How To
This page contains information about how to use the website.
Sign In
Before you do anything, you will need to log in. You can log in at the address /wp-admin/. Enter your username and password.
Once you do this, you will be able to access the administration pages. You can always access them at /wp-admin/. You can also hover your mouse at the top of the site and the admin bar will appear with button controls.
Site Structure
The site has several types of posts. They can be accessed by the left sidebar.
- Pages - Static pages at specific addresses like About Us.
- Posts - News/Updates, organized by date.
- Programs - The listings for shows/programs on the station.
- Sponsored Events - Companies and organizations' event listings which have a date range.
- Staff Members - Bios for staff members.
- Verses - Bible verses that can appear in rotation on the site.
Note
In all of the types listed below, feel free to look at existing examples on the site to get an idea of what is possible and how the different data is used to create the output that visitors see. There should be little you can permanently damage, so feel free to try things out.
Posts
When you want to make a new post, add a New Post. You would use this for updates to the site, announcements, or to call out when adding a new Staff Member, Program, or Sponsored Event.
These will appear in reverse chronological order on the homepage and are paginated. You can control how many posts show up per page in Settings > Reading > "Blog pages show at most". Currently set to 5.
For most other types of pages, most of the following will be identical. Later, I will give exceptions for other types of pages.
When editing a post, you need to add several things:
Title
The title appears at the top of the post and forms the link to the specific page for that post. It should be a short, memorable headline. It is required.
Permalink
By default, once you write a Title, the Permalink to the page will be a variation of the title. For example, if you have a title named "About Us", the site will try to make the permalink "about-us". You can choose whatever permalink you want, but you will want to follow these rules:
- All lowercase
- Spaces replaced by dashes
- Don't include other special characters
- Make the text related to the title
You can edit it after the fact with the Edit button.
The Permalink is required.
Content
On the left side you will see the Markdown text for the post. Markdown is a simplified text format that includes formatting. Use this markdown guide to understand what to type to get the desired output.
On the right side, you will see a preview of your changes. This will be a simplified view because the styling information on the actual page will not all reflect here. You may need to do some tests to get a feel for what will happen as you you make changes.
Media
Sometimes you will want to add an image to the page. The way to do this is to click the Add Media button just above the Content area.
Inside this popup, you will see a list of all previously uploaded images.
To add a new image to the media library, you can drag a JPG (.jpg, .jpeg) or PNG (.png) file into the area and drop it. The media library will automatically create multiple versions of the image at different sizes.
Once you have added the image, you can click it in the library to see options on the right side.
You can choose the size you want to use. Generally, when you need to insert an image, you're going to want to insert the "Full Size" version.
Once you are ready to insert, click the Insert Into Post button on the bottom right. This will insert the Markdown for selecting the image. You should remove the "https://miracleradio.org" part of the address, because links on the site only need to start with the first slash. (That means, if you link to a page or image, it is sufficient to link to "/about-us/" instead of "https://miracleradio.org/about-us/". These are equivalent, except that the one without the address is shorter and works when you change the website address.)
As for images, you should edit your images before uploading it into the media library. You should make sure your images have no width or height greater than 1200 pixels. You should also try to compress the image a bit before uploading. You can edit the size of your image with an image editor like Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, or an online editor like Photopea. When saving/exporting your edited image as a JPG, you need to specify a quality of about 90. If you export a PNG, you can usually use full quality. If you want to do better compression, export your JPGs and PNGs as full quality, then compress them with aggressive settings in ImgOptim.
Tags
On the right sidebar, there is an area to add tags. Tags should be single or multiple words in lowercase that are searchable text related to the post. You should choose words and names from the post that are distinct and insert them, as well as category type words like "update" or "program" or "event" depending on what it is.
Publishing
By default, new posts are in the Draft status. You can save your changes without publishing by clicking Safe Draft. You can preview what the post will look like on the site by clicking Preview. Once you are ready to publish, you can click the Publish button. There are options to publish posts to the future by clicking Edit next to "Publish immediately".
Later, if you want to hide a post, you can click Edit next to "Visibility: Public". Choose Private as the option so that you as a signed in user can see it, but regular viewers can't.
Pages
Pages are designed for static content not directly linked to time posted or other metadata. Pages work like regular Posts with a few exceptions.
They have no Tags.
They have the page attribute Parent, where you can specify the hierarchy of pages. For example, the Thank You! (/giving/thank-you/) is underneath the parent Giving (/giving/). This is because the thank you is related logically to the giving.
