Video Tutorial

At some point, you will probably want to add, update or remove users. That’s super simple. Just click Users from the Dashboard. You will be taken to a list of existing users, with the option to “Add New” ones at the top:

Existing Users

If you need to update an existing user, just click on their name. You’ll be taken to a new screen. In my experience, the things you are most likely to edit are the user role or the password (i.e. doing a sort of administrative password reset).

Roles

WordPress users are given a role that controls what they are or aren’t able to do and access in the site’s Dashboard. Here’s what I would say: Administrator is the top role and should be given out selectively – to management-level staff, e.g. Other, less senior staff are probably safe to set as Editors – they should be able to add or update content as needed, but not mess with wider site settings. And then, if you had, for example, a student intern, you might want something even more restrictive – Author or Contributor. If you want to learn more, Google “WordPress user roles” and look for a guide, something like this:

To do a password reset, scroll down to account management, click ‘Generate Password’ and either use the secure one that’s generated or set it to something more memorable:

There’s a tonne of other fields. I doubt many of them will be relevant or useful to you, but feel free to acquaint yourself with them.

Deleting a User

From the initial list of users, you can simply hover over the user and click Delete. If this user has created content for the site, you will then be asked if you want to reassign it to another user: make sure to reassign content to another user or else it could be deleted as well!

New Users

Click “Add New” at the top, fill out at least the required fields, set a password, assign the appropriate role, and click “Add New User”. This person should get an email about this, but it often ends up in spam, so you may have to manually bring their registration to their attention.

If they need to know how to log in after this or reset their password if you automatically generated one for them, direct them to the Logging In & Dashboard page:

Video Tutorial

Maintenance is important for keeping your site secure and up-to-date with ever-changing technical requirements. I’d strongly recommend running updates when prompted. If you see this circular arrow icon up top (to the right of my name in this image):

That means you have updates – whether plugin, theme, WordPress version or whatever the case may be. Click it. You’ll go to a screen that looks something like this:

Depending on what you need to update, it may be as simple as a button click or you may have to check the box of what you want to update and then click the corresponding button to actually run the update. I’d say you should always run the updates, with one caveat...

Backups

It’s possible that an update can break your site. Very uncommon, but it can happen for any number of reasons. Before running an update, it may be advisable to create a backup first. This site is using a plugin called All-in-One Backups for this, so click on it from the Dashboard and then click Export To > File to create a full backup:

To restore a backup, you would go to All-in-One WP Migration > Backups, hover over the backup in question, and click Restore.

Now, I have seen restores fail, especially for sites as large as this one, so you may need to call in a developer if something goes wrong. For that reason, it’s good to know you have someone you can contact – whether that’s a freelancer like myself (Sam, Rhineland.co) or a trained staff member – in case something does go wrong.

Deleting Backups

You don’t want too many backups clogging up your server. I wouldn’t keep more than the latest one or two at any given time. To delete backups, hover over the red X of the one you want to delete and click it.

Design Updates/Overhauls

For anything not covered here, you may just need to bring in a WordPress developer – no shortcuts sometimes.

Rhineland.co/Sam Allemang

You’re free to reach out to me to check my availability, which you can do either here:

Or by emailing info[at]rhineland[dot]co.

Other Freelancers

I don’t have experience with this myself, but I suppose I would Google for WordPress freelancers and see what I found:

I imagine a site like Upwork or Fiverr or something like that might be your best bet – read the reviews, look at the pricing and see what you find if this is the route you take.

Good luck!

Video Tutorial

Here, we’ll look at how to edit the Footer. First, let’s be clear what I’m referring to. The section we’ll edit is this one:

Where we want to go to edit this is, from the main Dashboard, Appearance > Widgets, because all of these pieces of content are widgets, automatically arranging themselves as columns inside a ‘widget area’ (the footer section):

Find the Footer widget area and use the arrow icon to expand it:

From here, you can use the arrow icons to expand whichever widget you want to edit, make your edits, and click Save:

The newsletter widget is the only one of these that is not very user friendly to edit, so I would just contact a WordPress developer if your newsletter situation changes (e.g. you move from MailChimp to Constant Contact or something like that). Everything else, though, is very easy to make tweaks to and update.

Video Tutorial

Adding events is going to be pretty self-explanatory once you are in the editor. It’s just a matter of filling out the fields asked of you. First, go to Events > Add New:

Once in there, it’s mostly just the unglamorous job of filling out the title and as many of the fields inside the tabs as you think are relevant:

Once that’s done just select which Category it belongs to...

...And give it a featured image...

And Publish it:

It will now automatically appear where you’ve scheduled it in the Calendar.

Video Tutorial

In this section, we’re going to look at how to edit pages on your site.

