Themis-Athena
10/01/2021
This is in response to comments made / questions asked earlier (by MbD and / or Christine) re: the working of “project” pages.
Leaving aside special formats such as quotes and image galleries etc., WP basically allows for three types of posts (or post-like input): “posts”, “pages” and “projects”. Those who are familiar with WP will know most or all of this — or at least most of what I’m saying about the first two of these — but briefly, to put things into context, especially for the WP newbies:
Posts are those contributions of yours that go into the blogroll / continuous feed (= the dashboard on BookLikes). On WP, they come with both a “like” and a “comment” option; i.e., essentially they work the way things did on BL — we can have discussions right in the comments section of the post. As comments are “nested” (i.e., replies and follow-up comments are indented further than the original comment, even if in this particular design theme not quite as clearly as on BL), several conversations on the same post can go on at the same time without comments overlapping and getting in each others’ way.
This is how probably somewhere around 90% (or at any rate, the vast majority) of the contents of the joint blog will be created.
Pages are contributions that do NOT go into the blogroll / continuous feed. You have to specifically make them visible in some way or other, e.g., by including them in a sidebar or top bar menu which then links to the page in question (or by linking there from another page).
Also, pages do not have a comment function (though on WP you can “like” them).
Thus, pages are a great place for permanent admin announcements — e.g., the Bingo Rules on this blog are formatted as a page. So is my main Literature index on my personal blog.
Projects are essentially a combination / cross section of posts and pages. Like posts, they allow for both comments and “likes”. However, like pages, they do not appear in the main blogroll / feed but have to be made visible in another way (e.g., as part of a menu). The black admin sidebar category under which you find all of a given blog’s projects is called “Portfolio” (it sits right under “Pages”). Also, projects do not share the blog posts’ tags and categories: that way, you can (inter alia) create one or more separate feeds for your projects to which you can also link (instead of just to a single project) from a menu.
I think on this blog, “projects” may be a good tool for every type of post that, on the one hand, we want site members to be able to access at all times without having to search the main blogroll / feed, and which on the other hand, we want people to be able to comment on.
E.g., I don’t know whether the Nose Graze plugin would allow us to create book lists — if it doesn’t, we could copy over the existing book lists for the various bingo squares into one project page per square / book list, to which others then could either add books directly (if they have the admin rights to do so) or make suggestions in the comments (the way we originally did this on BL, except that this time it wouldn’t fall to MbD alone to add the books; everybody with admin rights could pitch in).
Ditto the “Questions” section: We could create one basic “Questions” project page / post, include it in one of the overall bingo admin menus (sidbar or top bar), and questions could then be asked in the comments — with the answers to questions that don’t merely concern a single issue (e.g., “can book xyz be used for square abc?”) but a matter of policy (such as some of my questions in this year’s game as to the interplay of various spell cards) then — if we think it might come up again — copied into the main body of the “questions” project post as such.
On my personal blog, I am using “projects” mainly for the master update posts concerning my various reading projects; e.g., Halloween Bingo 2021.
BUT note that my top menu bar contains links — other than to my main blog post feed and my contact page — to my main index pages (literature, movies, music; all formatted as WP “pages”) AS WELL AS to the separate “(ongoing) projects” blogroll generated from all those of my projects in a portfolio category named (you guessed it) “ongoing”. A separate additional menu showing all of my ongoing projects is contained in my sidebar (as are menus for my completed projects and a number of other indexes) . So, visitors to my blog have two different ways of finding the master update posts for all my ongoing projects in one place; either via the top bar menu and the dedicated “ongoing projects” blogroll linked there, or via the relevant sidebar menu. I think we could do something similar for those bingo admin posts that do invite comments (and therefore can’t be formatted as WP “pages”), but which should nevertheless be accessible at all times without getting buried in the main blog post feed.
Essentially, the combination of separate “project” blogrolls and menus would allow us to create dedicated discussion sections or feeds that could have a similar function as the “discussion” subsections on Goodreads (“admin”, “the squares”, etc.) without interfering with the main blog feed and / or with the blog members’ individual feeds, such as auto-generated on the basis of their authorship category.
I hope this doesn’t all sound too complicated — it really isn’t; it’s probably just a matter of playing around with things … and there are probably also yet more ways of using “projects” that will occur to us once we start tinkering with the feature.
One note – you can actually turn the commenting function on for specific pages. It can be a little hard to find, but it’s there in the page settings menu!
Oh, OK. Live and learn! 🙂 Still, with projects it‘s built in anyway … and the dedicated feed remains a specific „project“ feature as far as I can see.
