Most of the content on this site should be coming from posts contributed by volunteers who are involved with the activities they’re writing about. Some of the example pages with content generated this way include:

• Escalating Inequality

This is a wonderful way to help the Fellowship by showing the world what a vibrant community we have, which helps us to reach out to like-minded people we haven’t met yet, who also would like to change the world through justice and compassion. It’s not very hard, this page will walk you through the process.

Here’s the steps you’ll follow:

1. Log in
2. Make a new post
3. Set the category
4. Write the contents
5. Submit for publication

Here’s more detail on each of those steps:

Log In

If it’s your first time logging in, you’ll first have to Register first.

Once your registration is complete, you can log in anytime by going to https://www.chaliceuu.org/wp-login.php and putting in your username and password.

If your permissions are set up right, you’ll be able to create posts. We usually like to let people get used to it for a few tries before giving them the access to publish posts themselves, especially if you’re not too familiar with the process yet. If one of the admins is especially confident that you know what you’re doing, it’s possible you’ll have permission to publish the posts right away, but most likely you won’t.

Make a New Post

Creating a new post is very simple, you mostly just have to find the button to click:

Click the button, and you’ll be editing a new post. It won’t be visible on the website anywhere, but it will have a “Preview” button that you can use to view it while it’s in progress.

Set the Category

The way wordpress is organized, there are “pages” and there are “posts”, and the posts can have one or more “categories”.

Most of our pages have an introduction that doesn’t change very often, plus a container that lists all the posts from a particular category.

For example, when there’s some new news about Economic Inequality, we don’t change the Escalating Inequality page directly, we just add a new post with the “Escalating Inequality” category. This will automatically change the page by inserting a new post at the top of the “Blog” section, or whatever we’ve named it.

The reason you have to set the category is so that your new post will show up on the right page. If you don’t, it won’t.

Also, the category controls whether it will appear in the news feed at the bottom left of the site’s home page. If the post has the “News” category or one of its sub-categories, that post will be listed there. If not, it won’t.

In the post editor that you get after clicking “New Post”, in the bottom right there should be a “Categories” box, which has a list of checkboxes. You might have to scroll down to find it on the right side of the editor. Usually a new post will have “Uncategorized” checked. Uncheck the “Uncategorized” checkbox, and check the category most appropriate to what you’ll be writing about.

When the post is published, that category checkbox is what will make the post show up on the right page (or not). If you ever find yourself in a situation where the post is published but it’s not showing up when you refresh the page it should be on, the first thing to check is the category.

Write the Contents

Hopefully you’ll spend most of your time on this step. You’ll type in a title and the message that you’re willing to share with anyone on the internet.

The main few things to notice are:

Add Media

You should have an “Add Media” button above your editor. This allows you to upload a picture, video, or embed a pdf. You can also embed a picture or video from another website.

If it’s not too much trouble, please pay attention to the size of the media you’re uploading. Modern phones, for instance, often will take a photo that’s bigger than 3MB, and is usually indistinguishable from a 300kb photo to the casual viewer. Larger image sizes can slow down the web page loading, and files (including images) over 3MB will generate warnings during site backups, and eventually might give us some space troubles. If you open a photo in mspaint, resize it to 640 pixels wide, and save it, it will probably get smaller. You can also consider using something like an online image optimizer. Likewise, online pdf optimizers can reduce your pdf sizes substantially.

Visual tab

The “Visual” tab at the top right of the big editor space is a lot like a word processor. I recommend this one for people who are a little uncomfortable with editing web pages, but still have a message to communicate. The Visual editor has a toolbar with buttons like bold, italics, numbered or bulleted lists, horizontal separator line, etc.

There’s a couple of extra buttons that you may not have seen in word processors, like the one for inserting a “read more” tag, or the one for adding a link to another web page.

You can think of the “read more” tag as an “above the fold” marker. If you use it, pages that include your post and show summary contents will show everything above the “read more” tag and nothing below it. When a website visitor goes to the full post, they’ll see everything, and the “read more” tag won’t be visible (though it will appear in your editor). If you don’t include a “read more” tag, the cutoff will be automatically generated, and might be in the middle of a sentence, or before some critical information.

There is also one more button for “Toolbar toggle”, which just gives you some more toolbar buttons in your editor, such as indenting, special characters, and colored text, plus undo and redo buttons.

Text tab

If you’re comfortable with raw html, you may prefer the “Text” tab to the visual editor sometimes, or you may occasionally find it useful to switch back and forth. The “Text” tab shows the various html-formatted tags, and permits things like embedded css styles. There are buttons at the top of this editor also, but you probably only want to use it if you are comfortable with raw html, or if you are trying to make a minor text change and hitting some trouble with the Visual editor not doing what you want.

One thing to note: it’s not completely raw html. WordPress will automatically insert paragraph tags into text from the Text tab. Searching finds a little bit of commentary, such as this article, if you want to learn more.

Reviewing and Saving Your Post

At the top right of the new post page, you should have a “Save Draft” and a “Preview” button.

“Save Draft” generates a new revision that you can get back to later, reachable from the “Browse” link a little below the “Save Draft” button. Your edits get automatically saved every few minutes, so if your power goes out you usually won’t lose much, but at good stopping points it’s not a bad idea to save a draft.

The “Preview” button lets you see your page as a website visitor would see it. It’s a good idea to try this, especially if you’ve used the Text tab. Plus, sometimes there are things that don’t look as good in the final page as it does in the editor, so it’s a good idea to check the preview often as you edit the page.

Final Plea for Writing Contents

Please remember that this will be publicly available information reachable by search engines, which people might read before they know any of us, and which they might use to decide whether or not to visit our Fellowship, so use appropriate discretion. This is not a good place to post gossip or almost anything that someone who’s mentioned might not want posted.

Submit for Publication

Once you’re happy with your post and you’d like it to be published, click on the “Submit for publication” button at the top right. This will change the status for the post to “Pending Review”. If you have the right permissions, you’ll instead have a “Publish” button at the top right, which will directly make the post public.

Then you should leave the editor page, because otherwise it looks to the administrators as if you’re currently editing the post, and it’s unsafe for them to change it from another account.

And you should also send an email to an editor to ask them to review and publish it. If you don’t know who to ask, you can send a request for review to communications@chaliceuu.org.