If you wish to volunteer your time to help with content maintenance, or to write articles on the site, please email the site-admin. Please note that we are relying on our maintenance crew to not make wholesale changes to the content, but to just make changes only when required, or to assist with putting up new content. Overzelous editing of the site will have your access cancelled.
Don't want the stress of having to work with the website, but want to have an article loaded? Contact the site-admin who will work with you to get the content on the server. Typically that is nothing more difficult then sending us the information as a word or text file.
Generally, for articles start with the authors name then the title. Otherwise, just use the title.
DO NOT start the page name with "admin" or "special". These are reserved for use by the CMS software.
Styling your page...
A standardised approach is being used for all pages to maintain a cohesive appearance across the whole site. For the majority of the maintenance work required, just editing of the content section is required. The software incorporates a WYSIWYG editor, which makes content editing very fast and easy.
To select the content area for editing, hover over the content section and then click on the red edit button that appears. The editor menu box should pop up, and you are now ready to start editing the content.
At the top of the content section we label the page as follows:
Category Section (Heading 1 style)
Sub-Catergory: (line break) Page Title (Heading 1 style)
A ruled line between the title section and the following content.
Author details (Heading 3 - link to contact page for author, or author's email address)
Publication date (Heading 4) if the document is revised alse put the revision date.
The Category Section is the top level menu item in which the page appears. The available correct categories are:
- Lochac Rapier Marshallate
- Royal Guild of Defence
- The Order of the White Scarf of Lochac
The sub-category is the next level menu shown under the main category in which the article appears. The Page Title is the actual title for the page.
When you generate a new article, the page name starts with author's name, followed by the title.
For the actual content...
Use the styles already built into the editor, as this will automatically correctly format your content. The standard rule for the site is content is king, formatting is basic.
Content headings should be "Heading 2" format for the main headings, with sub-headings as "Heading 3" format etc
Quotes should be set as "Blockquotes" using the "quotes symbol" button. This will automatically inset them, and it's generally good form to also put them into italics.
Similarly, use the appropriate button for numbered and unordered lists, which will automatically inset and number the lists for you. To embed a list within a list, use the indent button when you reach the start of the embeded list.
Links can be entered using the "links" button. If you wish to have internal links on the page, you will first need to put a named anchor at the desired location. In practice, highlight the text that will be a link, and then click the "links" button. Make the link text something logical like the page title etc. It's bad form to just write go "here".
If you want to include images use the images button. Article images go in their own separate folded in the Article-images folder. In the dialog box, select browse server, and then yo can navigate to the right location, and create you folder. Give it a name that reflects the article title, or better yet give it the same name as the page title. Navigate into the folder, and then upload the images you wish to use. Once uploaded, select the image to be used. Repeat for remaining images, but if you uploaded them all you just need to select the right image. In all cases we recommend that images be no more than 100KB, and less than 30KB is prefereable for a pages with lots of images. (Big images are slow to load!)
If you are writing quite a long article, using the anchors are a really good idea as you can then put a table of contents for the article at the top of the page, just under the title. Putting a ruled line between sections just above an anchor is also good practice as it helps readers identify the individual sections. To make an achor, place the cursor in the desired location and click the anchor button. Be aware that if you put an anchor over text, you'll just see the anchor symbol in edit mode.
Be aware that text copied from other sources will be automatically pasted as formatted text. This makes for very large file sizes, which will slow down the site performance. Instead, paste your text as unformatted text, and then format the text using the inbuilt options. This reduces the amount of coding in the back end of the page, which lets the page load much faster. There is a specific button on the editor to paste unformatted text. If you forget, select the text and hit the remove format button, which will take it all back to normal text.
The editor function gives you a lot of freedom to change the layouts etc of the site. Please do not change the site layouts. Just concentrate on the text in the content section, as the content management software, and the site admin will take of the rest. Messing with the layouts will have your access account cancelled.
If you make an update to the site, please drop a note into the site News blog so that people are aware of the addition / updates. If possible a brief description of the change would be beneficial for site users.