I used the comment function on the page that I set up to test the visualisation of the list of squares.
https://www.threecatsdesign.com/the-bingo-squares-test-layout/
It turned out there were a couple of visibility problems
I couldn’t see how to add Category to a Page so this doesn’t show up if you click on the Mike Finn
The search bar on the main menu only searches Posts so you can’t find the Page by searching there (although you will find the Posts I sent out to let people know about the Page).
Do Projects have the same visibility problems?
I’m wondering, since we’re all sort of talking around the edges of making this a year-round community, if projects would be useful for the games themselves, as well as buddy reads.
I image this is dependent on the answer to the following: Does a project allow posts from all users? You mention a separate blog roll for projects, so would I be correct in viewing projects as something of a parallel feed to the main one?
I think, if we really want this to be a year round site, we need to nail the organisation of the site early, so we can easily keep HB, and Festive Tasks at a minimum, easily delineated and seperate. Buddy reads and Group reads might not be as important – and hell, I might be overthinking the whole thing – but I also envisage, if the site organisation allows for it, different book club type events (Pratchett, Flat book society, Agatha, etc.) being feasible.
We don’t even need the project feed as a separate feed for the game posts — we can do this by way of the “regular” posts. What I can see happening is a menu encompassing (1) the admin “posts” (formatted as projects), both as a “project feed” link and with links to the individual major pages (e.g., “Rules” and “Questions”) and with a link to the admin project “post” feed) and (2) the “regular” players post, culled into a category called “Halloween Bingo” (or whatever other book game / group read they belong to).
This will also involve pulling all the player’s “name” categories into a separate menu, btw. Though I think we should keep the original “categories” menu in addition.
I’ll set up a demonstration of what I mean; this will involve a couple of further test posts, don’t mind me while I’m tinkering with them!
Hi Themis,
I found Projects on the admin menu and for this site and it looks easy enough to use.
I went to WordPress to see if there was any guidance/training and all I can find is that it’s a plugin that doesn’t come as part of the core WP offering.
It doesn’t show up on either of my sites.
Can you point me at somewhere where I can learn more about using Projects?
I’m trying to figure out whether to set the Square Pages as sub-pages to the Alphabetical List Page, as independent Pages or as Projects.
Thanks.
Mike, we already have the “projects” plugin installed and MbD and I have already used the feature in setting up our respective test posts / projects for the game structure. WP’s collective name for the projects is “Portfolio”; you’ll find it in the black left admin sidebar menu right below “Pages”.
How you format the “squares” page depends essentially (and IMHO only) on:
(1) Whether or not you want it to be included in any feed (bingo admin, your own, or whatever) — if yes, it has to be a project because pages don’t go into any feeds (neither the “Category” and “Tags” feeds culled from the site members’ regular posts, nor the “Project Type” feed culled from projects); and
(2) Whether or not you want the “comment” option to be auto-enabled. If you do want to allow for comments (without having to manually enable that option), again it has to be a project. If you don’t want to allow for comments, it has to be a page.
For all other purposes, arguably it doesn’t matter how precisely something is formatted. I would suggest not using the “post” format, though, because this is something on a higher admin / organizational order that we’ll want to keep easily accessible to everybody at all times.
ETA: As for using “projects” on your own sites, if you are on a paid WP plan or self-hosting, you should be able to download a plugin for them (e.g., there’s one called “Portfolio Toolkit”; that’s the one I’m using on my personal blog). If you’re on a free WP plan, projects should come as part of your regular setup (that’s how I learned to use them) — but since they’re not included in your standard menu, I’m going to assume you’re on a paid WP plan or self-hosting, because “projects” are absent from most of those setups.
OK, I still don’t get projects. My mental image of a project would have been an umbrella that maintained many different posts under it.
So, for example, the “project” would be “kitchen remodel” and under that umbrella I might have posts that discuss scheduling, paint colors, countertop choices, new cabinet configurations, and appliances. If my blog is a large filing cabinet, then a “project” would be the main filing subject and organizational method with smaller “files” making up the actual content.
But that doesn’t seem to be how it works because as far as I can tell, a “project” is a single post/page. Is a “project” just a page that shows up in the main feed?
No — a “project” on WP is just a fancy name for a specific type of INDIVIDUAL post — one that doesn’t go into the ordinary blog roll and has its own set of “types” (= categories) and tags (called “portfolio tags” on the projects, but as a matter of fact they’re just tags like all the others, except they, too, don’t go into the ordinary tag cloud composed from the tags on the blog posts).
Maybe just try setting up a “project” — you’ll see that the drafting page looks almost exactly like that for ordinary posts, except that “categories” are called “types”.
