Authors Guide

This page is intended as a quick guide for new authors on the Monkton Town website.  There are generally 5 things that an author would need to do.

Before getting started take a look at the site itself and familiarize yourself with how to navigate through the pages – note the upcoming events, recent posts and recently updated documents on the right hand side.  At the bottom of any screen is a Log In and a Site Map.  You will click Log In to log into the site using the username and password supplied by the website administrator.  To add any content to the website you need to log in.

When you log in you will immediately be brought to the ‘Dashboard’ view.  To switch between Dashboard view and the site view click on the words Monkton Vermont on the grey bar on the top of the screen.

Post Events

  1. At the top of the screen you’ll see a dark grey bar with “+ New” – click on that drop down – you want to add a new event
  2. Add the event title.
  3. Add event description – the text will be displayed when the user ‘hovers’ the mouse over your event – you can add pictures to your event in this box (click on upload/insert) – make sure you are in the Visual tab not the HTML tab (HTML tab is to look at the underlying html which most people don’t want to do)
  4. On the right hand side click on the type of event which color codes the event – Community(blue), Deadline(red), Elections(purple), Meeting (orange), Sports(green)
  5. Fill out the Event details – start and end time – if this is a recurring event then click on the repeat… box – you can set up repeating meetings here which meet on the third tuesday of every month etc.
  6. The rest of the event details are optional but Venue Name is probably a good idea.
  7. When you are done hit big blue publish button.  You’re done go to the website and see if you are happy with the results – Get to the website by clicking the Monkton Vermont up on the grey bar at the top and then Visit Site – if for some reason you don’t see it it may be that your browser didn’t know that you page had changed – refresh the screen by pressing F5 key.

Post News

  1. Posting news is similar to posting an event but the text and image show up on either the front page (for town wide interest items) or on your page (more ‘committee’ interest news).  At the top of the screen you’ll see a dark grey bar with “+ New” – click on that drop down – you want to add a new post
  2. Add the Post title.
  3. Add Post description – this will be the body of you post.  You can add pictures to your event in this box (click on upload/insert).  To add a link you need to select the text that you want to have be the link text and click on the little chain icon (may 10th icon from the left) – if you hover over it, it will say insert/edit link.  Click on it and a little box comes up – don’t manually enter the link but click on the ‘Or link to existing content’ and you should be able to find document and pages on the website.  Make sure you are in the Visual tab not the HTML tab (HTML tab is to look at the underlying html which most people don’t want to do)
  4. On the right hand side click on the Category of the post – this determines where the post is placed on the website – If you click on FrontPage it shows up on the front page.  If you click on your committee it will appear on your committee page.  IF you don’t click on anything it will end up in ‘uncategorized’ and won’t show up on any website page.  Don’t worry you can still find it and fix it up so you don’t lose all your hard work.   In Dashboard view click on Posts on the left hand side and select All Posts – you should be able to find your post and use Edit or QuickEdit to change the Category.
  5. Before you publish your post you preview it by pressing Preview in the upper right corner
  6. When you are done hit big blue publish button.  Go back to the website and make sure that you are happy with the results.

Publish/edit a document

The new website incorporates a document management and version control system which allows documents to be added as website content and which tracks revisions to the document over time. Each document is given a persistent URL which can be private, password protected or public. Documents also have a revision history with the option to revert to a previous revision if necessary. As a general rule, documents should be in pdf format. The PDF format is more universal and is not susceptible to malware.  All of the Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel etc) allow for conversion to the PDF format. To allow for generating automatic lists of common documents, the website also defines certain common types of documents. The currently defined types are Minutes, Forms, Ordinance and Policy. For example, if the current author is ‘ANAC’ and a new document of type ‘Minutes’ is created it is automatically added to the list of documents with author ‘ANAC’ and type ‘Minutes’ shown on the page ANAC Minutes.

To make documents list is date order it is important to establish a naming convention in which the documents, when listed in alphabetical order, are listed in date order.  It is also important to make your naming convention not overlap with some other groups naming convention. Consider the minutes for the ANAC committee, each set of minutes is given the name ‘ANAC Meeting Notes YYYY_MM_DD where YYYY is the year, MM is the numerical month and DD is the numerical day. For example the minutes from the November 2, 2011 meeting are named ‘ANAC Meeting Notes 2011_11_02’.

  1. At the top of the screen you’ll see a dark grey bar with “+ New” – click on that drop down – you want to add a new document
  2. Add the document title.  If you are adding minutes
  3. Click on the upload new version button (by the way it’s best if your document is in pdf format – if it’s a word doc just convert it let me know if you need help doing this) – just drag and drop the file you want to upload into the square.
  4. Now we need to give a little more information about the file – on the right hand side there is a Visibility which is currently Private – you need to edit it to be Public (note you could have made it password protected if you wanted) – use the Workflow State for your own purposes to track where the document is in your workflow – Document Type should be Minutes if you intend the document to be added to a list of minutes associated with your committee.  Update the revision information with relevant text like “Draft minutes” or “Minutes updated on XX/XX/XXXX” and hit big blue Update button.
  5. The document is now uploaded to the web site.  If your document is meant to be added to an automatic list (like minutes, policies or ordinances) it should now be listed – go to the website and make sure that you are happy with the results.  If you need to link to it (for example you’d like a link on a post or a page) then edit the post or page and use the chain icon to link to existing content.
  6. IF you don’t see your document in the list where it is supposed to be don’t worry you can still find it and fix it up so you don’t lose all your hard work.   In Dashboard view click on Documents on the left hand side and select All Documents – you should be able to find your post and use Edit or QuickEdit to change the Document Type which is most likely the problem.

Edit Page

Editing the page is identical with creating a post except the page content is always there and is not superseded by later content.   To get to your page, visit the site and navigate to the page.  If you have authoring rights to the page then a Edit link will be at the end of the page.  Click on this link and you will get to the Edit Page which is very similar to the Edit Post – make any changes you want to the text/images and links on the page.  Please do not alter anything which appears between square brackets ‘[‘ and ‘]’.  These are short codes that direct the web site to automatically perform operations on your behalf such as displaying posts and listing minutes.