From the dashboard menu, select Pages to be redirected to a list of all the pages on your site:

You’ll now be at a list of all the pages on your site, which can be in various states, such as page drafts. These are pages that are available for you to edit and update and so on, but are not (yet) available to the public. We are just going to worry about some of the pages that are already live.

Let’s learn how to edit a few representative pages:

Video Tutorial

There are a couple small branding considerations that are done within the Customize panel. I don’t think you will use this much, but it’s good to remember its there for when you do need it.

First off, where is this located?

If you are in the Dashboard, you can navigate to Appearance > Customize:

Or, if you are logged in and viewing the front-end of the site, you can select Customize from the top menu:

Either way, you will be taken to the Customize screen:

The parts here that I expect will be most relevant, if any, are:

Colours

The colours set here are used throughout the site in various ways. If the brand identity changes, you can try setting these colours to new values and see what happens. Though you may also need a web developer like myself to edit some aspects of the code to ensure full synchronicity.

For your reference or in case you overwrite colours without having backups, the current values are:

Breakthrough Pro Settings > Hero Section Settings

Here, you can edit the ‘tagline’ at the top of the homepage, as well as the button text and link right below it.

Breakthrough Pro Settings > Image Settings

Here, you can replace the image at the top of the home page, as well as the default ‘hero’ image for posts/pages when one isn’t manually set and the image that appears near the bottom of the site:

And that’s quite possibly all you’ll need the Customize section for if you need at all. Here’s another way of looking at it: if you find you have a bunch of great new photos on hand and you want to ‘refresh’ the website, you can try swapping out some of these images for some new ones. It may take some trial and error to find ones that crop nicely to fit the site, so try and use ones with similar characteristics: focal point(s) in the approximate middle of the image; mid-to-longer range distance; abstract or pattern images work well (since you’re less worried about cropping out people’s faces, etc.)

Publish

When you’re done making changes, make sure to hit Publish to take them live:

Use the table of contents to jump to the section you want. For additional support, contact Sam at info@rhineland.co.

Video Tutorial

Home Page

Let’s start with the Home page. Click its name or hover over it and click edit to begin editing the page:

We are using the almost brand new WordPress block editor on this site. In the section on Adding Pages, we’ll walk through adding new blocks and give a better introduction to what ones are available. For now, we’re just going to worry about modifying the ones that are already on your existing pages.

Sidenote: Viewing the live page or page preview

At any point, if you want to view the page, click View Page up top. Now, you may want to do this in a new tab if you are in the middle of working on something, which you can do by either right clicking on it or holding ctrl or ⌘ when clicking it (Windows vs. Apple):

To preview your work in progress, click the preview link:

Page Title

The very first item is not actually part of the page content – it’s the page title:

Hopefully you won’t need to edit this ever or at all, but if you do, be aware that it will change references to the title throughout the site, such as in the Menu or in your list of pages. It may even change the URL to the page, which could be a problem. So edit it when needed, but leave it intact when this can be avoided.

Carousel

The first block creates a carousel using a third-party plugin. Here in the page editor, all you have to do is select which slider you want to show. But let’s take a quick look at how you could update this carousel if you wanted to. In the main admin menu, select Soliloquy:

From here, you would hover over the slider that appears at the top of your homepage – JAC profile pics – and click Edit. Once in here, you can drag and drop new photos you want to feature, select ones that have already been uploaded (“Select From Other Sources"), and/or remove photos that are already in use (click X on the photo in question).

Paragraph

The next section is just a styled paragraph:

Click anywhere inside and edit the text like you would in, e.g., Word or Google Docs. You have some styling options, such as bold and italic. Just select the text you want and click the appropriate icon.

There are additional, block-wide styling options along the righthand side of the screen (provided you are on a medium-to-large sized screen; on mobile, it would be different). Here you can set the text size (from presets or a custom size), and/or background and foreground colours (again, from presets or a custom colour):

Sidebar/Settings panel

A quick note, if that settings panel on the right hand side isn’t showing for you when you have a block selected, click its icon up top – the gear icon:

Separator

The next block is just a ‘Separator’ – a line that is useful in breaking up content and communicating to users where one section ends and another begins:

The separator has some modest settings you can try, though this site hasn’t made use of them at the time of this writing:

Deleting blocks

Let’s say you wanted to get rid of this (or any block, for that matter). Just click on it and hit delete. Made a mistake? Use your standard “Undo” shortcut (ctrl + z or ⌘ + z, Windows vs. Apple).

Moving blocks

Let’s say you just wanted to move it up or down. Just click those arrows on the lefthand side in the appropriate direction.

Other options (duplicating, e.g.)

There are a few more options on every block. Just click the menu option (three dots at righthand side) to access these:

Columns

Next is a columns block. These can be the trickiest to navigate, and I’ll explain why in a moment. Editing within a column is easy enough though. Here, let’s say you want to update the video being shown. Just click on the video and then click the pencil icon to edit the YouTube URL that the video ‘lives’ at:

Incidentally, there are empty columns on either side just to reduce the width of the video so that it doesn’t get too large – that’s why this section is the way it is.