I know the name is totally counterintuitive — based on what I’ve seen on the theme that I use with my own blog (which has more customizing options than those that we have — and need — here), I think the origin of the term may basically have been “advertisements” or promo pages for charitable and other special interest projects that were / are being set up that way, and which on the one hand had / have to be protected from getting buried in an ordinary blog roll, and on the other hand have to allow for feedback (= comments) from the general public (so the WP “pages” feature doesn’t really work, either). Such a promo / advertisement “project” post would still link to other pages and posts for further details — and some blog themes, including mine, also allow for the type of “umbrella” you imagine to be created, e.g. by way of a series of “project” posts tied into a specific category or type, AND then to be displayed in a dedicated section of your site.
But as I said, that, to me, chiefly seems to be the origin of the feature. Personally, I’ve come to use it essentially as a vehicle to create a set of posts for special purposes (e.g., reading project master update posts) and any other types of posts that I want to protect from getting buried in the ordinary feed / blogroll — basically, anything on a higher organizational level that I want to have handy and with quick access.
Ok, that all makes sense, except where, exactly, is the project feed?
Let’s say we make a project for Halloween Bingo (which I think you’ve done, I just haven’t gotten that far in my catch-up yet) and everybody gets their calls there, and the square lists and rules are there, etc.
Do people have to click on a different link when arriving to the site to see the HB blog roll?
When they do HB related posts, do they have to do them twice: once on the project and again as a seperate ‘normal’ post that will appear in our main blog roll feed? Or is there a way to cross-post the same page to both feeds?
If we go with the basic setup of the HB menu I created (and explained in the post titled “Setup for Regular Blogging AND Reading Games / Group Reads”), all people really need to do is follow the links in that menu.
The “Players’ Feed” link at the center of the menu takes them to the regular HB post feed, which is culled from the overall / general post feed by way of the “Halloween Bingo” category (which we’d just ask everybody to check on the drafting page while creating a HB-related post).
Admin posts would be in the feed linked at the top of the menu (culled from our “project” type posts that we’d use to set down the basic admin stuff), possibly supplemented by the odd “page” (which we’d have to add manually and which doesn’t go into any feed), e.g., for the bingo rules and the bingo square definitions. Again, IMHO “pages” should only be used for things where we don’t want / expect people to comment. Everything else that is “admin” should be formatted as a “project” so as to automatically enable the comment option.
And lastly, there is the members’ Halloween Bingo master update post section — where we need to determine whether we want people to do this as “projects” or regular posts (in both / either cases, combined with a “HB master update post” tag so as to be able to cull all of these posts in a single separate feed and make them accessible that way) — or by way of “pages”, each of which we’d then have to add to the menu manually. Ditto issue, incidentally, with regard to members’ main “about me” pages, see discussion with Christine on the “Setup for Regular Blogging AND Reading Games / Group Reads” post.
If our brains had visual representations, yours would be a neat and highly functional Excel spreadsheet, while mine would … not.
I’ll get there – I’ll have a play around with the menus you setup and I’m certain I will have an “AH-HAH!” moment where it will all come together.
Lol. That moment will come within minutes at most, I predict. Actually, when I set this up I thought “MbD will look at this and instantly go ‘gee, this is really rather basic stuff'” … 😀
I think it’s the parallel feeds that are doing my head in the most. Once I see it, use it a bit, I think it’ll click.
Just think of them as two separate blog post feeds; at bottom, that’s really all they are. I speculated in one of my responses to Christine as to why “projects” are called “projects” to begin with and how they originated — but anyway, the way they work is really just as a slightly fancier sort of posts that are kept out of the general fray … and that you don’t have to add manually each and everywhere, like you have to do with “pages”, once you’ve figured out that you can give them one or several feeds of their own. (The “project” feeds are generated via the “project types” and “portfolio tags”, but I’m sure you’ve figured this one out already.)
@Mike:
When looking up something else last night, I came across these two pages concerning “projects” in the WP Support section:
https://wordpress.com/support/portfolios/
https://wordpress.com/support/portfolios/making-the-most-of-your-portfolio/
The first of these pages contains a link to a “Themes” page listing the design themes that allow the “projects” feature to be put to optimum use: https://wordpress.com/themes/filter/feature:portfolio
As far as I can see, these are all design themes putting an emphasis on visual displays.
Also I’ll just add that if you have a self-hosted site, you have to enable JetPack in order to enable portfolios. That took me awhile to figure out when I was doing my own site.
Either JetPack or you can use the Portfolio Toolkit plugin. That’s the one I installed.