, select the Edit icon, or to delete it, click on the red cross icon. Whether you’ve created a new widget, edited it or deleted it, always press Update at the end.

Child pages will inherit inserted items from parent pages unless they are replaced by a new one on that specific page. If a widget is appearing on a sub page and you don’t want it to, try adding in an empty widget into that region.

Id numbers can also be found in the URL shown in the address bar of your browser when you have opened up a post/snippet/image or hovered over it. The URL address ends with something like ‘?action=edit&post=355&message=1’. The number following ‘post=’ is the ID number.

Adding a featured image

Whilst editing the page:

  1. Click on Set featured image link in the Featured image box – over on the right (under the Tags box)
  2. Select a featured image from the Media library or upload a new image. Click on the blue Set featured image button
  3. Click on the blue Publish/Update button to save your changes.

Other usefull stuff

Visibility and Password protection

Pages can be Public (visible to everybody, when Published), Password Protected, or Private (visible only to logged-in users). Use the Visibility -> Edit link to the right of the Editing panel to set these options.

To password-protect the page, select Password protected, type a password, and click OK. If you want to make certain areas of the site available to members only, make sure all the relevant pages have the same password, and give it to members when they join up. (This is the free way of creating a ‘members only’ area. The alternative, with systems for registration, login, lost password etc, is fairly costly to set up – but Wingfinger can do this, if required.)

Shortcodes

We use these to insert posts on the Blog page and when pdfs are added into the main content area. The format has the required widget parameters on one line and enclosed in square brackets (which I can’t show here without WordPress executing the shortcode!)…

shortcode_list cat=6 style=blog type=excerpts order=DESC pic_size=medium format=l show_posts=5 paginate=true

You probably will not need to change these in the normal usage of the site.