All you need to know about registering on the site and creating and managing your own posts and pages, images, videos and more…

Why register?

There is only ONE reason to register on Loups du Soleil and that is you own a dog from Loups du Soleil and you want to create and manage a page about your dog, post your brags and accomplishments, download photos, add video content, etc. There is no other reason to register!

But if you do own a LdS dog, by registering, you’ll be able to create and manage pages for your dogs and blog about your training, titles, trials (and tribulations!) and other achievements. Your collaboration will help make this a great resource for the LdS family.

Register as a user

By default, you’re a SUBSCRIBER when you initially register. If I don’t know you, I will send you an email asking a little about yourself so I know you’re not a comment spammer or are trying to hack the site. I need to know you’re real, and have a LdS dog. Once I receive your reply and you meet the criteria, you will be upgraded to EDITOR. If you’re a friend of LdS who wants to be able to post or comment, I will upgrade you to CONTRIBUTOR or AUTHOR. I will try to upgrade you quickly, but drop me an email if you haven’t received your “welcome” email. If you don’t reply, you will be left at SUBSCRIBER or deleted.

User Levels

Editor – An editor can publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users’ posts. This means you can create your own pages for your dogs, add titles as your dog earns them to the litter page, post your own brags, photos, videos, etc. on the blog (News & Brags), make comments and edit other people’s comments.
Author – An author can publish and manage their own posts. This means you can post to the blog (News & Brags). You can add photos and videos to your blog post, but you can’t edit pages (add titles, for instance) or make new pages for your dogs. You can post to the blog, edit your own posts, and manage comments for any posts you have written.
Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish them. Their posts are held for review before being published by the administrator.
Subscriber – Somebody who can login, view the Dashboard, and edit their own profile. You can’t post, comment or create pages.

An important note about passwords

Half a dozen losers per day try to brute-force their way into this website by trying to guess admin passwords. One of the easiest security features you as a user can have is a strong password. This website requires that your password be at least 12 characters long, and must contain both lower and uppercase letters, numbers and other special characters including $%#@*&. Don’t use any word that can be found in a dictionary (of any language). For your own safety, change passwords frequently, and don’t use the same password for multiple sites.

Logging in

Once you’re registered as a user, you can log in to the website by clicking “login” at the very bottom of each page, or by placing “wp-admin” after the domain address: http://loupsdusoleil.com/wp-admin . Log in using your username and password.

Dashboard

Starting at the dashboard, you’ll see on the left the “index” of things you can manage.
If you’re a Contributor, you’ll see:

• Profile

If you’re an Author, you’ll see:

• Posts (All Posts, Add New)
• Media
• Comments
• Profile
• Tools

If you’re an Editor, you’ll see:

• Posts (All Posts, Add New, Categories, Tags)
• Media
• Links
• Pages
• Comments
• Profile
• Tools
• WP-Activity

The difference between POSTS and PAGES

POSTS are what get published in the “News and Brags” section of the website. This is a dynamic log of news and events, announcements, photographs, videos, thoughts, articles, rants, – anything the user wants to write about! When you add a new post, it gets published in calendar order on the NEWS and BRAGS page. Use POSTS to announce new titles, add photos of new puppies, brag about accomplishments, etc.

PAGES are for more static content. For example, each of the litters has its own page, and individual dogs have pages. Pages can be updated, and new pages can be created – you can also add titles and photos/videos to pages – but the content is more static.

POSTS

• POST
  • All Posts – you can see the list of all the posts you can view, edit, or delete.
  • Add New – Create a new post
  • Categories – classify Posts into groups and subgroups, which aids viewers in navigating the site.
  • Post Tags – key words that help users find the info they’re seeking

Create a new post

Choose ADD NEW which will open this window:

Fill in a title and add your content. You can write your post in VISUAL or Text (HTML) (upper right of content box). I prefer writing in TEXT when I’m cutting and pasting, because when you paste in material from another application – especially MS Word – all the formatting will be added along with the text, which is usually not what I want. I avoid this pasting into TEXT – I can then switch to VISUAL to make formatting changes.

To make those changes in VISUAL, this row of icons gives you lots of options for formatting. Bold – italic – strikethrough – unordered and ordered lists (which indents and adds bullets to lists), blockquote (which separates and highlights text) – alignment – links (highlight the text you want to make into a link, then click on the chain icon) – “more” – spellcheck – distraction free writing mode – show/hide kitchen sink – add NextGen gallery (more on that later).
The little icon second from the end opens up the whole “kitchen sink” of formatting where you can choose headings vs paragraph text, underline, change text colour PASTE AS PLAIN TEXT, or REMOVE FORMATTING, add special characters æ and more.

Format options: Heading 1

Format options: Heading 2

Format options: Heading 3

Format options: Heading 4

Format options: Heading 5

Format options: Heading 6

Format options: paragraph text
Format options: bold paragraph text

From the menus to the right, choose one or more Categories, or create a new category. The Categories are indexed on the sidebar menu where you can search for all articles written in a specific category. Add keywords to the Tags field if you wish.

Discussion

You can choose to allow people to make comments and/or trackbacks and pingbacks if you wish. By default, comments are allowed on POSTS but not on PAGES.  I have turned off comments on all the pages because there is so much spam associated with them, but if you build a page for your own dog and want to leave comments on, you can.

Slug

The slug is what shows up in the url and is automatically assigned, but you can change it if you wish.

All in One SEO Pack

Down below the content box, “All in One SEO Pack” adds the meta data that search engines look for.  The information you add in these fields are what search engines (google, etc.) index when the site is listed, and what appears in the title bar in your browser window. You can add a Title, Description and Keywords to your posts and pages.

