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V 1.1 February 2024

Create and Edit Posts
Posts are another lovely new feature and they could really add interest to some
of our pages. There is no equivalent in Site Builder. Posts use a block called
Query Loop and this is seen as quite an advanced WordPress tool but the team
feel that many u3as will want to use the Posts feature so it is included here in
this workbook.

There are many ways to use Posts and several ways to display them but we’ll
start with a relatively simple one. You might be aware that way back WordPress
was used as a blogging tool. The examples that are being used in this section are
along those lines. Groups are the heart of our u3as. The main page informs
visitors about the group generally with a series of Events listing and/or describing
forthcoming activities. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have something linked to
a group page that describes a recent event with photos for members to enjoy
and to reminisce over? You can do that with Site Builder by creating a document
in something like MS Word, saving it as a pdf, uploading it to your site, and linking
it to the group so that viewers can click the link to view it but you probably have
to reduce your photo sizes to keep the file a reasonable size and it is a multi-
step process.

With Posts in SiteWorks you create the Post and using the menus link it to the
page you want it to appear on. The good news is that you already know the
concepts of this feature as you have been viewing and creating other items such
as pages and events and you have had plenty of practice editing pages. Posts
are edited in the same way pages are, so the editing part of this section should
be very easy for you.
Notices vs Posts
Notices and Posts are both useful features of u3a SiteWorks. Whereas a Notice
is to draw attention to something time-limited in the future, a Post can be a
description of something that has taken place in the past. Notices relating to all
groups are generally found in a dedicated area on the Home page whereas Posts
are more often found on specific pages that are related to the content such as a
Walking Post on the Walking Group page.

Thus you could find a Notice on the Home page reminding you to pay for a
particular garden field visit by a certain date alongside a Notice advising that the
walk next Friday is cancelled due to waterlogged fields from the recent torrential
rainstorms. Both of these items would disappear once their expiry date had
passed. You could find a Post on the Garden Group page describing a recent
visit to a plant fair and a different Post on the Art History page telling you about
the visit to the Oriental Museum. The Posts would remain on their respective
pages to provide a history of the group activities until such time as they were
deleted.

We looked at Notices in a previous section so let’s look now at Posts.

Workbook for Web Managers Migrating to u3a SiteWorks Page 98