If you are the site owner, remember to READ this PAGE and DELETE or make it DRAFT, before you start writing!
Help for Beginners
What are posts?
Posts are articles or news and the lifeblood of your new website. Keep your site alive by posting articles regularly.
What are categories?
Make your articles easy to find by creating and assigning posts to categories and tagging them with suitable index or key words (but no need to over-do it).
Can I upload pictures?
Sure. Resize images before you upload (for web publishing the size needs to be optimised – e.g. 800-1000px wide at most) AND ensure you have permission to use the image. Great storage is available on photo sharing sites like flickr.com and picasa.com if you have significant image management demands.
What about comments?
Remember to configure your settings appropriately, especially those relating to user registration and comments. By default comments are CLOSED, but if you want interaction makes sure the SPAM settings are activated and ENABLE comments, post by post or universally.
What Themes can I use?
Our themes may look basic, but conceal many hidden functions. Sign up to plus! to get more and Automattic css style editor (just like on WordPress.com). More themes are also available at wordpress.org. Ask very nicely or pay us and we’ll consider adding a new theme just for you. Pick wisely and make sure it is WP3.0 enabled.
How about pages?
Pages are like the static pages of old fashioned websites. They contain infrequently changing blurb about you or your organisation – e.g. Contact Us or About Us. Many of the nice features that posts have are missing on pages, but pages do have their uses. Keep your post to page balance as high as possible.
Can I change Menus?
In WordPress 3.0 you can configure the menus very flexibly, but you will need a WP3.0 enabled theme.
What about the right hand column and footer?
The column contains Widgets which can be configured to suit your taste. This template has a footer too, that will take 4 columns of widgets.
And if want to make my website private?
Plenty of options. You can stop search engines, e.g. during site development, in Settings > Privacy. Once public News is also published on ourlocality.org/news. Single articles can be made private or password protected.
You can find this article, and others at http://ourlocality.org/manager/
We now have access to a number of videos that should be handy to get you up and running
http://ourlocality.org/wp-admin/admin.php?page=video-user-manuals/plugin.php
And if you prefer a longer read
http://ourlocality.org/wp-admin/admin.php?page=manual-options
For community support:
http://support.ourlocality.org/
