Header Menu and Pages
Home: Overview and Blog
Blogs are interactive websites typically often viewed by special interest groups. Their format is derived from Discussion Boards that are more complex and frankly can be off putting. Blogs are attractive because of their simplicity and they are much more likely than discussion boards to allow images to be posted .
Technically a ‘blog’ is not really a page you lay out with articles at all. The front ‘page’ of faartals.co.uk is currently a blog made up of ‘posts’ i.e. articles. These posts, like all the others on the site, are stored in a database and normally appear chronologically, newest at the top. The other ‘interactive’ feature about normal blog posts is the fact that they can attract comments. These comments have to be moderated to actually appear on the site.
Visibility on the Front Page can be can be controlled by the ‘Category Visibility’ plugin.
Other Pages
Inside pages (Constitution, Walks and Links) are more like ordinary website static pages as there is no intention to turn them into chronological blogs.
Each page has a button in the page header.
Constitution
This page is a single topic page.
Walks
The Walks page is an index page with hyperlinks to your articles about specific walks. Each walk article is actually a sub-page of the Walks page and at the bottom of each is a hyperlink back to the main Walks page.
On static pages Comments and Pings (emails to authors to let them know a comment has been posted against their article) are usually disabled. For pages like the individual walks sub pages, these options are left active.
Links
This is a page of hyperlinks to other websites. They are categorised under broadly the same categories as those used for the posts in the blog.
Archives
Automatically generated links to blogs by month and by category (subject).
Can be controlled by the ‘Category Visibility’ plugin.
Sidebar
The Sidebar sits to the right of the main content section of each page. It contains content elements, some of which are called called widgets.Announcements
This element is a small text box with a header. It is used to make simple announcements.
Search
The Search box is used to find content in blog posts. Enter a search string and click.
Calendar
This is a plug-in that puts a mini calendar in the sidebar of the page. Individual events are modified posts.
Upcoming Events
A few (currently five) upcoming events are listed below the mini calendar; the most imminent at the top.
Menu
This small menu currently has a few miscellaneous links, but importanly it includes a login link and a Site admin link if the user is authorised to perform such tasks.
Categories
This section is a set of links to posts in the blog, arranged by category. Clicking on a category brings up a list of posts under that category. Remember that posts can belong to multiple categories although most calendar events just belong to the ‘Events’ category.