What Goes Where
There are two parts to this site – an Articles section and a tree. They are driven by two applications – WordPress for the articles and TNG for the tree – that have been linked together to provide the complete solution.
WordPress is the front office. It provides the site’s Home Page, Help System, articles of general interest such as the origins of our family names and life stories.
TNG is the genealogy engine room. It is actually much more than just a tree but we call it that as a shorthand way of referring to the charts, personal records, photos and reference materials (birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns and other backup information that documents our ancestry).
Using WordPress to Create and Edit Articles
Who can create and edit Articles?
If you have been granted editor access to the tree you will also gain editor access to the articles so you can contribute to the article content. Your content is wanted and any genealogy topic you want to discuss can be created, reviewed and published. Don’t be shy about being published – you do it every day on Facebook.
Logging in to WordPress
When do you need to login?
Browsing and commenting articles posts or launching into the tree needs no login. You only need to login to edit content or access your To-Do List.
Where do you login?
The login section is in the page footer.
Ground rules for using WordPress on this site
Pages versus Posts
Please create posts not pages. Posts are for dynamic, day-to-day content and are created by editors. Pages are created by the site admin (that would be me) and are used for critical, formal and static content such as the Home Page and the Help System. If you think your content merits a page, please contact me.
Categories
Posts need to be categorised properly to make sure they appear in the correct place in the menu system. Think of categories as the entries in a book’s Contents section. Each page appears only once in a Contents section so every post must have only ONE category. Choose a category from the existing list. If you think you need a new category contact me please.
Tags
If categories are the Contents section then Tags are the Index pages. Please enter as many tags as you want on a post as this will increase its chances of being found by searches. There’s no need to refer to me – just go ahead and create them. I may edit them if I think it’s necessary though.
Style Rules
Most of the styling is handled by the site theme so there are very few ‘rules’ as such. There is no requirement to follow a house writing style. Do what comes naturally. Look at some of the other posts and get a sense of how they work if you wish.
Short paragraphs
No-one likes reading large blocks of text. Use paragraphs to break up the text, and keep them relatively short. It’s much easier to scan multiple paragraphs.
Headings and subheadings
Use headings and subheadings. They help break up long posts as well as making it easier to find a piece of content quickly. There are six headings levels available, and start with Heading 2.
Tables
If you have content that is best laid out in a grid then you can use the TablePress plugin. It’s easy to use for simple text tables. Life gets a little more tricky if you want to do things like applying bold, colour or hyperlinks to all or part of a cell. Contact me if you need assistance, or try the plug-in’s support page
Press the Save Draft button and press it often
The theory is that WordPress autosaves your work periodically. In practice I have lost some work occasionally. Use the save button and use it often!
Don’t Press the Publish Button
New users: until you have found your feet please don’t Publish content on your own. Instead, let me know when you have some content ready to go and I will just check that it’s ready to publish. I am more concerned about tagging and categorisation than the actual content
WordPress Tutorial
I am not going to write a tutorial on how to use WordPress. There’s no point – there are many sites out there that have already done it and have made a much better job of it than I could. Let Google be your friend and find your preferred tutorial. My favourite is:
