Posts and Pages
What are these things, “Posts” and “Pages”? Vertical structures that support horizontal load-bearing beams? Announcements for an individual over a public address system? No? OK, so here we go. It’s not actually that complicated even if I make it seem so. Sorry.
On this website there are really only two types of article: Posts, and Pages.
Pages are the things that you see when you select one of the menu items at the top of the screen. So in this example:
you can see a number of Pages. One is called “Home”. Another is called “About”. Then we have “Events”, “Help”, “Parenting”, “Pints of View” and “This Sunday”. All these are just pages. They’re generally things that aren’t very time-based – the actual content might (or might not!) need to change, but we want them to be there most or all the time. So we always want a Page called “This Sunday” to be there, even if you get what’s-going-on-this-Sunday when you click on it.
You will have noticed that there is some structure here even if you didn’t think of it as that. Four of the pages are along the top. As it’s shown above three are hanging off one of these. When you’re actually using the site the pages you see in the menu depends on where you’re pointing your mouse. In fact they’re all just pages, made in the same way (by simple typing, no complex software at all). The only difference is that the Pages hanging off “Events” have had a very simple setting made to say that their “Parent” is the “Events” page. That’s a technical term and I’ll try not to use more than one more of those. You’ll only need to know about it if you’re writing new Pages – and if are then you’ll quickly remember all about it because you’ll write a Page, take a look at the website, realise that your new Page is along the top, and then have to fix it (which is really easy). I do it all the time. In fact writing this Page has made me realise I haven’t set it up yet to have its Parent set to “Help”. (As an aside, you can keep going on this structure stuff. I could write another Page whose Parent was this one, and it would then hang off this page on the menu. And so on.) But anyway please be assured that you don’t have to think about menus and so on when you’re doing all this stuff. All you have to do is decide where this Page should go. The menus are made for you automatically.
Anyway that’s Pages. So what then are Posts? These are things you want to tell people. They might be just quick notes, or questions, or thank-yous, or a request for prayer, or notices, or requests for help, or a comment on the world or another website or something you heard, or just something that you want to tell other people. They’re in fact anything that doesn’t belong as a Page – although sometimes somebody might say that something you said belongs on a Page.
Here’s an example of a (complete!) Post:
People can of course comment back on this by adding a comment to the Post.
I promised you only one more technical term and here it is: “Tags”. You will see in the example above that it says, in the box below the actual text, “Tags: Website”. You might also have noticed some stuff on the right hand side of website about Tags. A “Tag” (in this context) is just a label that the author has associated with their Post to give people an idea what it’s about. The website can then do things like show you all the Posts that relate to that subject. So if I want to see every Post that’s about the Website, I can do that really easily. Provided the Tag has been set. If the author of an article about next week’s DCC meeting sets a Tag of “Website” but not “Events” (if you can call the DCC meeting an Event) then somebody looking for website-related Posts will get it. Somebody looking for Posts about Events wouldn’t. So they need to be set correctly.
You do that kind of search just by clicking on the Tag name from the set shown on the screen – for example:
The website software automatically changes the size of these words according to how many and how recent (I think!) the Posts on a subject have been. Tags can be anything – if you wanted to do a Post with a Tag of “Sausages” you could do and it’d show up above, and that would be just fine. And a Post can have lots of Tags associated with it – a request for people to help at a community workship event might have four tags. If it involved Sausages too it might have five.
You can also find Posts by date using the Calendar thingy on the screen:
If you “hover” your mouse over a date that has Posts associated with it then the mouse will change shape and you’ll get a little box giving you some names of the Posts (I do on my PC running Windows, anyway).
