Writing and publishing a post

Adding categories and tags to your posts

Using Quick Edit and Bulk Edit to manage your posts in half the time

Rearranging the post editor to suit your style

Saving and returning to draft posts & pages

Embedding photos, video & audio into your posts

Publishing your post at a later date

Collecting data from your customers, visitors or users is simple and easy once you learn how to use Gravity Forms.

A Video Guide to Gravity Forms including:

1. Create a new form
2. Setting required fields & changing validation messages
3. Adding a form to a post or page in your site
4. Setting up submission notifications
5. Protecting your forms from SPAM

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Quote Source

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An Unordered List

• Vestibulum in mauris semper tortor interdum ultrices.
• Sed vel lorem et justo laoreet bibendum. Donec dictum.
• Etiam massa libero, lacinia at, commodo in, tincidunt a, purus.
• Praesent volutpat eros quis enim blandit tincidunt.
• Aenean eu libero nec lectus ultricies laoreet. Donec rutrum, nisi vel egestas ultrices, ipsum urna sagittis libero, vitae vestibulum dui dolor vel velit.

Image with no alignment

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An Ordered List

1. Vestibulum in mauris semper tortor interdum ultrices.
2. Sed vel lorem et justo laoreet bibendum. Donec dictum.
3. Etiam massa libero, lacinia at, commodo in, tincidunt a, purus.
4. Praesent volutpat eros quis enim blandit tincidunt.
5. Aenean eu libero nec lectus ultricies laoreet. Donec rutrum, nisi vel egestas ultrices, ipsum urna sagittis libero, vitae vestibulum dui dolor vel velit.

As a reader I can…

1. View a list of most recent posts with short teasers should be shown with paged (1,2,3,4,etc.) links at the bottom. (e.g. http://www.ftscms.com/)
2. View a full article containing videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and other video services, images and structured text (e.g. http://www.ftscms.com/help-support/using-the-visual-editor-to-manage-your-content/)
3. Post feedback using a comment form below a post easily by entering their name, email and website
4. Quickly find similar or related articles when viewing an individual post
5. Quickly browse to the most popular posts in the blog
6. Quickly search through the blog to find specific content
7. Browse the blog by topic (categories) or subject (tags)
8. Easily navigate to the main website

As an administrators I can…

1. Can moderate comments before they appear on the website
2. Draft blog entries before they are posted publicly
3. Control the search engine metadata for each blog post
4. Automatically add search engine friendly titles and descriptions based on the post content entered.
5. Add images, videos and structured text to posts
6. Organize posts by topic (category) and subject (tag)
7. Post a sticky blog post that stays fixed at a set location in the design of the main blog page
8. See an overview of traffic and user statistics on their Dashboard Google Analytics
9. Quickly refer to help articles when questions come up using a built-in help system
10. Manage search engine metadata for the entire blog
11. Add, edit and remove blog readers
12. Save backups of my blog by Exporting XML files containing all of my blog content
13. Control the number of teaser entries displayed on the main blog page
14. Control the teaser text of each blog entry that is displayed on the main blog page
15. Schedule publish times for posts
16. Create private, hidden, blog entries
17. Remove a published blog entry from the blog, reverting it to a saved “Draft”
18. Manage all uploaded media from a centralized library
19. Manage a series of categorized links to display in the blog for readers
20. Create and manage forms that can be directly embedded into blog posts (great for surveys) to collect information from readers

1. Login to your domain name host. Often this is through a service like GoDaddy, Network Solutions or TUCOWS.
2. Find the location of your DNS or Domain Name Settings. Sometimes this is under and Advanced area.
3. Create a new A-record for www.yourdomain.com to point to 199.204.136.7
4. Also, check that yourdomain.com (without the WWW) has a 301 redirect to the domain with WWW. This will help assist search engines index your site.

Please note, if you visit the IP address mentioned directly above it will resolve to FTSCMS.com directly. If your a system admin, there’s no need to panic. We map incoming domains to the display the corresponding setup on our end. Not convinced? Run a DNS report on Freshtilledsoil.com and you’ll see that it’s using the same IP.

That’s it! If you have any questions feel free to email david@freshtilledsoil.com.

1. Harvest

We track all of our time with Harvest in increments of 15 minutes. If you spend 5 minutes on a quick change it should be logged as “.25″ of an hour in Harvest. All CMS tasks are flagged with “CMS” before them, so be sure to log your times as best as possible using those. Also you MUST add a detailed, 1 sentence note for each entry. This is what appears on client invoices, so keep these professional and action-oriented please. For example, “Installed custom GA tracking 404 code” may make sense to us, but to a client it’s completely foreign. Instead log something like “Setup Google Analytics error page tracking to keep a list of broken pages in the site.”

A member of our Sales & Accounting staff will create a Harvest account for you. All of the details you need to login will be emailed to whatever email you provide us. If your having issues with Harvest, contact Dan Allard with questions.

2. Basecamp

All communication related to a project should be done with Basecamp in place of email. This let’s us keep a track record of all communication in one central location. All assets related a project should be handed off using the Files feature in Basecamp. Also, any passwords related to a project (Feedburner, Google Analytics, AddThis, or any other third party integration) should ALWAYS be tracked in Basecamp for future reference.

3. Beanstalk

All custom WordPress themes we created at FTS are done in a version controlled environment using SVN or Subversion. To make this as easy as possible we use Beanstalk to manage our repositories.

