To post content on the site you first need to login. You can do that by going here:
Once logged in on the right hand side you should see a sidebar block with your login name as its title.
From there you will have a few menu options including "My account" where you can see and/or change your profile information, "Recent posts" where you can get tabled listing of the most recent posted content, "Create content" where you will add all the content for the site and lastly, "Log out" were you can log out.
The "Create content" menu is the most interesting here. If you click on it, out will expand a menu with several content types that may be created. If you hover over each link with your mouse, you will see a short description of what each is for. Please be careful when selecting which content type to create an item for because they each have different attributes and will appear by default on different parts of the site.
- Articles appear on the front page and allow you explicitly input the name of the author. This content type is mainly used for long articles published in full on the website.
- Blog posts appear on the front page and are meant mainly for relatively short commentary by itself or on other content around the web. For example, if you find an interesting article on another website, you can post a short excerpt of it surrounded by quotes, and then give your take on it (a sentence or two on why its interesting up to several paragraphs).
- Events are individual events that by default only display on the 'timeline of events' page.
- FAQ is a frequently asked question with an answer associated with it which by default only displays on the FAQ page.
- Image is a content type which is used for posting images on to the image gallery page.
- Letter is a content type for posting letters between two interested parties. For example, Amnesty International writes the White House and we want to post that letter up on the site.
- Page is used to post some content up permanently. For example, the "U.S. Involvement" page is just static content which explains the U.S. involvement in the Niger Delta. Pages should always be attached to some menu.
- Press Release is for posting up full press releases by an interested party or organization. They will appear in the press release list.
- Quotes are for posting up *short* quotes that are notable, philosophical, or interesting in some way. Quotes appear by random in the "quote of the moment" block on the front page.
- Report is for posting up a short excerpt/description and a link to notable report on the Niger Delta by some organization.
- Video is for posting up notable video content that come from supported sites like YouTube. If you have original video that is not hosted anywhere, it must be uploaded to a supported site like YouTube before it can be posted on Niger Delta Rising.
Clicking on any of these content types will bring you to a page with different fields to enter your content. Some of these fields are required and they are noted by a red asterisk. Submission will not work until something is filled in to them. Most of these fields should be pretty self explanatory, but I will explain a few in more detail.
- Tags are used throughout the site to help users navigate to different topic areas of interest. You can see the tags in the "Tag Cloud" box on the right sidebar. Tags are very important navigational instruments and have thus been made as a requirement for most content types. You can feel free to create as many tags as you want as long as they are relevant to the content. To follow the site convention, try to keep all tags lower case except proper nouns. Separate all tags with commas.
- Body is a field for holding your main content. By default it is usually set to filtered HTML. Any line breaks and URLs will automatically be handled and converted into hyperlinks. There are some special tags you can see if you click and expand the "input format" selection area. I would recommend the default unless you really need to get fancy. Full HTML is the other input format option and selecting it will convert the text box into a GUI interface that looks a lot like word. You can use this, but be careful with it as it doesn't always produce text that looks like the rest of the site. Feel free to experiment with it and test out what it produces, but keep a standard text copy of your content on hand as backup in case something goes funky.
- Note on pasting from Word into the GUI editor: when you past from Word into the GUI editor, there is a special "paste from word" button that clears a lot of the formatting garbage that comes along with the paste. If you look carefully, the button looks like a little clipboard with a blue [w] on it. After clicking it, the screen will kind of lighten and a dialog will pop up where you can paste the material. I'd say check both check boxes below it ("Ignore Font Face definitions" and "Remove Style definitions") before hitting the OK button. The content should look much better after posting.
- Feature Picture is a field in which you can use or upload a picture which further tells the story of the content. It is displayed at the top of the content and a reduced size in the teaser and the "featured stories" section of the middle sidebar. We strongly encourage its use as it gives a relative amount of eye candy to the site and your content. You select your feature picture several ways including uploading your own from your computer, transferring a picture from another website by inputting its URL, or browsing the server for images it already has stored. You can use any method; just try not to duplicate images that are already on the server by uploading another copy of the same image.
- The fields at the bottom including "Revision information", "URL path settings", "Comment settings", "Authoring information", and "Publishing options" are further settings that you can play with, but you shouldn't necessarily need to worry about. The defaults should work just fine.
- Publishing options will let you uncheck the "publish" check box if you're not ready for your content to be published yet. This can be useful if you want to start a draft and come back later to finish it up, but you don't wish for everyone to see it.