The tricky part can be modifying the block. Not the column content itself, but the section that creates the columns. For example, you might want to delete the whole section or maybe change the number of columns – this is when you’d need to modify the block. Here’s what you would need to do.

First, let’s say you haven’t selected anything yet. You might see something like this:

When you hover over an element or a column, you should see an indication that an item is clickable, such as the line here:

Click on it and you should see something like this:

See that dotted line surrounding the whole section? Click that and you should now be able to modify the entire block. Now you can change its appearance, whether adjusting its width or the number of columns, or delete or move the whole thing thing:

Columns, Separator, Pullquote

The next sections are just more columns containing text (including headers, which let you pick what level heading) and a pullquote (which is editable in quite a similar way to the paragraph option above). You should be comfortable with these by now.

Spacer

In between the following headers, we wanted a little empty space to spread things out for good flow. You can edit the size of this (or delete or so forth) if you want:

Forms

Next we have a block for the form from the WPForms plugin. Like the Soliloquy slider, this is a third-party plugin block, and if you want to edit the form you would select WPForms from the menu:

As of this writing, there is only the one form in use, the newsletter signup form. And, most likely, it’s not going to be modified often or perhaps even ever. But if you do want to edit it, here’s how: Once you've selected it, you will see a variety of field types along the side that you can add. You can drag and drop any of those into place on the form, and then click on it to set its specific options:

Buttons

There are a few buttons near the bottom of the page. When you click on one, you’ll see you can edit the button text and the linked URL in the block itself, and set a number of options and styles in the panel along the side:

Custom HTML

The last section on the home page is for custom HTML, to add a ‘code snippet’ provided by Twitter to embed a Twitter feed. You’ll rarely need a custom HTML block except for instances like this, where you are embedding a block of code provided by an external service provider. There’s no customization available for this block, since there‘s no reason to be. It just outputs the rendered version of whatever code you input:

Video Tutorial

Let’s see how to add, remove or move items in your menu. From the Dashboard, go to Appearance > Menus:

Here is where you can edit the Menus on your site. As of this writing, there are actually two in use, though one is certainly more prominent than the other. They are the Header Menu...

...and the Footer Menu:

The social icons up top are managed independently, so we’ll explain how to edit those at the end of this section:

Now, for editing the menus. Make sure the one you want to edit is selected:

Here are all the elements in your menu:

Want to just edit the menu by rearranging it? You can drag and drop these elements into any order you want. Notice how some items are indented from others? That makes them dropdown elements beneath their ‘parent’ menu item:

Need to delete something from the menu? Just click the little arrow on the right and you’ll be able to Remove it:

Need to add something new to the menu? Along the left are numerous tabs of all the types of content you can add. And then, within those, you may get additional tabs (Most Recent, View All...):

Check the item(s) you want to add and click Add to Menu. They should appear at its bottom. Then it’s just a matter of dragging and dropping them into the spot you want and then, make sure to hit Save Menu:

Social Icons

These are editable under Appearance > Widgets:

From here, find the Widget Area called Nav Social Menu, click the arrow to open it, click the arrow to expand Simple Social Icons, and then simply fill in links to whatever social accounts you want to appear. If you don’t see the one you want, it’s simply unavailable until/unless the Simple Social Icons release an update. (Sorry, TikTok.)

When you’re done, just make sure the widget is Saved:

Video Tutorial

Logging In

To login into any WordPress site that hasn’t modified the defaults, you can go to either example.com/wp-admin or example.com/wp-login.php so in your case, you would go to http://jeanaugustinecentre.ca/wp-admin to sign in. From here you can enter your username and password, and check the checkbox to save your details in your browser if you wish, or reset your password if you’ve forgotten it. If you do this, be sure to check your spam folder, as password resets often end up there.

Dashboard

When you log in, you’ll be taken to the WordPress dashboard from which you can access all the different parts of your website. It may look slightly different for different users. There are at least two reasons for this: different users have different levels of access – for example an admin user will have more options than an editor user. (We will get to adding and modifying users in its own section on Users.) Additionally, you can customize your dashboard, collapsing 'widgets' and dragging them around.

Let‘s look at the Dashboard menu for an admin-level user.

I’ll start with the ones I think you will use regularly before explaining the ones I doubt you will use at all:

• Dashboard – takes you back to the dashboard when you are in a sub-page

  • Home – same as above

  • Updates – lets you run updates to WordPress, plugins, themes and more. Note: I nearly always recommend running available updates for security reasons. But there is a (small) risk it can produce unexpected consequences. Still, I would suggest running updates when they are available.

• Posts – if you start to make use of blogging, this is where you would do it. Currently, there is no active blog on the site, so this might be something to keep in mind for later.