• If you use Dreamweaver CS4+ then you have SVN built in, check out the Adobe documentation for info on how to get started with it.
• If you use Coda, then we love you, and you already have SVN built-in. Check out the Coda documentation to get started.
• If you don’t use either of these and your on OS X checkout Versions ($80) or the free SC Plugin. Both work well with OS X.
• If your on a PC, checkout Tortoise SVN, it’s free.

Once we create an account you’ll receive all the details of how to get setup in a confirmation email. If you have any questions about using Beanstalk contact kevin@freshtilledsoil.com.

4. Firehost VPN & FTP

All of our hosted WordPress CMS clients exist on our dedicated server hosted by Firehost. This is a very secure server, and VPN access it needed for FTP to work. A member of our development team should provide you with a VPN username and password. After that navigate to https://vpn-1.firehost.com. Log in with the appropriate username/password. If the Cisco VPN client software is not already installed, it will be downloaded and installed automatically. From here on our you will need to login to the Cisco desktop client with your VPN username and password before you can connect with FTP. If you have any questions contact david@freshtilledsoil.com.

5. FTSCMS Hosted WordPress MU

All of our WordPress installs are managed by one master install on this domain (ftscms.com). We use a domain mapping tool to host individual domains underneath that account. This allows us to customize, secure and manage the WordPress backend for our customers. You will be provided with an administrative account, which will allow you to install and configure plugins. You must be careful not to upgrade or de-activate site-wide plugins. This could negatively affect other sites hosted on our system.

1. Logging into WordPress using the Site Manager link
2. Adding and managing users
3. Blog settings and notifications
4. What happens if I forget a password or username?

Working with the page editor

1. Setting page titles
2. Setting a page’s web address using the Permalink editor
3. Uploading media
4. Pasting text from Microsoft Word, as web-safe text (also known as plain text)
5. Formatting text and best practices: Headings, lists, paragraphs, quotes and links
6. Working in full screen mode
7. Handling mistakes and reverting to a backup using Revisions
8. Trash feature, and restoring deleted pages
9. Managing galleries and using modal windows
10. Uploading and linking to PDF downloads

Working with blog entries

1. Creating posts
2. Tagging and/or categorizing posts to create an easy to browse taxonomy for users
3. Managing moderation and comments
4. Scheduling future posts
5. Managing post thumbnails

Managing multi-lingual content

1. How to use WPML for managing multiple languages throughout the site

Managing the homepage

1. Updating page regions
2. Editing the main content area

Re-ordering pages

1. Using the Re-order feature to organize your site with drag’n’drop

Managing uploads and media

1. Using the Media Library feature
2. Adding third party video to your posts and pages with the Third Party Video feature

Tracking user information with Google Analytics

1. Setting up the Google Analytics feature
2. Controlling search results

Managing search engines

1. Editing page titles, descriptions and keywords
2. Explanation of the automated setup currently in place.

Managing forms

1. Creating forms, adding fields and setting up notifications
2. Add a form to a page
3. Viewing form entries

General

1. Setup Google Analytics (Settings > Google Analytics & Settings > Google Analytics Dashboard)
2. Check footer copyright info. If there’s an email, make sure it works and be sure it’s protected using the WP antispambot() function.
3. Add a link to FTS for marketing (if client has agreed to it)
4. Check that RSS Feed is working properly
5. Add Favicon
6. Change permalink structure to /%category%/%postname%/
7. Build out a search index with Relevanssi (Settings > Site Search)
8. Test search, be sure to highlight search queries using the plugin settings.
9. Test any custom built systems.
10. Double-check all notification emails.
11. Check thoroughly in the following: IE7+8, Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome
12. Talk to Dave Romero about setting up SMTP email if large volumes of email will be sent from the server (e.g.  User notifications for sign-up site)
13. Check that titles and meta data are in place. It’s good to take the time to provide a keyword rich title tag for the homepage. All in One SEO can be leveraged to automate the rest of the sites metadata.
14. If the project is a redesign, take “Before” screenshots of the current site and post them to Basecamp, attaching Alex S. and Tim on the message to notify them.
    
15. Once the project launches, take “After” screenshots of the new design and post them to Basecamp, notify Tim and Alex S.

Forms

1. Check Contact page. Compare phones and addresses to current live site.
2. Check Gravity Forms, be sure that notifications are setup and working.
3. Add Captcha to all Gravity Forms
4. Test all sign-up or subscriptions forms for user flow and validation

Blog

1. Check for pagination setups on Category & Blog pages. Be sure it’s styled to match the site.
2. Click on a tags and categories to make sure templates are setup and designed.
3. Check pagination, be sure it’s styled based on the design or to match the current design if a design was not provided.
4. Setup Akismet & Captcha or Number based spam protection
5. Post a test comment and a test reply to it.
6. Setup Akismet & Captcha or Number based spam protection
7. Set blog administrator email to primary custom contact email

DNS Routing

1. To launch point a DNS A-record to 199.204.136.7, the IP address of FTSCMS. Using an A-record will ensure that we don’t mess around with anyones email.
2. Notify the client and let them know that it’s going to be 24-48 hours before the website resolves to the new host.

Post-launch

1. Follow-up with client 4 days after launch to check that everything is working properly and ask if they have any questions
2. Patch Base Theme issues that were noticed during development
3. Notify Dan of launch for invoicing and ask him to open up an hourly Harvest project for ongoing maintenance
4. Is the client happy? If yes, send them to the Testimonial Collect form.

Video training library

We have a built a library of support videos to help show you and your employees how the system works. These videos can be found under the Videos menu above.

Knowledge base

If you have a specific question you can refer to our knowledge base. If you don’t find any answers to your question, submit it to us and we’ll add a response to the knowledge base for you.