Sidebar Overview for Posts and Pages

📚 Manage Planet 4 > Administration > Setting up the Basics > Sidebar

What’s the Sidebar?

The Sidebar is the place where are all the different options and tools you get. Going from the Visibility, to the Featured image and Social Media excerpts. They are used in both Posts and Pages. Here’s an overview of all the Sidebar options you have available, what they do and how to use them.

Overview

Status and Visibility

By default, content will be visible to the outside world as soon as it is published. You can change that and choose from a variety of Visibility options.

🧑‍💻 To learn more about Status and Visibility, go to this page in the Handbook. 

Page Header

In the Page Header section, you can fill in a Header title (this will be the title people see on the site), a subtitle, description, button + link and a background image.

Don’t feel like having all of this on your live page? Simply click on “Hide page title” and leave it all blank. This way, only what you’ve built on your page will be visible for the visitors of your site.

Permalink / URL

Ideally, the title/ permalink should have keywords relevant to your overall story topic. This will generate the post URL, which can be edited.

• Keep it brief – remember it’s a ‘mobile first’ engagement platform. 
• Avoid using connection words such ‘and’, ‘at’, ‘the’, pronouns – ‘ours’, ‘yours’ etc
• if you automatically save a post, the title will be saved as permalink – try editing it using only keywords and deleting the connection words.
• eg: instead of ‘what-i-learned-from-the-women-fighting-to-save-our-planet/‘ (which is automatically created from the title) a better permalink could be ‘learnings-from–women-fighting-to-save-the-planet’

The Title on Posts should be full width regardless if there is a card or not. Make sure to use the keywords from the article in the title.

Once you save the post as a draft or publish it, the option to edit the permalink will also appear on the right, under Document -> Permalink.

Open Graph / Social Fields

Here you have the option to modify the title, description and image that would be shared on social media. Edit this section only if you want the details on social media to be different than the default content that would appear when sharing.

SEO – Search Engine Optimizations

Defining a canonical link will help admins to prevent duplicate content issues in search engine optimization by specifying the “canonical” or “preferred” version of a web page. (Learn more about canonical links here.)

Categories

Make sure to give your page a Category, so your visitors know what topic it is about.

🧑‍💻 To learn more about Categories, go to this page in the Handbook. 

Tags

You can also add tags in the same way, in the “Tags” section in the sidebar. (Type them in the Search field if you know it by heart, or just select one (or multiple) in the options below that.)

🧑‍💻 To learn more about Tags, go to this page in the Handbook. 

Featured Image

Similar to the thumbnail photos on P3, Featured image should be used on ALL Posts.

Click on Add Media > Featured Image or select Set featured image in the Right Column. Either upload a new image, or select an existing one from the WP Media Library.

• For Stories and PRs – use a landscape photo (width of no less than 1140px)
• For Publications – use a portrait photo. Create an image from the report PDF. (width of no less than 255px. More info on image sizes)

The following rules apply when the editor does not assign a thumbnail photo:

• On Posts, when no Featured Image is selected by the Editor, the 1st image appearing in the Post (if there is one) will be used and displayed in Search results and the Articles block.
• If there is no image in the description of the post, the post will be published with no thumbnail photo, resulting into a blank space into the frontend.

Excerpt

Excerpt of at least the first 30 words of the content is now automatically generated when creating a post. The caption will cut off at 30 words; the front-end will replace any content above with an elipsis ( . . . )

The editor should select the best quote in the PR for an excerpt.

For PRs, dateline should be edited to include the location part but not the date as date appears automatically when published. Edit dateline in Excerpt like this: Batangas, Philippines, 21 February 2018 – Activists from…

Discussion

You can edit the option to allow comments and to allow pingbacks & trackbacks, as in the image below.

🧑‍💻 To learn more about Discussion and Comments, go to this page in the Handbook. 

Page Attributes

In case your page has to be under another page, make sure to select the Parent page here:

Video

All you need to know about how Navigation, content types and pages interact with one another is in the P4 Admin Video.

1. 00:55 Homepage, Act and Explore pages
2. 15:00 Page Blocks
3. 16:55 Navigation and Footer
4. 21:05 Settings
5. 26:26 Categories and Tags
6. 32:55 Issue pages
7. 37:55 Tags page
8. 39:00 Take Action pages

🤔 Tip : Need subtitles? Enable them in the YouTube Video Progress Bar! You can do this by adding the timecodes in the description of your YouTube video.

Links & Resources