Login

Before you can make any changes to your site, you will need to log in. The login for your site can be found at the following URL – https://missingadults.ca/wp-admin/.

Your username and password should have been emailed to you (I can re-send if you didn’t get it).


Dashboard

Once you’ve logged in, the WordPress Dashboard appears. This is your main administration homepage. At the very top of your Dashboard (and across every page) you will see the name of your site in the header area. In the screenshot below (and throughout this documentation) the site name is Ontario’s Missing Adults. This is also hyperlinked to your site’s homepage. You will also see the name of the person who is currently logged in. Move your cursor over your name to reveal the Log Out link as well as a link to edit your Profile.


Dashboard Menu Options

Down the left-hand side of the Dashboard and on every page you will see your main navigation menu. This is where you’ll find all the options to update and configure your site.

Hovering your cursor over each of the main menu options will display a ‘fly-out’ menu with the various choices for that particular menu option. Once you click each of the main menu options, that particular menu will expand to show all the available options within that section (if there are any).

We’ll just focus on the menu items that you’ll need to worry about:  Posts and Pages.


Posts versus Pages

WordPress is built around two basic concepts. Posts and Pages. Posts are typically blog entries. A series of articles, listed (usually) reverse-chronologically. Pages are used for more static content (i.e., content that doesn’t change or changes infrequently). An ‘About us’ page is an example of a Page on a typical website. In most cases you’ll find that the content in the ‘About us’ page doesn’t change all that frequently.

For your site, your Posts aren’t necessarily “blog” entries.  They will show as the main content on the home page and and excerpt from the most recent Post will show in the “Recent Updates” section which appears on some pages.


Posts

After clicking on the Posts menu option you’ll be shown a list of Posts that your site contains. Among the information displayed is the Post title, the Author, Categories, Tags, No. of Comments and either the Date Published, Date Scheduled or the Date the Post was Last Modified. The Posts screen will look similar to the screen below.

At the top of the page you can view how many Posts in total you have in your site, how many have been published by yourself or Published, Scheduled, Sticky, Pending, in Draft or in the Trash.

When hovering your cursor over each row, a few links will appear beneath the Post title.

  • Edit – Will allow you to edit your Post. This is the same as clicking on the Post title
  • Quick Edit – Allows you to edit basic Post information such as Title, Slug, Date plus a few other options
  • Trash – Will send the Post to the Trash. Once the Trash is emptied, the page is deleted
  • View – Displays the Post. If the Post hasn’t been published yet, this will say Preview

Next to each Post title is a checkbox. This allows you to perform an action on multiple items at once. You simply check the Posts that you would like to affect and then from the Bulk Actions dropdown select either the Edit option or the Move to Trash option and then click the Apply button. The Edit option will allow you to edit the Categories, Tags, Author, whether to allow Comments and Pings or not, the Status and whether or not the Posts are ‘Sticky’. The Move to Trash option will move the selected items to the Trash.

You can also filter the pages that are displayed using the dropdown lists and the Filter button.


Pages

After clicking on the Pages menu option you’ll be shown a list of Pages that your site contains. Among the information displayed is the Page title, the Author, No. of Comments and either the Date Published or the Date the Page was Last Modified. The Pages screen will look similar to screen below.

At the top of the page you can view how many Pages in total you have in your site, how many have been published by yourself or how many are Published or in Draft.

When hovering your cursor over each row, a few links will appear beneath the Page title.

  • Edit – Will allow you to edit your Page. This is the same as clicking on the Page title
  • Quick Edit – Allows you to edit basic Page information such as Title, Slug, Date plus a few other options
  • Trash – Will send the Page to the Trash. Once the Trash is emptied, the page is deleted
  • View – Displays the Page. If the Page hasn’t been published yet, this will say Preview

Next to each Page title is a checkbox. This allows you to perform an action on multiple items at once. You simply check the Pages that you would like to affect and then from the Bulk Actions dropdown select either the Edit option or the Move to Trash option and then click the Apply button. The Edit option will allow you to edit the Author, Parent, Template, whether to allow Comments or not and the Status of each of the checked items. The Move to Trash option will move the selected items to the Trash.

You can also filter the pages that are displayed using the dropdown list and the Filter button.


Adding your Site Content

Adding content to your site is an easy process no matter whether you’re creating a Post or a Page. The procedure for both is almost identical. Apart from how they display on your site, which was described earlier, the other main difference is that Posts allow you to associate Categories and Tags whereas Pages don’t. What’s the difference between categories and tags? Normally, Tags are ad-hoc keywords that identify important information in your Post (names, subjects, etc) that may or may not recur in other Posts, while Categories are pre-determined sections. If you think of your site like a book, the Categories are like the Table of Contents and the Tags are like the terms in the index.

