How to post new content
Posted Sat, 08/01/2009 - 8:28pm by Richard Wood
Posting new content on the web site is not hard, but there are a few things to keep in mind when doing so. Although the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor makes formating your content similar to working in a word processor, there are some dissimilarities that need to be kept in mind.
- If you are pasting content from an existing Word document or from some other format rather than typing directly into the editor, it must be pasted as "plain text". To do that, use the icon that looks like a clipboard with the letter T (hovering your mouse over any of the icons will give a discription of what they do).
- Manually indenting text using the space bar will probably not give the results that you're looking for. To indent text, highlight what you want indented and then use the indent button on the toolbar. The same applies to making unordered or numbered lists, or centering or left aligning your text.
- Most content types use a "teaser" on pages that list only a part of the article or other post. The teaser break will automatically be placed after a certain number of characters, but you can manually place it using the "teaser break" button.
- You can use images with some content types, but make sure that you resize them using the built in image editor so that they're not huge. If you try to upload an image that is too large, you'll either encounter an error message or the browser will take a long time to complete the upload. If you have images that you want to use that are too large and don't have image editing software to downsize them, contact me (the admin) and I'll help you.
- Previewing your new content is not enforced at this point, but it's recommended that you always preview your new content (and spell check it. There's a built-in spell-checker in the editor) before submitting it. If I encounter many poorly formatted posts or ones with errors, I'll turn on the forced preview.
- Finally, don't expect to have the same control over the formatting of what you put on the web that you do over Word documents or other print formats. It simply doesn't work that way. Print and screen formats are two totally different media and need to be treated differently. Take some time checking your first few posts and you'll soon not have any problems at all.
Hope that helps.
