The new version of WordPress (WordPress 3) is now being used as the system which operates the myCouncillor websites.
The “Dashboard” – what you see when you log into your site to edit it – looks a bit different, and a bit more up to date.
Hopefully most of this is pretty straightforward for people – the buttons that you see down the left of the dashboard are shown here:
- – posts – for creating a new story on your site (or editing an existing one)
- – media – for managing pictures (or now other files) which you have uploaded to your site:
- – links – to manage the links that you show in your website side bar
- – pages – to manage the extra pages that you’ve set up on your website
- – comments – to approve, reject or mark as “spam” comments that you get on your site
- – appearance – to change the look of your website
- – tools – all the extra things that are just for for the myCouncillor sites are in here – Local Information, the Graph, Surveys etc. There are NEW features in here, which we’re going to be telling you about over the coming weeks!
Please be a little careful with the tiny arrow which appears just about “posts” on the left – if you click on that your dashboard reduces to a thin column of just icons, with no words – to get the words back you just click on the tiny arrow again!
Please ignore the “profile” section – we don’t use it on the myCouncillor system.
Please note that to see your website from the dashboard – click on your name at the top of the page – its not that obvious!
New Features when creating a new story
When you’re creating a new story there are a number of new buttons which hopefully you’ll find useful (see below):
- Picture Button – can you see the “picture” just to the right of the words Upload/Insert? This is where you add pictures to your website. This is a hugely improved way for adding pictures (or files like word or PDF documents with the media button (the “star”) to your story. Its significantly improved on before and allows you to alter the sizes of pictures more easily. We’ll be doing a separate posting to help you with the detail of this shortly, but it is very easy to have a go. Please remember that if the picture you want is ALREADY on the internet, you don’t have to upload it again (just just add media “from URL”).
- Show the kitchen sink (!) – the LAST button on the right is called “kitchen sink” – press it an all the buttons on the bottom row appear!
- A really useful new feature is “Paste From Word” (the clipboard with a “W” on the bottom row) – if you’re copying a story from a word document, then sometimes its full of strage fonts and formatting that spoil the look of your website – click on “past from word” and you remove the worst of this!