ADMIN: Site Organization

The New Explorations Weblog is divided into a few main areas in order to sensibly structure the various elements which are necessary to growing and developing a sensible website. Site administrators will need to decide which sort of New WordPress submission-type they need to create based on the purpose of the new article.

1.0 Posts—The Front Page and Archives

Most new content will be of the “Post” type. These will show up at the top of the front page of the weblog, and will be variously categorized.

Pre-published Journal articles, Art exhibits, serialized features, guest columns, etc. will all need to be properly categorized. Authorship will need to be attributed according to the posted administrative publishing procedures.

2.0 Knowledge Base Articles

The “About” link in the websites header leads to the Knowledge Base, which lists and categorizes pages intended to provide static, mostly-unchanging and undated information in a sensible, categorized way. At present (June 2020), there are three main categories: About, History, and Contributions (subject, of course, to revision).

This section should be used, whenever possible, for static content instead of the use of WordPress’ built in Page type. New Knowledge Base articles can be made from the Administrative header bar by seelecting the type “New Explorations Project – Article”, where “New Explorations Project” is the name of our Knowledge Base:

Knowledge-base articles should select the dummy user account “Blog Staff” as author, so as to create generic Authorship boxes. The category selection is necessary to choose which main category the article will be present under on the “About” page.

A Table of Contents will be automatically generated for each Knowledge Base article, derived from header blocks used in its composition.

Please use the header block-type in order to structure your document and create quick-links to important sections:

3.0 Features

Features are serialized posts, installments of which will be submitted on a regular basis by one or many authors. Each entry will be in the form of a standard WordPress Post, and as such be a regular item at the top of the front page. They will be defined as belonging to a serialized Feature by inclusion in that Feature’s category.

Each post in a Feature will include the Feature name in its title, as seen in the first post in our example feature, McLuhan’s Mileau: The Herd of Independent Minds (1948). It is recommended that the authors of any inaugural post of a new feature include an explanation of the series in its introduction.

3.1 Feature Menu

The top-level menu item “Features” links to a page of the same name where the features will be manually described, and its sub-items will be direct links to the Category page of each feature, as seen here in the Appearances-> Menus section of the WordPress Admin Panel:

The Features Page will be edited with a header with the name of the feature series, a description, and a Latest Post block corresponding to that category.

3.2 Features Page

Each item on the feature page will be contained in an Accordion block, so that no feature takes up lots of space to be scrolled-past.

Inside that feature block will be placed a Group item, to allow the description paragraph and the list of posts to be collapsable together within the Accordion.

After a Paragraph element containing the description, the second block added to the Group Block will be a Post List #3 from the Gutenberg Post Blocks section. The “Preset Design 2” template will be selected in the Design tab:

And then the following will be done in the block settings:

• In ‘General’ the Heading and Category will be disabled.
• In ‘Query’ the Category for the Feature will be selected, making it a list of all posts only in that category. The Number of posts will be set to max.
• Under ‘Image’ the size will be set to Thumbnail.
• Under ‘Read More’ the Colour will be set to #3d1994 (our colour of purple).