Post pages, however, will be at the top level, and so have no parent. The page you are on right now How To is under contact just to hide it more deeply from site visitors who might otherwise stumble upon it.
Programs
Programs is a post type that allows you to individually edit radio program listings to appear on the Programs page. Programs posts work like regular Posts with a few exceptions.
They have no Tags and there are several custom fields at the bottom.
Custom Fields
- Type (required) - Choose between Feature and Program, depending on what it is.
- Presenter Photo (required) - The URL (starting with the slash) to the the uploaded photo.
- Date & Time - If it is a program with a specific time, add it here.
- Presenter - The speaker, if applicable.
- Order - A number to control what order this Program appears in relative to other Programs in the Programs page.
Sponsored Events
Sponsored Events is a post type that allows you to individually edit events for sponsors. The events that are not finished yet will appear in chronological order on the homepage. All events, even completed ones, will appear on the Sponsored Events page in reverse chronological order, and they are paginated.
You can control how many events show up per page in the Sponsored Events page (NOT on the homepage, that's controlled only by date info) in Settings > Reading > "Blog pages show at most". Currently set to 5. Note that this is the same value as the Post count per page, so whatever you choose, it will apply to the Posts on the homepage too.
Sponsored Event posts work like regular Posts with a few exceptions.
They have no Tags and there are several custom fields at the bottom.
Custom Fields
- Location (required) - A description of where the event will occur, including the venue name and possibly the address.
- Start Date (required) - The date the event starts. Use the YYYY-MM-DD format.
- End Date (required) - The date the event ends. If it is a one-day event, set this to the same date as the Start Date. Use the YYYY-MM-DD format.
- Banner Image - The URL (starting with the slash) to the medium size image, used on the homepage.
- Post Image - The URL (starting with the slash) to the full size image, used for when viewing the full page or the Sponsored Events page.
Staff Members
Staff Members is a post type that allows you to individually edit staff bios for the About Us page. The all appear on this page in the Order order. Staff Member posts work like regular Posts with a few exceptions.
They have no Tags and there are several custom fields at the bottom.
Custom Fields
- Profile Picture (required) - The URL (starting with the slash) to the medium size image, if it exists. Otherwise the full size image.
- Position (required) - The staff member's functional position in the organization.
- Email (required) - The email address that will appear on the page.
- Order (required) - A number to control what order this Staff Member appears in relative to other Staff Members in the Staff Members page.
Verses
This is a feature not visible yet because we're waiting for enough verses to be filled out. But eventually, when there are at least 365 verses entered, we can turn on this feature to show a random Bible verse per day, which should appear somewhere on most pages.
Unlike the other post types, these only have the following:
- Title (required) - Should be the verse location like "Genesis 1:1".
- Permalink (required) - Should be based on the title like posts do.
- Verse (custom field, required) - The text content of the verse.
- Version - What translation of the Bible was used, such as "NIV".
RSS
There's an RSS feed for most types of functionality on the site, but the one anyone would care about is the main news feed (/feed/). This shows the most recent set of regular posts in reverse chronological order. The total number of recent posts is controlled by Settings > Reading > "Syndication feeds show the most recent". Currently set to 5.
You can read more about how RSS works on our Subscribe to Our RSS Feed page.
Other Info About the Site
The theme is a custom one made by Dwight. Any changes to the appearance of the site will involve modifications by him, rather than using the Theme editor systems.
What links appear on the sidebar to the different pages is hard-coded in the theme, specifically in the "partials/nav.php" file. I don't recommend modifying them yourself without Dwight's assistance, or until you understand HTML editing robustly.
When editing content, you can use Markdown for the majority of your formatting needs. If you need to create something more complex or specific that requires custom HTML or CSS, you will probably need to ask Dwight until you gain a better understanding of HTML and CSS.
If ever updating a style or script file, you will need to make a new file with the date at the end (such as "styles2024-12-12.css") to break the browser's cache. Otherwise, users might see an old version of the styles or scripts.
Also, this new file reference must be edited in the theme's functions.php file where the import is actually specified.
Many of the Plugins we use on the site are custom to allow for our needs on this site specifically. We try to keep third party plugins to a minimum. We do, however have a couple:
- WP Githuber MD - Allows markdown editing in the content.
- Secure Custom Fields - Allows the custom field definitions at the bottom of different post types.