A  basic guide to posting

Confused about who can do what? visit Members, users and passwords

Commenting

Comments are notes you can add to an existing post.

At the bottom of a post you will see the following:

You must be logged in to post a comment.

In order to log in, you need to be registered – see below.

If you are already registered, simply click the link and type your user name and personal password in the box.

You can then type your comment.  Please only submit comments that are relevant to the original post.

If you want to write about anything else, you can comment on a different more relevant post.  Alternatively if you are a ‘contributor’, you can create your own post.

When you have finished, type the two words in the reCAPTCHA window into the box.

That is all you need to do.

Registering

Scroll down to the bottom and click the ‘register‘ link in the right sidebar,  then follow the instructions on the screen.

A password will be emailed to you automatically. Please log in and change this password to something you can remember.

You will be registered as a ‘subscriber‘.  Once registered, you will be able to comment on posts as above.

Creating new posts

When you are used to commenting, you can go on to create new posts of your own.

To do this you need to be  a member of the group. If you are, you will already have been registered and a user name and password will have been sent to you.  Members are registered as ‘contributors‘, this means that they can also create new posts.

Once you are registered to write a new post, first Login using the link under ‘Meta‘. If you are already logged in, for example if you have just submitted a comment, just click ‘Site Admin‘.

Your personal dashboard screen will then appear.

Click ‘Posts‘ and then ‘Add New‘ on the top left of the dashboard.

Write your post in the window that opens. The title goes in the upper box.

On the right of the screen are windows where you can:

• save your draft to come back to later
• preview your post to see what it will look like
• add tags; click the tags most associated with your post or create a new one (see advanced instructions )
• choose your categories (see below)
• do you want it to be passworded? (see advanced instructions)
• finally if it does not need a password and you are completely happy with your post click Publish.

Categories

When you have written your post, you need to choose which category it will go under.

Check one or more boxes in the ‘categories’ window on the right of the screen. Please always do this or it goes into ‘uncategorised‘ and will be more difficult for other users to find.

A post can be in several categories at once. For example ducks could be both ‘working animals‘ when they are kept for slug patrol and ‘livestock‘ when kept for meat or eggs.

Please be sure to stick to one topic per post so that people can find things easily.

For an explanation of how all this works and a comparison between this site and a group or forum visit the understanding a Wordpress site page.