Creating a post
After logging in, you should be presented with your dashboard. You won’t be spending much time here.
In Wordpress, articles are called “posts.” Click on the “Posts” section in the sidebar. Here, you can see all of the published and drafted articles, as well as those pending publication.
Click the “Add New” button on the top left to add a new post. This takes you to the blocks editor. Here is where you can either draft your article or paste from a Google Doc (recommended).
Go ahead and add a title by typing in the “title” field. In the blocks editor, there are a few sections you should pay attention to.
- This is where you enter your content -- any text, images, etc. We’ll call this the “content panel.”
- Contributors can more or less ignore this panel. This is where audience engagement or any editors can set specific plugin settings. We will call this the “plugin panel.”
- If you click on the “Block” tab, you will see settings for the block under your cursor (more on this later).
- In the “Post” tab (currently visible), you have settings for your entire post. This is where you set the author, category, featured image, etc (more on this later).
Adding content
The blocks editor works on the concept of “blocks.” A block can be a paragraph, an image, a YouTube video, etc. By default, you have a paragraph block, where you can enter in text. Any type of text formatting works: bold, italics, underline, links and more. These are preserved when copying from a Google doc.
To insert a new block, you can press enter at the end of a paragraph. This brings up a new line with a square plus sign on the right. You can either type “/” or press the plus sign to bring up a search menu for blocks. This is how we can insert multimedia.
Adding multimedia
To add embedded media (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Vimeo, etc), you can search for the relevant block and paste in the link.
Editors can add galleries, which are groups of images.
- When making a gallery, switch the feature photo from “default” to “hidden,” or else both the gallery and feature photo will appear in the article
Editors can also add photos. To do so, scroll to the bottom of the post sidebar, and then click add feature photo. Then make sure it is set to default. If you’re doing that, you should remember to add alt text, a caption and a description.
If you’re adding a photo to the middle of a story, then put one in as a block.
- Alt text is necessary for accessibility (e.g. for screen readers). Here’s a good resource for writing alt texts.
- A caption will be displayed with the image and should be formatted as:
This is a photo caption. Firstname Lastname/Daily BUT Only use Name/Daily when it is a Daily Photostaff Photographer. Otherwise use: This is a photo caption. Courtesy of Someone
- A description is useful for future editors searching the media gallery, but won’t be displayed anywhere on the website.
Any TMD original multimedia content (photos we took, designs we made, etc.) must include this text and hyperlink at the end of the caption: Buy this photo.
- Example: This is a photo caption. Firstname Lastname/Daily. Buy this photo.
- FOR DESIGNS/NOT PHOTOS FROM photo: Design by Firstname Lastname
<i>Design by Firstname Lastname.</i> <a href="https://store.pub.umich.edu/michigan-daily-buy-this-photo/">Buy this photo.</a>Photo captions
The caption should read This is a photo caption. Firstname Lastname/Daily. Buy this photo.
Copy and paste this as the caption template:
This is a photo caption. <i>Firstname Lastname/Daily.</i> <a href="https://store.pub.umich.edu/michigan-daily-buy-this-photo/">Buy this photo.</a>If you don’t want a “Buy this photo”:
`This is a photo caption. <i>Firstname Lastname/Daily.</i>
If you want only a "Buy this photo."
```This is a caption. <a href="https://store.pub.umich.edu/michigan-daily-buy-this-photo/">Buy this photo.</a>Design captions
The caption should read Design by Firstname Lastname. Buy this photo.
Copy and paste this as the caption template:
<i>Design by Firstname Lastname.</i> <a href="https://store.pub.umich.edu/michigan-daily-buy-this-photo/">Buy this photo.</a>Adding metadata
Finally, an editor should set some metadata for each post. These can all be set in the Post tab.
- Add authors in the plugin panel.
- Add categories in the Post tab:
- Select the category for your section and your beat (e.g. Art and Film)
- Designate the category for your beat as the “primary category”.
- Add tags in the Post tab (see the next section on the editing workflow.)
- Add a featured image in the Post tab.
- (Optional) Add a subtitle in the Post tab. This is a line of text that displays under the title.