This page is for people who are designated content providers, or to put it in plain English, the people who are responsible for certain pages of this site. If you’d like to become one, drop us a line using the form below, and we’ll create a page for you and a user account that you can use when you want to edit it.
Logging On
Before you can edit anything, you’ll need to log on. Scroll down to the bottom of any page on the site until you see a hyperlink with the word “Admin”. Click on this and you should see a dialog box where you can enter your user name and password.
Once you have done this, you will be admitted to your dashboard, where you can change your profile details if you want. Also, a magic black strip will appear at the top of your browser. This is important, as it enables you to switch easily between your dashboard and the website itself, by clicking on the words “Allerton Villages” in the top left hand corner.
Provided you select “Remember me” when you log in, you shouldn’t have to log in again for a while, although for (I assume) security reasons, WordPress logs you off after a few weeks, and you’ll need to log in again. As a general rule, if the magic black strip is visible, then you’re logged in. If it’s not, you aren’t.
Editing Your Page
Navigate to the page you want to edit. If you have permission to edit it, you should see the words “Edit this page” in the magic black strip, and also the word EDIT at the bottom of the page. Click on either of these to begin editing.
Basically, each page in WordPress is constructed as a series of blocks. If you’re just writing text, you don’t really need to know this. All you need to do is type away, and the WordPress editor will do it all for you, by creating a block for each paragraph. However, you may want to do other stuff, like adding images. You can do this by clicking on the Plus sign that appears when you move your cursor between blocks or at the end of the page. This brings up a dialog box which lets you choose which type of block you want. For an image, just search for “Image” and then click on the image block when it appears. You can then upload the image that you want.
Another thing you might want to do is add a heading (like the one that says “Editing your page” at the start of this section. You can turn any block of text into a header by clicking on the paragraph symbol that pops up at the left when you move your cursor over the block. You can then select the option to “Transform to heading”. It comes up as header level 2 by default, but you can change this by clicking on the button that says “H2”.
If you want to embed a PDF into your page, you can do that very easily by selecting a “PDF Embedder” block. You might also want to add a contact form. You can do this yourself using a “Contact form” block, although the results aren’t terribly good, and it’s probably better to ask me to create one for you using an extension called Contact Form 7 that you can then add yourself using the editor.
Previewing and Updating
Once you’ve finished editing your page, you can request a preview by clicking on “Preview” in the top right hand corner. This will show you what your edited page looks like in a variety of target devices. Once you’re happy with this, you can click on Update to make your update visible to everyone else.
Once the page has been updated, a link to “View Page” will appear in the bottom left hand corner and you can click on this to go back to it. This link doesn’t hang around, so you’ll need to click on it quickly. It’s one of the things about the WordPress editor that annoys me!