Guidance on breaking up posts
The following exercise would reduce the amount of work I need to do
The problem
Some of your posts on this website have more than one item in them. Really to make the site as useful as possible to people, we need to have each post covering one subject area.
The solution
Each multiple item post needs to be separated into individual posts and categorised as appropriate, and for any new derivative posts the date needs to be changed to reflect the date of the original item.
Why?
The recommended way for your website to work is that users can create pages of content (usually posts) in a variety of ways.
- Search by category
- Search by text (use a search string of text to find something)
- Search by date (Use archive year and month) to move through the site temporally
The three cases above means that pages are built on the fly based on the search criteria and presented to the user as a sequence of summaries. A user can then check through the list to locate something of interest.
Searches
There are many ways that we can help people to locate things in this website, however we need to structure the website accordingly and categorise the information in it. We can also use tags as well. If we do this we help users locate things relatively easily.
Search through archive period
Clicking on one of these buttons will build several pages which provide a list based on the year they were published. The list will go onto several pages. This function is automatic, you do not need to do any special presentation or preparation. The filtering is based on the published year. Each page opens in a new window.
Searching by Newsletter
If we look at the current content it is possible to select newsletters because these are a single post where a number of news items are grouped together. Click on the button below to locate the Summer 2018 Newsletter.
when you click on the button it finds one single post which has several items in it.
However we want to be able to see both the individual items and the 2018 Summer Newsletter. In this case I have chopped the Summer 2018 newsletter into several shorter items. Each is categorised as a 2018 Summer Newsletter. So in this case they are pulled together and presented on a single page dynamically.
They look very similar, but in this case the site is searched for anything that falls into the Summer 2018 Newsletter Category.
Searching for a Hot Topic
In this case the search button searches for items which fall under a specific category. In this case Heathrow. If all news items are published discretely, then you can assign categories to them (more than one) which will assist in locating them in the future.
In this case there was one Heathrow related news item published in the Summer 2018 Newsletter. Because I broke down the Summer 2018 Newsletter into discrete posts we can now search for something within the newsletter. and it will appear as an isolated item (as opposed to something buried in a newsletter.
Of course it is also possible to search the whole site for the word “Heathrow” which is what the following button does.
What you need to do (part 1)
You need to create a list of categories that you want to use on the website. They are not mutually exclusive, so more than one can apply to any post that is published. This list needs to include the following Generic categories:
- News, Events, Members, AGM, <season> <year> Newsletter, (e.g. Summer 2018 Newsletter) as generic categories
Additionally you may wish to consider by Region
- Staines Town Centre, Spelthorne, etc
Additionally you may wish to consider by Hot Topic
- e.g. Heathrow
You do not want 100’s of them, but say 20-30 might be ok as a goal. Once you have sorted out the list, then we create them as categories, and then start to apply them to the published posts. Also note that “categorised” and “categoized” needs resolving, so there is only one of them. It is a mandatory category for anything you forget to categorise.
There is another level in WordPress called Tags, we can use those too, but then we risk it becoming too complicated. I think we can do all we need to do using Categories.
What you need to do (part 2)
With the categories in place and set up in the website. You need to systematically go through all of the posts. All posts need to be in the new Divi format like the first three I have done, they also need to contain one subject area per post. So a newsletter needs to be taken apart. When you create new posts to populate with old information set the date on the new posts to correspond to the original newsletter. When you have taken the newsletter apart and have it in discrete posts, you can delete the original otherwise things will become duplicated.