Publish

When you’re done, click PUBLISH and it will automatically appear on the NEWS & BRAGS page, published under today’s date. If you’re catching up on older news and wish to post it with an old date, you can change the publish date by clicking EDIT next to “Publish immediately” and then change the date. If you aren’t quite ready to publish, you can save it as a draft and come back later.

You can click “View Post” at the top to go look at your new post.
 

PAGES

 Edit a Page

Once you’ve been upgraded to an Editor, you have the following options on the dashboard:

• POSTS
• MEDIA
• LINKS
• PAGES
  • All Pages
  • Add New

I am adding pages for dogs as I find information for them – photos, videos, etc. If I’ve already made a page for your dog, feel free to go in and add more photos, make changes, and generally make it your own.

Once you’re logged in, go to your page and in the banner across the top, choose EDIT PAGE. You can also find the page by going to:
PAGES – All Pages and scroll thru until you find the page you’re looking for. Highlight the page title and you’ll see
Edit | Quick Edit | Trash | View
Click Edit.

You can edit in Visual or HTML mode, whatever you’re most comfortable with. Type in you new titles. You can highlight them and change the colour to RED in the menubar if you’d like. Click UPDATE when you’re done.
 

Create a New Page

If you want to add a new page for your dog, go to PAGES, ADD NEW. Give it a title (what will show up in the navigation menu).
Add your content. (see Creating a Post for more info on formatting.)

IMPORTANT!
On the right side of the page, you’ll see “Page Attributes”. Under PARENT you’ll need to click which litter your dog is from so that it shows up correctly in the navigation menu.

Under TEMPLATE choose “Full Width”. Full width does not have the blue navigation menu to the right; default template does.

 

Discussion

You can choose to allow people to make comments and/or trackbacks and pingbacks if you wish. By default, comments are allowed on POSTS but not on PAGES.  I have turned off comments on all the pages because there is so much spam associated with them, but if you build a page for your own dog and want to leave comments on, you can. But that means you’ll be responsible for managing the comments – they are held for review until they’re approved.

Slug

The slug is what shows up in the url and is automatically assigned from the title you give the page, but you can change it if you wish. Just click Edit by the Permalink under the title field.

All in One SEO Pack

Down below the content box, “All in One SEO Pack” adds the meta data that search engines look for.  The information you add in these fields are what search engines (google, etc.) index when the site is listed, and what appears in the title bar in your browser window. You can add a Title, Description and Keywords to your posts and pages.

Publish

When you’re done, click PUBLISH and it will automatically appear in the navigation bar under the litter.  If you aren’t quite ready to publish, you can save it as a draft and come back later.

You can click “View Page” at the top to go look at your new page.

IMAGES

Add an image

After you’ve created a PAGE for your dog, you’ll want to upload photos. If you only have one or two pics, you can use the photo uploader in the Add New POST or Add New PAGE form.

Click the little photo icon right next to “upload/insert” – in the newest version of wordpress, it now says “Add Media”. Choose the file or files from your computer (you can upload multiple photos at once if you want). After the file has uploaded, click on SHOW. A form opens where you can change the title, add a caption, choose where you want the image to be (left, center, right) and how large. If you select thumbnail, the reader can click on the image and it will open to its actual size. Click INSERT.

If you have multiple pictures, you’ll want to create a gallery in NextGEN.

Create a gallery in NextGEN

From the DASHBOARD menu on the left, choose Gallery

Choose Add Gallery/Images

Choose “Add new gallery”. You have to create a gallery before you can upload images.

Name your gallery.

Go to the Upload images tab, and choose your gallery from the drop down menu. Click “Select Files”

Browse to the folder where your images are located on your computer. Here, I have made a temporary folder on my desktop called “zappa” to make finding the photos I want to upload easy. Select the photos (shift-click to select all photos, or ctrl-click to select a few) and click on “Open”.

Click on “Upload images”. You can also click on “Scale images to max width 800px” so you don’t end up with monster photos.

Uploading images

Two of my photos hadn’t been “optimized”. For best results, use a photo editor to make each photo 72 (or 96) pixels per inch, a maximum of 800px wide (399px wide for portrait pics) and save as a jpg file optimized for the web.

Success!! Now click on “Edit gallery”

NextGEN also automatically makes thumbnails.

Here you can give the gallery a title and description, give captions to individual photos, assign the page it will be linked to, make sure the author is correct. I also deleted the two large photos, as they appeared in the list even though the photos hadn’t uploaded.

Link the photos to the page on which they will appear. Choose the page you’ve already made — but if you haven’t made a page yet, you can create one in the “Create new page:” drop down menu.

Add title text, descriptions, and tags, if wanted. These help search engines find and index your photos. Now you’re with the gallery!

Navigate to the PAGE or POST edit window.

In the “visual editor” click on the last icon in the top row. This is the NextGEN gallery editor.

This is the NextGEN gallery editor. Choose your galler, and choose Image list, Slideshow, or Imagebrowser.

Image list

Image list

Slideshow

Slideshow

Image browser

Image browser. This makes the photo super-size, larger than the original, thus losing quality.

Add video:

Currently, the easiest way to add video is to download it to youtube.com first and then link to videos simply by typing in the URL of the video and adding a “v” to the http:// so it reads “httpv://samplevideo”. The videos will open on the page as in the example below of LdS Legends:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS8e64h7vIU

Getting Started with WordPress

If you want more information about using WordPress, you can find it in the WordPress Codex.

That’s it! If you run into problems, or have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Enjoy!
-sam

lodestar at mcn.net
lodestargraphics at gmail.com
sam at lodestargraphics.com