Adding a New Page

To add a new Page, hover your cursor over the Pages menu option in the left-hand navigation menu and in the fly-out menu, click the Add New link. Alternatively, click the Pages menu option and then click the Add New link underneath, or the Add New button at the top of the page. You will be presented with a page similar to the image below.

Page Attributes

In the Page Attributes section you have the option of selecting a page from the Parent dropdown.  This will make the page you are adding/editing a child of whichever page you select.  If it is a top level page, there is no need to select anything from here.  You can also select from the Template dropdown.  The Default Template will have the right sidebar with the “Recent Updates” included.  Selecting Full-Width creates a page with no “Recent Updates” sidebar and the main content takes up the full content width.  The Homepage template should not be selected as it is only used for the Home page itself.

Featured Image

You can also choose to Set featured image for a page.  If you set a featured image on a page, that image will appear to the right of the main heading, like the screenshot below.

If you do not set a featured image for a page, the page’s main heading will just span the full width.  Setting a featured image on a page is optional.


Adding a New Post

To add a new Post, hover over the Posts menu option in the left-hand navigation menu and in the fly-out menu, click the Add New link. Alternatively, click the Posts menu option and then click the Add New link underneath, or the Add New button at the top of the page. You will be presented with a page similar to the image below.


Menus

In the main dashboard/admin menu, hover over Appearance and you should see as one of your options:  Menus.  Clicking on Menus should give you something similar to the image below.

From here, you can add/remove/re-order pages on the “Main Menu”, as well as the “Footer Menu”.  You can select from “Pages” and “Posts” on the left and by clicking “Add to menu”, whatever you have selected will be automatically added to the bottom of the menu.  Then, you can drag and drop items to order the menu items the way you want.  WARNING, you’ll want to be careful when making edits to the menu.  If you are uncertain, feel free to ask me for help the first few times you think you need to make edits to the menu(s).


Special case:  editing the Home page

There are different content sections on the home page of the site and all of them are editable to some degree.  I’ve labeled the different sections in this image below:

Latest Post

The main content on the home page will display your 3 most recent “Posts”.  The number of posts that show can be changed, just let me know if you want that maximum number changed.  The most recent post you publish will also show in the “Recent Updates” sidebar which appears on many of the site’s inside pages.  To add a new post to the site, please refer to the “Adding a New Post” sectionn above.

Homepage sidebar & Sidebar quote

To make edits to the homepage sidebar or the sidebar quote, you will need to navigate to your pages, by clicking on “Pages” in the dashboard menu.  From there, locate the “Home” page.  Hover over “Home” and the click on “Edit”.  You should see a screen like this:

Editing the Homepage sidebar and Sidebar quote is done from these two text editors shown in the image above.

Featured link images

If you scroll further down the “Home” edit screen, you should see the 3 images currently being used as “Featured link images” on the homepage.  Hovering over one of these images will give you an edit icon and a remove icon near the top-right of the image.  Clicking on the edit icon gives you some edit options for the image.  Clicking on the remove (“x”) icon will remove that image.  If you remove the image you are then given the ability to add an image in this section.

Featured links

Scrolling further still down the Home edit screen, you will see the 3 featured links:

There is a dropdown below each heading.  From these dropdowns you can select any page on your site to be one of the featured links.


Resources

There is a special process for dealing with Resources.  Here are the basic steps:

Firstly, you will edit the Resources page just as you would any other page on your site.  Click on “Pages” on the left-hand menu of the Dashboard.  Then, find the “Resources” page in your list of pages.  Hover over this and click on “Edit”.

You should now see an edit page with all of the things you are used to seeing.  You can edit the page title as usual, and the page content edit box is there as well.  This content is for editing what shows above the resource listing.

Adding a new Resource

Below this, you should see an edit area/box with the heading “Resources”:

This is where you can add a new Resource to the page.  It has the following items:

  1. Resource Title:  enter the name of the resource here;
  2. Resource Image:  click on the “Upload Resource Image” button to choose an image that will show as the resource’s thumbnail image;
  3. Resource Description:  this is the text/description of the resource;
  4. Resource Document (English):  from here, you can upload the English version of the resource document;
  5. Resource Document (French):  from here, you can upload the French versoin of the resource document.  NOTE:  this field is optional, as some of your existing resources only had English versions.
  6. New Resource: check this box if you want the resource to show at the top with the “Newest Resources”.

Once you’ve finished entering info into all the required fields, click on “Add Entry” and the new resource will be automatically added to the page.  This is what the listing of resources looks like on the actual page:

Edit/Delete/Re-order Resources

Under the “Add Entry” button where you add new resources, you should see a listing of the current resources on your page.  From here, you can edit or delete any resource you want.  You can also change the order that resources will show on the page.  To do this, hover over the number column of the resource you want to move.  You can then click and “drag & drop” the resource to move it where you want in the list of resources.  Click on the “Update” button at the top/right of the edit page to save your changes.