Writing Best Practices

Wordpress blogs allow two different content types: static web-pages and posts. In order to create or edit a content (whether is from one type or another), the blog tool offers a text editor allowing two posibilities: HTML text-based editor and a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor. By default, Wordpress includes a “TinyMCE” editor with very few functionalities. However, the editor functionality has been increased by customizing it, following http://tinymce.moxiecode.com instructions. Thus, editing in the Morfeo Website has become easier.

Writing Rules

Content edition can be done in Write menu, which is located in Admin menu. To access there, it is mandatory to be logged into the blog and have the appropiate rights. Once logged, go to Write Post (or Write Page for static web-pages) section under Write menu.

The main steps to be done when editing contents are the following (for further information, there is a editing guide available at http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_posts):

1. Setting the main title. Morfeo is a multilingual blog, so if the post is going to appear in several languages, it is necessary to surround the title translation between the following tags:

   

   changing xx into the appropiate language ISO code.For instance, if a post is going to be in English and Spanish, it will have to be written as follows: se expresaría:

   

2. Setting the post URL name (also called Slug). By default, any post has its own title as the URL (that is, the address) to access it. Since Morfeo has multilingual posts, the post title contains the aforementioned tags, so it is not a valid URL. It would be shown as:

   

   Instead, it is necesary to set the Slug, which is a keyword that must identify uniquely the post. It is a good practice to add the current date to the keyword (in order to guarantee the URL oneness). So, in the previous example, the resulting slug should be firstpost_DDMMYY, and the post URL:

   http://domain/archives/firstpost_DDMMYY

3. Setting the category or categories of a post content. Wordpress allows you to categorize your posts through the Categories field of the Write menu.

   

   In this field, not only is it possible to choose an existing category but to create a new one. In this case, you have to use the tags:

   

   SPECIAL CATEGORIES
   If you think that a post may be interesting for the rest of the community, it MUST be included in the category/categories that represent the interested parties. For instance, in the next figure, including a post in the Morfeo’s relevant category means that this post will appear on the Morfeo Community blog as well as on the blog where the post is published. In the same way, if you want a post to be displayed on the web of the chapter that contains your blog, this post MUST be in the category <CHAPTER>’s relevant. Similarly, the published posts which are categorized as Events are important posts for the whole Community, so they are shown on Morfeo’s blog (in the Community Events section) as well as on the chapters which contain the blog the posts are published in.
   If you are publishing in a chapter and you think that your children blogs may be interested in that information, you MUST include your post in the category which has the chapter’s name. That is, if you are publishing in the Business Support chapter, an interesting post for your children blogs MUST be included in the Business Support category.
   However, Morfeo’s Chapter is different from the rest of the chapters. If you want a post to be displayed on all the projects and chapters of the community, that content MUST be categorized as Morfeo’s relevant.
   All posts written in chapters are automatically included in the category that makes the posts flow to the chapter’s children, that is, in the previous example, all posts would be automatically included in the “Business Support” category. However, if the categories are set manually in the “Categories” section, the behavior set by default is not applied (in the previous example, the “Business Support” category will not be automatically applied). Thus, the editor is the responsible for managing the right categories.

4. Filling the post (or page) content with language tags. when editing a content, it is necessary to add the language tags in order to sepparate the different post languages, doing the same as in the post title.

   

5. Choosing your edition options. This Website provides a full WYSIWYG editor with both the basic edition functionalities (lists, tables, styles, etc.) and other user facilities such as opening a full screen to see the whole text or showing the HTML code on a new window.

   

6. Extracting a post summary. If you have a long content, setting a part of the content as a summary is recommended in order to be shown when a full post list is displayed. The tag <!–more–> (written like an HTML comment) is used for this purpose when writing on the HTML editor. If you are using the WYSIWYG editor, there is a specific button that inserts the tag for you. Pay attention to posts in several languages: if you want to use this tag, all the translations of the summary part MUST be before the tag <!–more–> and all the translations of the rest of the post MUST be put after the tag. Thus, in a full post list, the following post

   

   would look like (in English):

   

7. Paginating a static content (pages). If you have a long static page, dividing it into several pages is recommended. The tag <!–nextpage–> is used for this purpose when writing in the HTML editor. If you have several translations of one page, you MUST be careful at placing them correctly around the <!–nextpage–> tag. You can do it as it is said in the previous point (<!–more–> tag).
8. File Uploading. Contents may have an image, a PDF file, etc. as an attatchment. Adding that kind of files is easy thanks to the special tool Wordpress provides when writing a content. On it, it is possible to specify the file

   

   and to add it to the text you are editing.

   

   For further information on file upload visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Image_and_File_Attachments

9. Tagging the content. You can categorize your content with a set of tags. If you have more than one tag, they MUST be separated with commas (“,”).