Making changes

Most of content maintenance involves only two processes: altering text and changing images. Both are simple and described below. Adding an archive is a little more difficult and is deferred to a later section.

Changing text

Here is an example of a page, the Hot Press page as it was in October 2018. HotPressPage

Notice the thick line in the middle. Above this line is the content of the page, below it is the media section containing any images or documents associated with this page - in this case an advert for the Halloween Potluck Party.

The line can be dragged up or down to share the screen space between the two sections.

The textual content is written in Markdown (MD). MD is an industry standard open source tool used to make it easy to write HTML ready content. For the most part, it looks just like plain text but has powerful shortcuts for formatting text and presenting images, video and links. It is the language used by GRAV for page content.

When you want to change textual content, just type over or add text as you would in a word processor. Just do not change anything that looks funny: ### indicate headings, *** indicate bold, sections with lots of ()[]{} are about images and links.

Should you want to make a block of text become heading, bold or italic, notice the toolbar above the text - it has useful shortcuts, notably headings, bold, italic. Suppose you want to make a phrase bold, highlight the phrase and then click the bold icon. This causes the text to be surrounded by a pair of four asterisks - it will display bold on the website. Similarly for headings and italics.

The link and image icons provide a template for a link or a picture - these are beyond the scope of this section.

The last two icons in the toolbar cause a bulleted list and a numbered list respectively. Place the cursor ahead of the list item and then press the icon in the toolbar.

The standard spacing of text is double. If you want to squash together a few lines, just put two blank spaces at the end of each line. For an example, see the listing of Board members in Members/Administration.

After changing the text, click the save button at the right of the top menu bar.

Changing images

The media section holds all the images that are to be displayed on the page. It may also contain other media files such as documents.

To make a new image available prepare the image on the desktop and then drag it into Media.

What do I mean by prepare? Usually images from a camera or phone are large, very large and unnecessarily large for display on a website. For the website, images should be as small as possible while retaining sufficient clarity for a desktop display. Larger than that uses space on our server, increases download time and costs our readers more data fees. My rule of thumb is reduce the size to 600 pixels for most purposes, smaller for some. This can be done using Preview in MAC OS or Irfanview in Windows - the tools menu option allows you to adjust size.

In addition, please give your images a meaningful filename.

After dragging your image into Media, just drag it from Media to Content to create a link on the website. Write your text as needed above and below the image link.

Save (button at top right in the blue menu bar) and check the website.

For deleting and replacing an image in Media, notice that beside the image in Media there are small icons. Mouse over the image and the icons light up - the trash can being the most intreresting. To remove the image, click the trash can and confirm. To remove the link to it in Content, just erase the link in the content and save.

To replace an image, delete the old image and drag the new one into media.

If the image does not have the same filename as the old one, you also need to delete the previous link in content and drag in the new one.

After deleting or adding an image, click the save button at the right of the top menu bar.

Other buttons beside the items in Media: the "plus" button inserts a link to the image at the current cursor position - can be useful to insert an image inside existing text, the eye icon shows the image full size.

Important GRAV uses a cache system for efficiency. As a result, changes involving images may not be immediately effective, so you should clear the cache after any changes involving images - do this by clicking the top icon in the left panel - the trash can. Then reload the site to verify that the changes took effect.

Changing documents

In the Internal section, There is a page called Documents, and inside Documents are three child pages containing Forms, Policies, and Minutes, For each document type, special code in PNHBtheme displays the header image and a list of all the .PDF documents of that type. The procedure to add a new document is simply to drag the new .PDF from the desktop into the page media of the appropriate page, save and clear the cache. That is, there is no need for links in the Content.

For new Minutes, the PDF should be named thus "Minutesyyyymmdd".

Obsolete documents can be deleted from the page media.

Music making

Several pages within Music Making are simply pages with picture links to child pages, notably Conductors, Concert bands, Ensembles.

In these cases, the textual content and the images are at the lower level, that is in the pages for the individual conductors, bands and ensembles. The code used to display the picture links uses the images from the individuals to make the picture links.

Concert videos have special handling. Each concert is represented by a directory (folder) inside the Concert Videos page.

Inside a concert folder there is a file for each performance e.g. "Green Frosty Snowman.mp4

For concerts prior to Christmas 2019, the videos are stored on our server. The file name is the actual the video file - the program running the website uses the name to produce a picklist of video names with links to the .mp4 files.

For later concerts, the videos are on our You Tube channel. Each video is represented by an empty .txt file - the filename of this file provides the program with a display name for the picklist and a link to the You Tube video.

In all cases, the filenames may not contain the character '?'.