Administration FAQ

Start by getting to know the toolbar icons, hover over each to reveal a tooltip on what it is. The last icon in the second row, “Insert read more tag” is what I used with Cases & Investigations to create intro text with a Continue Reading link.

Administration Layout

WordPress administration, as opposed to Joomla, is laid out with the administration functions in the left column. For the most part the only functions you will regularly use are Pages and Posts and occasionally Media and rarely, Module Positions. However, if you are uploading a PDF document you can access Media to upload when editing the document. The content of the Contact page is managed through Contact in the left column.

Line break vs paragraph

A line break differs from a paragraph block in that a paragraph block inserts paragraph tags between text blocks and this displays as a blank line. If you need to use a line break then to do so you place the cursor at the end of the line and hit Shift + Enter. Hitting the Enter key alone will result in the default paragraph block.

Copying text from other sources

I don’t recommend copying text directly from other sources as a rule because it will introduce hidden formatting elements that may mess with the look and feel, perhaps a custom font family, font-size, etc. If you want to try then first click on the “T” formatting icon (Paste as text). This should remove the hidden baggage and may work very well but you will probably have to add links manually using the link formatting function.

3 Spotlights and Sitemap

The text of the 3 spotlights above the sitemap section as well as the sitemap boxes are managed through Module Positions –> Content.

Notices, Attorneys and other Regular Pages

Ordinary pages are managed through Pages.

Media

Uploading PDF / Images

Media is the function for storing and managing images. From within a page you can access it by clicking the Add Media button. It will allow you to upload various media types including images, PDF documents and Word processing docs and once uploaded will interpret the media type for the need in a page. This is an example of a PDF doc uploaded through Media: geron-amended-stip-of-settlement. You can change the displayed title in the media properties.

Filenames

Although the program may allow you to upload files with spaces and special characters (?!@#$%^&*()~'”, etc) in the name I recommend renaming the file to use only alpha-numeric characters, hyphens and underscores.

Cases & Investigations

I chose to use the Blog function, aka Posts, to set this up. Typically with blog posts there is commenting; however I disabled that via global settings. What this does is to give us 1) a main blog page (Cases & Investigations) in addition to a sidebar with a Search field. I set both to display the most recent first. I set the Sidebar widget to display up to 20 posts before adding a Read more link. The main section is set to 10. These can easily be tweaked at a later time to help balance what you wish to display.

Continue Reading

In editing each investigation I used the “Insert read more tag” to split the content into a brief introtext and balance of the article. For this to work well you do it in between paragraphs as opposed to arbitrarily in the middle of a paragraph. All you do is find or create your paragraph break then at the end of the period, click on the Insert read more tag formatting icon. It will automatically convert it into the “Continue Reading” button and link to the balance of the text.

Article Date

To control the article date, displayed at the top of an article, when editing an article I updated the Published date found in the Publish section in the right column.

Process – Do not remove Articles

From what I can see in the past you have been creating new Investigation articles and removing the old ones. With the way this is set up now, I recommend not removing the old articles. Let the lists grow just as Shuman Law Firm website content grows and gets indexed by Google.

Once a page gets indexed by Google if you subsequently remove that article it will create a black hole, so to speak. If a visitor clicks on the Google link it will take them to an Oops! That page can’t be found page. Removing the page also reduces your search engine visibility.

Slideshow / Header Images

Unless you plan to update these yourself I won’t write up the FAQ. On some pages I used a slideshow via 2J Slideshow and with others I used the Featured Image function which you find in the sidebar near the bottom when editing a page.

Top bar

The content for the black top bar is found under Module Positions

Adding/Editing Editors

This is done through the Users link in the sidebar. I set you up with Administrator privileges. Editor permissions are adequate for most staff to do their jobs.