This is a guide for future students who wish to expand the site by adding posts. If you're a programmer and you want to work on the code, check out CONTRIBUTING_CODE.md instead.
This website uses wordpress.com for managing posts and images, so adding stuff to the site is simple without needing to write code.
Dr. Reynolds will give you the login information to the Wordpress site. From there, visit the Posts section and start a new post.
In order for the website to display your post, you need to add a category to it.
Valid categories are:
- Article
- Bibliography
- Biographies
- Documents
- Timeline
If the post isn't categorized with something from that list, it won't show up on the site.
You should also add tags with the notable people, places, and events mentioned in the post. This is especially important for images--there's no text to search so you have to rely on tags.
Every post should have a date range attached. You enter this as a regular tag, but it needs to be a specific format.
The date range must be in exactly the XXXX-XXXX format to be detected as a date.
Valid date ranges are:
- 1855-1880
- 1880-1890
- 1890-1900
- 1900-1910
- 1910-1920
- 1920-1930
- 1930-1935
- 1935-1940
- 1940-1945
For documents, enter the date range that the document is from. For example, a newspaper article from 1936 would be tagged "1935-1940".
For articles, bios, etc., enter all date ranges that cover the time your figure was involved with the United Fruit Company.
Andrew Preston was a major figure in the company for many years, so he is in four different date ranges. Meanwhile, John Foster Dulles was a prominent figure for many years, but his relevance to the United Fruit Company only covers 1950-1955, so that's the only date tag he gets.
The site makes heavy used of Wordpress's "Featured Image" system. This is different from an image included in the post. It's under the Post header in the post setting menu, but by the time you're reading this Wordpress has probably redesigned their menu a dozen times. If you Google "wordpress featured image" you'll find up-to-date instructions on where the option is.
If that was a bit too much to take in, feel free to check out existing posts in the Wordpress site for examples.
If there's still any confusion, I should be around somewhere and hopefully not too busy to answer some questions.