Reference for Writing Motions and Other Posts

Registered members may write Motions and other posts from the “Write” tab on the “Site Admin” page. Click on the “Site Admin” link, which can be found on the sidebar to the right. Then click on the “Write” tab. To write a Motion or other post, simply fill in the various labeled fields, such as “Title” and “Post”. These fields are explained below, along with other fields found on the Admin pages. Not all fields appear on every page. To access the information on this page from the Admin pages, click on the field name.

Your Drafts
If you have any posts saved as drafts, they will appear here. Draft posts
are only visable to you the author and any authors with higher user levels
than you.
Title
The title of the post.
Category
The category the post belongs to. This is a drop-down list of existing
categories. If you want to add a post to a new category, you must create the
category first. See Categories.
Post Status
Selecting “Publish” will cause the post to be published to the weblog.
(Note that a post marked “Publish” can be changed to “Draft” or “Private”
later by editing the post.) Selecting “Draft” will cause the post to be saved;
it will show up in the “Your Drafts” section of the “Post/Edit” page, but
will not be published to the weblog. It will be editable by other authors
with user levels higher than yours. Selecting “Private” will cause the post
to be saved; it will show up in its chronological place on the “Post/Edit”
page, but will not be published to the weblog. Posts marked as "Private"
are not visable to any other authors regardless of user levels.
Comments
If “Open”, comments may be added to this post. If “Closed”, comments may
not be added to this post. If there are already comments on the post when
you turn commenting off for that post, then the link remains to the current
comments but future comments are disabled and the comment form is hidden.
If comments are off and there are no comments the comments_popup_link
template function doesn’t return a link, rather it just says "Comments
Off" (which is configurable).
Pings
This functions identically to the comments option
above except it applies to Trackback and Pingback "pings."
Post Password
When you enter anything in this field the post will become password protected. A link to a “Protected” post will show up on the weblog,
but in order to read it, a user will have to supply a password. This field
will allow the post’s author to provide the password for the Protected post.
This approach is highly flexible.
Excerpt
This field gives you the ability to manually craft a summary or description
of your post. This will be used as the description for the post in the RSS
feeds, and will utilized in the future for any place where a short excerpt
of the post is necesarry, such as search results or monthly archives. If you
don’t put anything here an excerpt will be automatically generated from the
first number of words from your post itself. You can access this field using
the template tag the_excerpt(). This should not be confused with
extended entry functionality.
Post

The body of the post.

You can enhance the content by using one or more of the following (depending
on configuration):

  • HTML markup (by default, the tags allowed are: <b> <i>
    <strong> <em> <code> <blockquote> <p> <br>
    <strike>     and <a>)
  • BBCode
  • GreyMatter styles
  • Texturize.

You can add a “teaser” at the beginning of the post by inserting the following
HTML comment in your post:

<!--more-->

That is: (less-than)(exclamation)(hyphen)(hyphen)more(hyphen)(hyphen)(greater-than)
exactly as you see it, no spaces.

This comment should be inserted immediately after the text that you want
to be the teaser. This will cause WordPress to display only the teaser text
followed by a link that says “(more…)”. The reader must click on the “(more…)”
link to see the rest of the post.

Regardless of whether or not you use a teaser, the body of the post may
be split into one or more “pages” by adding the following HTML comment one
or more times:

<!--nextpage-->

This will cause WordPress to stop displaying the post at the end of each
page, and to add a “page navigation” line at the bottom of the post. The
“page navigation” line looks like:

“Pages: 1 2 3 …”

where each of the page numbers (except the current page number) is a link
to the corresponding page.

Quicktags

A series of buttons above the top of the “Post” box that help to insert
markup in the body of the post. Most of them work like “toggles;” the first
time you click them, they insert the open tag (for example, <strong>)
and the next time you click them, they insert the close tag (</strong>).
They also have keyboard shortcuts; you can use these in most browsers by
hitting the ‘alt’ key (meta on Mac?) along with a letter. (See table below.)

Quicktags for “image” and “link” insert a single tag with no close-tag,
so they do not function as toggles. They pop up entry boxes that ask for
the information needed to insert the tag properly. Try them and see.

Quicktag Button Meaning HTML Inserted Shortcut
Key
B bold <strong> alt-b
i italic <em> alt-i
u underscore <u> alt-u
strike strikethrough <del> alt-s
<p> paragraph tag <p> alt-p
<li> listitem <li> alt-l (lower case “L”)
b-quote block quote <blockquote> alt-q
image image tag (no toggle) <img src="(source of image)" alt="(alternate text)"> alt-m
link link tag <a href="(URL)">(link text)</a> alt-h
X close all open tags See notes below alt-c

The “Close all open tags” Quicktag button (labeled “X”) is cool; it will
add all required close tags at once, and in the right order. So
if you have inserted <li><em><strong><u>some
text, just click “X” or hit alt-c (for “close”) and you will get
</u></strong></em></li>.

Pingback the URLs in this post
When this box is checked the WordPress pingback engine will scan all of
the linked URLs in your post to see if they return a XML-RPC header to indicated
that they support pingback. This can slow down the posting
process quite a bit so if you don’t plan on using this for one particular
post it’s probably best to uncheck it.
Blog this! / Edit this!
Click this button to submit all new information or changes from the post/edit form.
Trackback an URL
This sends trackback pings to the URLs you specify in this field. You can
trackback multiple URLs by separating them with commas. Whitespace between
things is insignificant. For more information about Trackbacks see Trackback
explained. (Which doesn’t exist yet.)
Edit Timestamp
This allows you to change the date and time of the post. As a safeguard,
this will not work unless you also have the “Edit timestamp” box checked.
If you set this to a date in the future then the post, even if published,
will not show up until that time.