Help for contributors
Page last edited: 13th October 2017
This page provides help for editors, authors and contributors.
This website welcomes regular contributors. If you want to submit only a one-off article, you should contact the Editor to find out how best to send it to us.
Writing and typography
Most contributors send in their copy by email. If you want to send us an article (or photo) contact us and we will provide you with the correct email address to use.
Our latest style guide can be downloaded from this link.
Posts versus pages
Music in Leicester website has two main types of content
Pages
Posts
Pages are permanent articles that stay up and are always available to the various methods of navigation. Contributors cannot edit pages, only posts.
Posts are live during the month that they are published but on the first day of the subsequent month, they are automatically transferred to a monthly archive. Once a post has been published, it can be edited, if changes or additions are required. Posts should be saved when they are finished; the editor will check them and if they are OK will press the Publish button.
Posts are not automatically deleted – they do not expire with time. All posts remain live on the website. Posts should not be deleted once they have been published. If the content of a post becomes defunct, or out of date, it can be transferred to the archives section. Deleting a post will cause errors to occur, especially in search engines.
All posts for the current month can be viewed on the round-up page for that month.
Links to all pages and posts are gathered into the Contents Page (this is an alphabetical topics listing.) This is edited manually, so an editor has to insert links into the alphabetical list.
Posts automatically supply feeds to other sites and social media media outlets (which pages do not.) When a post is published it will appear on Twitter, Facebook and in emails sent to subscribers.
For example, posts can be used to provide information about festivals coming up and once the festival is finished the post can go into the archive. Posts are archived once the year has changed. The archives now show posts for 2013 and 2014 and these are often marked with a logo:
The site allows people to read each monthly archive using the “Months” drop-down menu on pages that have the right-hand column.
Posts can be used to promote pages; especially if adding a new page, a post can draw attention to it.
What contributors can and cannot do
Music in Leicester has a variety of users and each of them have their own permissions; this limits what they can do when they log on to the site.
User types are set by the software and permissions for each user are set by the Admin (within the limits allowed by the software; they are
Administrator (the site webmaster)
Author
Contributor
Editor
Each role has its own set of permissions that allow the user to do some things but not others.
Authors and contributors can add new posts BUT NOT PAGES. They can also add photos to their posts.
They can edit posts that they have made BUT NOT OTHER PEOPLE’S POSTS.
All users are expected to edit their own profiles on the site through the Profile item on the dashboard.
Editors can add pages and edit pages and have much the same permissions as the admin.
Hence, the way the system operates requires us to manage what users do by editing what they upload to the site. Hence, if a contributor posts a textual piece, they would have to ask the Admin or an Editor to insert an image into it, for them.
A user would need to have been a successful contributor or author for some time before being upgraded to an editor.
Useful links
Our article How to get your review published in MIL.