How to use our new website

If you come to the forums via http://www.xdcuk.com you’ll have noticed we’ve fixed up a new theme for the website, and of course Bug’s is back again 🙂 It isn’t completely finished yet, but it’s fully functional at the moment so may as well put it up as it is. Before I go on I want to give a big thanks to Jonny and Andy for all the help they gave me in setting the thing up, it was very much appreciated and I’d have been up shit creek without you both! But anyway you’ll all remember Andy going on about this wordpress thing when we switched hosts, and you’ll probably also remember that slightly numb feeling in the brain, then thinking what the fuck is he talking about 😉 Well everything he said about it is true, the thing is brilliant, and virtually idiot proof now that the site’s up and running! Now I know not everyone will have an interest in this, but for those who do, I hope to show just how easy this is and explain how to use it so that hopefully more of us can help with keeping the front page updated.

Logging on and Posting a News item

URL: http://xdcuk.com/alzir/wp-login.php

Username: admin (case sensitive)
Password: xdc101

This is almost an indentical process to posting on a forum. All you have to do is log on here (bookmark that page for easy reference), and select “Write a New Post” (note you’re making a post not a page – see later) and you’ll be taken to an area where you can write up the news item. To post it, simply click on the publish button, or alternatively select publish from the pull down menu on the right, below where it says “Publish Status“, then hit save. If you want to help keep the site organised, scroll down the page slightly to where it says categories, and tick any box beside a category that’s relevant to your post, (if no such category exsists just add one or select Miscellaneous) and then hit save. As an example of what this does take a look at my post about the team fortress map pack; I typed up the message, then ticked the categories Team Fortress 2 News and From the forums (a lot of our posts will come from the forums I guess). These categories will then be displayed along the top of the post beside the date and also on the sidebar of the site, under the category menu. If you click on the link of any category, all relevant posts in the archive will then be displayed as a list. This will obviously look better with time as we add more variety and content. Oh and don’t worry if you forget to select a category, it defaults to miscellaneous, but I’ll also keep an eye on the whole thing to make sure it stays tidy.

What not to do 🙂

Unless you know what you’re doing, don’t select “Write a New Page” as it will most likely mess up the site navigation, and there’s no need to turn off or activate any pluggins or widgets. Of course if you know what you’re doing and have an idea how to improve the site, fire away.

Correcting a mistake

If you’ve already navigated away from a post and then realise you made a mistake, just select “Manage” on the top left menu which will bring you to a list of all posts by default (you can also view all pages, links, categories etc from the manage menu). Select your post by clicking on the title, edit and save. If you want to delete a post, instead of clicking on the title to edit, just tick the box beside the post in the list and hit the delete button above (just like using hotmail).

Links

I’m not sure how the list of links will work in future if we have a lot of them, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it. If you would like a link added, either let me know, or go to the “Manage” area and select links from the options there (don’t select “page links” as this is a plugin for something different) then click “add new“. When filling in this form, and considering how clutter may affect things in future, try and keep these categorised.

Embedding a video

I’m just making a note here about this because it was a little tricky at first, so to save anyone else having to look up the solution, here it is. First go to your profile, and make sure the box beside “Use the visual editor when writing” is unchecked. You can then embed simply by cut and pasting the code supplied by the video website, for example

Event Calendar

I’m not completely happy with it at the moment, but it’ll do for the time being. Click on the Events Calendar option on the menu, and fill in the details (it’s fairly self explanatory). There’s also an option to automatically post a news item showing the event has been added. Use this to your hearts content, it’s not like we organise a million events, but it may come in useful.

Registration

You don’t have to register, but if you post a news item using the above log in details, nobody can tell who made the post as it’s author will be “admin”. I’m also not entirely sure how stable the whole thing is if say we have 2 or 3 people logged in at once (Do you know Andy? Though I guess we’ll find out soon enough assuming people try it out). If you do decide to register you can make posts using your normal forum name (remember username is case sensitive) but there are a couple of things to look out for. First of all you register here, and that’ll send you an email with your username and a randomly generated password (remember to check junk mail folder if this doesn’t seem to arrive). If you then log back on as admin and click on the “users” option (top right of screen), you should see your new username listed there. Click on the name and you’ll then be able to set your own access level (make this at least Author), and can also modify other profile details including password (incase you want something less chunky than the generated one, or if you ever forget it). If that sounds too much, just register your name and pm me, and I’ll sort it for you.

Suggestions and Requests

I’m always open to suggestions and ideas as to what we can do with the frontpage and the site in general, so feel free to share any ideas you may have. Unfortunately I’m just learning all this stuff as I go along, and so anything requiring intimate knowledge of the code involved is likely to end in disaster, but I can always give it a try.

Anyway I’ll come back and edit this post from time to time if anything changes but for now I think that’s enough to keep anyone interested going.