General WordPress Help
This help file is more geared to the specifics of TrumanTickets.com. There is loads of documentation available for the general use of WordPress at the following locations…
- Documentation – http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
- Forums – http://wordpress.org/support/
TrumanTickets.com
This website has a several customizations where made that will make the site differ from ordinary WordPress sites and other documentation you will find around the internet. Hopefully, the resulting Admin Center is relatively simple for you to control the website. Most content on the site can be controlled via the Admin Center, but there are a couple areas that will have to be edited directly in the code.
Blog
The blog is controlled via the ‘Posts’ tab. The five most recent posts are shown in the sidebar and a link at the bottom to read all entries, which is a list of all the posts with a little summary and ‘read more’ link. The blog does not yet use categories, but can easily be added once the number of posts justifies it (would look silly with only a few posts).
Main Pages
Most of the site is controlled via the Pages tab. You can control the Title at the top of the page and using the ‘Heading 2’ style. Sub-headers should use ‘Heading 3’. Below are some specific notes about this section…
Court Pages. The pages in the Courts section require a bit different set of instructions that most others. To create a Court page, do the following…
- Create a 200px image of MapQuest or Google Maps to be used on the page and upload via the Media tab. Name the image like ‘kansas-city-municipal-court-map’ with the right court name. Be sure to use the official name of the court and to separate the words using dashes. Note the full name of the image when you upload it.
- Create a new page, using the official name of the court of the Page Name.
- Create the Content of the page from the ‘General Information’ section down. Content above that point are controlled differently.
- Under Attributes, select the following: the Parent should be ‘Kansas City Missouri Traffic Courts’, the Template should be ‘Court Page’, and the Order number controls the order of the courts on the general page, starting with the lowest numbers first.
- Scroll down to the Court Info section, which controls the top part of the court page as well as the blurb on the general courts page, according to the following: Summary Page Teaser appears on the general courts page and at the top of the individual court page, Address and Phone Number are self-explanatory, the Website Address is the address to the court’s official page, the MapQuest URL is the url of MapQuest with directions to the court, the Mapquest Image is file name of the image you created in step 1.
- Click Update Page and test in browser including click on the links.
Custom Tags. Some areas of the site have custom tags in the content, like [display_questions_and_answers], which are used by the system to automatically replace those tags with some of the more advanced features of the site. These tags should remain unchanged.
Miscellaneous Content. This page is just a holding page to organize pieces of content that are not actual pages on the site, but rather text that is pulled into various places, like the sidebar. As of the time of writing, this only included the “Monthly Specials” text, but could be expanded later to include other areas of the site that you’d like to control via the Admin Center.
Exclude Pages. Uncheck this box for any new pages so that they don’t appear in the menu.
Tools
There are two custom Tools (via the Tools tab) built for this website…
Truman Q&A. These are the Questions and Answers section shown at the bottom of the ‘How We Help’ page. Here, you can add, edit, or delete those questions and answers including a sort field to control which order they appear in. Having links or formatted text (bold/italic) will require some simple html, see the existing entries for examples. The Q and A images are handled automatically.
Truman Testimonials. These are the excerpts of testimonials. A random testimonial is displayed in the sidebar and a new page with all of the testimonials added to the system are shown, as well as new graphics leading to the Yahoo and Google pages. I’d recommend only selecting the best testimonials for this system – and to only use short excerpts of the most powerful sections.