Page 169 - PAM - PROOF

V 1.1 February 2024

Appendix B – Pioneer Hints and Tips

The Pioneers spent several weeks working with u3a SiteWorks when it was a
brand new product with almost no reference material. They experimented, tried
things out, became guinea pigs for specific group testing, and more. I asked each
of them to tell me which item(s) they had found most useful during their learning
and would like to pass on to you. In no particular order here are some of the
things that they said.
• When you are adding text to a page and press ‘Enter’ you get a new block
of the same type you were using. If you want two paragraphs of text in the
same block then press Shift and ‘Enter’ at the same time and you will get a
new line rather than a new block. (Note that this trick works when
preparing Beacon mails too.) (Sorry – should be Shift and not Ctrl.)

• Plan your pages, content, and layouts by sketching out your block types
on paper first.

• The page hierarchy function is really helpful when you want to look back at
how a page was created and to help you to decide how to edit it.
• Prepare additional text in a text editor ready to copy and paste to the
server. This will save time.

• When in view site mode search for @ in the search box. It will help to
reveal where you have exposed emails on your site.

• When editing your site in maintenance mode prior to going live you may
want to let your committee members see it. Set up an Author log on but
don't give it access to any pages to edit.
• Comments and hints about SiteWorks block deletion. The problem with
deleting blocks that very often when you click the three dots at the right
hand end of the block menu the delete option, which is always at the
bottom, is very often 'off screen' and the scroll bar isn't that prominent so
people need a reminder it's there. The other problem is that it is very easy
to end up with empty blocks on a page, I’ve adopted two approaches, put
a bit of 'random text' into the block and then delete or click the three bars
'Document Overview' and then click the three dots to the right of the
offending block and delete.

• This one is from the Development team. One of our team had an issue
that was perplexing him when copying content by using the familiar Ctrl-C
... Ctrl-V copy 'n' paste shortcut keys. He was getting unexplained changes
in text colour. He was unaware of the "paste as plain text" alternative
which uses Ctrl-Shift-V to paste instead of Ctrl-V on Windows and Linux
or Cmd-Shift-V on Mac. The benefit of using the shifted version is that is
prevents hidden markup and control characters being included from the
source document when pasting. Using this method can save a lot of time
cleaning up text when copying from other sources into WordPress pages.

Workbook for Web Managers Migrating to u3a SiteWorks Page 169