Posts and pages guidelines

Published June 16, 2014 | By Spike Himself

This guide will outline the standards and procedures that apply when you want to add content to our website. Make sure you read and understand everything. If you have questions do not hesitate to ask them.

Language

If it wasn’t already obvious, our website is in English, and any content we publish will also be in English. At this time we have no intention of publishing content in other languages.

Header image

Update (30-06-2014):
Header image can now be chosen using a dropdown list on the Edit Post page. If it is not visible for you, click Screen Options at the top of the page, then tick Choose post header image

Which header image is displayed above posts is determined by the ~~category selected~~ option you choose in the Choose post header image dropdown. A minor “bug” here is, if you select multiple categories, the code doesn’t very cleverly determine which image to use (because it simply can’t), so sometimes you have to work around this by omitting a category. For example, our Hearthstone In-House Cup is a Hearthstone post as well as a Community post. Selecting both of these categories would’ve meant that the post was given the green Community header image, so for this post the Community category was not ticked.

Currently the following categories have an image:

General (black with tc logo)
Community (green with community icon)
Interview (yellow with speech bubble icon)
Team Fortress 2 (light blue with tf2 logo)
Dota 2 (purple with dota 2 logo)
League of Legends (blue/grayish with LoL logo)
Hearthstone (brown with hearthstone logo)

Location

The selected category also determines where a posts shows up. Actually that’s not 100% accurate, but I’ll get back to that further down (under ‘Hub/news pages’).

Menu in sidebar

To add a navigational menu to your post, you must add a custom field named ‘dvmenu’. Valid values for this custom field are names of menus defined in the wordpress system.

Some examples include:

community
cups
dota-2
hearthstone-in-house-cup
league-of-legends
team-fortress-2

If you were to write a community guide post such as this one, you would add the ‘dvmenu’ custom field with the value ‘community’. That way, when viewing the post, you would get to see the same menu as you would when you would look at the main Community page.

New menu

For completely new (sub)sections, a new menu is created. This is done through the page found on the wordpress dashboard under Appearance -> Menus. Not everyone has access to this. If you don’t, contact an admin. You can find who’s who near the bottom of this post.

We try to maintain the following structure for our navigational menus (in the sidebar);

Item at the top: Main page (ie ‘News’ or ‘Hub’)
Items following: direct subpages of the above

If a subpage, as listed in item 2 in the paragraph above, also has subpages, then we create a new menu of the same structure as above, with one exception; the top item will be a link back to the parent. If we go deeper and have more subpages, the same applies, but we try not to do that, because it will be too messy.

As an example, let’s look at our Hearthstone In-House Cup:

First of all, we have the main ‘Cups’ section on our website. This section shows all cup-related news on one page and in its menu shows all current on-going cups.
When clicking on the name of a cup in the menu here, you are taken to the Hub page of the cup you selected. This is a new parent with its own subpages, so the menu structure here is as follows:

First item, a link to the parent page (‘Cups’ in this case): “« Cups”
Second item, the main page for this subsection: “Hub”
The rest are direct subpages for the Hub page, in this example those include “Brackets” and “Rules”

So to put all that in a breadcrumb for illustrative purposes, you would end up with something like this, if you were to navigate from the front page all the way to the cup’s rules page;

Front Page -> Cups -> Hearthstone In-House Cup -> Rules

Hub/news pages

With some exceptions, hub/news pages (or otherwise defined as ‘main page of a subsection’) work in a slightly different way than regular pages. These pages do not have any content defined on the backend. Instead, the page type (on the edit page under Page Attributes -> Template) is changed to ‘Categories’. This is what makes the page behave as a page containing posts. From which category posts are displayed is determined by adding a custom field named category.

A few examples of categories that can be filled in here are as follows (note the use of ‘slugs’ – url friendly names – rather than the full display name of the category);

general
community
interview
team-fortress-2
dota-2
league-of-legends
etc..

So to expand on the Location paragraph from above, merely selecting a category for a post determines not so much where a post will be visible, but rather it is the other way around; some pages display posts of a certain category. By selecting multiple categories for a post, it is then possible for that post to show up on multiple pages.

Post or page?

Simply put, a page is a static website entity, whereas a post is an entity in an array of entities that fit within a category. If that isn’t confusing enough, there are also many exceptions.

Another rule of thumb you could go by is that pages go into menus, posts do not.

At the lack of managing to put this into an understandable paragraph, I’ll just show some examples;

Pages:

Teams
Cups
Community
News archive

Posts:

Guides (like this one)
Announcement of a cup
Interviews

Formatting

Some formatting guidelines:

Under no circumstance ever use the visual editor. We often add custom stuff in the code editor and using the visual editor will break that
Names of people are bolded, and only the first mention is prefixed with a flag
Team names follow the same standard as above
Images are not to be wider than 600px
Paragraph headers are enclosed in the h2 html tag. Sub-paragraphs in h3. If you need sub-paragraphs deeper than 3 levels, reconsider your post’s structure
Lists such as this one are enclosed in ul tags, and each item in li tags
Team Colonslash email addresses are to be written using the tcemail shortcode

Flags

You can add a flag with the flag shortcode. Which flag you want to display is determined by the ‘code’ argument, like so:
{flag code=”gb”} (replace curly brackets with square brackets).

The flag codes follow the 2 letter ISO 639-1 standard. A list can be found on wikipedia.

Flags for which a standard 2 letter ISO code does not exist, use the full name prefixed by an underscore, for example “_england”.

Email addresses

The email address shortcode is used as follows: {tcemail}spikehimself{/tcemail} (again, replace the curly brackets with square brackets). This results in: spikehimself at team-colonslash dot eu. The idea behind this is to stop bots from mining addresses for spam purposes.

Workflow for publishing

Assuming you have access to write news posts, just go ahead and do it. If you have access to publish as well, don’t.

A news post is under no circumstance to be published by the same person that wrote it, bar the administrators.

Writing a post, apart from the obvious act of actually writing it, involves the following:

Do not press the publish button – always save as draft
Self proof-read to the best of your abilities
Select the right category or categories for your post
Never select the Front Page category – the administrators will determine what ends up on the front page
Select some appropriate tags for your post
Inform the administrators of your post

When an administrator receives your draft, they will initiate the following workflow:

Proof reading
Determining the priority of the post. This means that if another post is scheduled to be published which has more important content, we will not publish another post straight after it, causing the more important post to disappear down the news feed
Determine if the post will be on the front page and how long for, if not indefinitely
Publish the post, or schedule the post for publishing

Access rights

We are pretty open to who gets access to what. We like for people to do things and access rights should not be a barrier. That said, it is possible that you had access rights previously (maybe as far back as on our old website) and you have lost them now. This isn’t necessarily because we don’t want you to have access, but rather because a lot has changed in the backend and we want to make sure you are aware of the options and caveats. If you don’t have access to something that you need for your project, talk to one of the administrators listed below and it shall be done.

The current list of administrators (that is, people with access to pretty much everything) is;