–Site Documentation–

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The purpose of this page is to document how the website is implemented so that people can take over the role of maintaining and enhancing it over time.

The key concepts that the site uses are pages, posts, media, menus, and themes.

Pages

like normal pages in a website; they tend not to change over time, except that they might display updated content when they include a collection of posts. All the pages in the site can be seen in the WP (WordPress) dashboard. The home page for the site is referred to as the “front page” and has special procedures for how it gets displayed. Pages are composed of blocks; many blocks are like HTML constructs, but some relate directly to WP. For example, there’s a block that indicates that a collection of posts should be displayed, based on dates/categories/etc.

Posts

when content is updated — usually announcements of upcoming events, new newsletters, meeting minutes, etc. — a post is created that contains the content. A category associated with the post is selected that indicates the kind of content: Document (not used much), Events, Meeting Update, Minutes, Newsletter, Uncategorized, zoom. One or more pages may include an indication that posts with a specific category should be displayed. In this way, new content can be added without having to edit any pages — simply create the post and assign the correct category. Posts can also contain an expiration date – so that irrelevant posts are no longer displayed. The content of a post is composed in the same way as a page… using blocks.

Media

includes images, recordings, and documents. All media is contained in the Media Library, and can be referenced in pages or posts by media-type specific blocks. Links to off-site content can be included using hyperlinks “as” the content, but if you want the content to appear within the page or post, it needs to be in the media library.

Menus

the ability to create multiple, hierarchical menus to display various types of content — including primary and secondary banner menus, bottom area menus, sidebar menus, etc.

Themes

provide a consistent look and feel for the site, and may provide some enhanced layout capabilities. This site uses the OA Hope theme, developed especially for OA sites. It provides powerful capabilities that make a complex front page easy to create (no HTML necessary) and beyond what can be done with the standard WP page block layouts. To learn more, from the dashboard, go to Appearance > Themes, and select OA Hope. There is a special form that appears when editing the front page. But not everything that appears on the front page appears in the form. To populate everything you might want, go to Appearance > Customize and select Front Page. From there, you can reorder the elements on the front page, and add things to various sections (it’s not consistent across all sections).