ADMIN: Publishing Procedures 1: Attribution

Welcome aboard, New Explorers!

These documents will outline the procedures for posting regular features to the New Explorations Weblog. The intent is to established standardized practices which to ensure uniformity, proper attribution, and basic order for the blog as it grows in content. By establishing these practices now, we can minimize the work necessary for corrections or basic janitorial work when the amount of content grows too unwieldy for manual processing.

For instance, the proper use of the Author features will ensure uniformity and ease of handling/updating biographical and contact information which might come to us hard-coded into posts, like so:

The above style of attribution—written directly into the body of the post—is unprofessional and impossible to maintain or update. Nevertheless, we must accept that submissions will often arrive in draft form in such a manner. So let us begin our standards with the proper methods for attribution:

1. Attribution

Summary: All posts must be properly attributed to their authors, and control over customizing or updating the biographical details of said attributions must be available at any time, without the need for manually editing posts. Therefore each new author must be properly entered at the beginning. Administrators must 1) Decide whether to give the author a User Account, or merely to register them as a Guest Author. 2) Ask the author to provide a profile photo, and inquire as to how they should be identified, titled and credited, and what links or social media accounts should be listed in their Authorship Box. 3) Ensure Guest Authors are assigned authorship of posts which are created on their behalf by administrator accounts.

Thanks to the magic of WordPress Plugins, every post made on our blog can have a custom author attribution for public display, obscuring the default use of the actual WordPress account which created it. Instead of the above style, we want every article to conclude with a standardized author block like this:

Notice that the author block features a link to the author’s Website and may feature other desired links, such as email or social media accounts.

For each author, it must decided whether or not an actual WordPress user account or a Guest Author entry will be created for the sake of attribution of authorship to their post(s).

1.1 WordPress User Accounts

User accounts ought to be created for regular submitters who would be comfortable taking on the responsibility of registering and logging into the blog with their own name and password. They would also be in direct control over the creation and formatting their own posts in WordPress. Permissions for direct publication to the blog can be allowed, or the user’s draft posts can be submitted into a queue for review by blog administration before public display.

TODO: A standard checklist must be drawn up to ensure User Account Holders adhere to a uniform style of formatting and categorization, since they will be responsible directly for their own posts.

In the Administration Panel, accounts for users will be created in the Users section.

1.2 Guest Accounts

Irregular contributors, those not desiring accounts and passwords, or all other authors for whom the responsibility of formatting and posting will be assumed by the Weblog Administration will instead have their identity registered in the Guest Authors feature of the Molongui Authorship plugin.

1.3 Author Details

Both the User Account page and the Guest Author page feature the same plugin-afforded fields for the generation of the Author block at the bottom of the post page.

Author’s pictures (square, please!) and the option of publicly displaying their email address can be configured in the right-hand column.

1.4 Attribution in Posts

For User Account holders, their authorship byline and attribution-block will be automatically part of their posts, with no further administrative action necessary.

However, posts submitted by Administration on behalf of Guest Authors will require manual attribution of authorship during the creation/editing of the post. This can be done in the Author block on the right-hand side of the post while it is being edited:

In the above example, the guest author has been added to the post, and the Administrator account which is actually creating the post is about to be deleted from the byline and have it’s Authorship Box removed from the footer of the final published page.

Note: User accounts can be attributed authorship over posts they didn’t create just as Guest Author entries can be.