  • Note: If you were going to start blogging, it wouldn’t be enough to start adding posts here. We would want to add a blog page too, perhaps as well as a section of recent posts on the home page, etc.

• Events – this is where the calendar’s events are added, modified and deleted, as well as adjusting settings for the calendar. For the full guide, please see the section on Events.

• Media – this is one spot where you are able to upload and modify media files, such as images and PDFs. You will rarely need to use this section except when you need to get the link of a PDF – then it can come in handy. For examples of this, please see the section on Pages.

• Pages – this is probably the most useful link. This gets you to a full list of pages on your site. For the full guide, please see the section on Pages.

• WPForms – here you can manage forms on your website, as well as seeing entries. Currently it is just being used to collect Newsletter sign-ups, so you may not need this too much.

• Appearance – there are a couple important site-wide subsections beneath here:

  • Customize – This leads you to a section where you can customize some of the theme design. We don’t make full use of it, but some key elements of the Home page, for example, are edited here. For a full guide, please see the section on the Customize page.

  • Widgets – Widgets are little blocks of content that can appear across multiple or all pages. Because of your specific design, we don’t make extensive use of it, but it is used to control the footer. For a full guide on editing the footer widgets, please see the section on the Footer.

  • Menus – This is where the main menu is managed, as well as any other menus in use on the site. For a full guide on editing menus, please see the Menus section.

• Users – this is where you can add new users, remove old ones, reset passwords and update permission levels. For the full guide, please see the section on Users.

• All-in-One WP Migration – a section to create backups.

  • Note: It might be worth creating backups periodically (once a moth or week, e.g.). Click Export To > File to run a full backup.

Just for your information or curiosity, here are some quick notes on the remaining items:

• Comments – where blog comments are managed. Without a blog, this isn't an issue.

• Genesis – where a number of theme options are set. For advanced development; unlikely to be needed from day-to-day.

• Plugins – a key section to add new functionality to the site via plugins, but best left to a developer or experienced WP user.

• Tools – a section of more technical features.

• Settings – a collection of various site-wide settings. Unlikely to need ongoing maintenance.

• SEO – settings relating to how links appear in Google and on social media. Best left to a developer or experienced user if edits are needed.

• Soliloquy – the plugin to handle the Instagram carousel.

• Gutenberg – settings relating to the WordPress editor. Shouldn’t need ongoing maintenance.

• Google Analytics – settings relating to Google Analytics integration.

  • Note: The key metrics from your Analytics will be showcased on the main dashboard page. Look for them there.

Video Tutorial

The Programs page should fill in a few remaining gaps not covered in the Home page section. Once you’ve looked at both of these, you should have a pretty good idea of how to edit nearly any page on the site.

Columns with Cover Blocks

The first section is a row of columns. As mentioned on the Home page, these can be tricky to navigate, so let’s look at how one block is embedded in another is embedded in another is embedded in another (phew!) and how to modify each part.

First, you can click on the text and button blocks to make edits to them. Pretty simple so far:

Sidenote: Updating PDF links

The registration buttons happen to link to PDF registration forms. Linking to PDFs is one of the more ‘clunky’ processes here, so I’ll tell you how I do it.

First, I would open the Dashboard in a new, second tab. From there, I would visit the Media > Add New page:

Here, I can drag and drop a PDF into the designated box to upload one. Once it’s finished uploading, I would click Edit:

Now, I would want to copy the File URL to my clipboard – select it and either right click and pick ‘Copy’ or use the keyboard shortcut (ctrl + c (Windows); ⌘ + c (Apple)):

Go ahead and close the tab. We’re nearly done. Back in your Programs page (or whichever), paste the link as your button URL – right click and pick ‘Paste’ or use the keyboard shortcut (ctrl + v (Windows); ⌘ + v (Apple)):

End of sidenote, back to editing:

Click on the outside of these blocks, on the image behind them and you will see the text and buttons are inside a “Cover” block. This is where the background image comes from. The Cover block basically gives you an eye-catching section where you can have a background image with any number of child blocks within it. If you want to edit the background image, there are two ways. I think the first one is easier. With the cover block selected, click the pencil icon up top and you will be able to pick a new image:

Or, you can click Clear Media in the block settings and then pick a new image in the block itself:

Below that, in the settings, you can edit the overlay colour as well.

The cover block is within a column. Click the dotted line just outside of this to select the column (as discussed on the Home page’s first column block). Finally, the containing Columns block in which all three columns live. Because it’s full-width here, it can be harder to select, so here is another way to navigate ‘nested’ blocks:

You can select the Block Navigation icon from the toolbar above to bring up a sort of family tree that gives you a representation of the parent and child blocks in whatever area you’re currently working in:

Select Columns there and you will be able to edit the containing Columns block.

Gallery

Click on any image on the gallery and you’ll see you have some self-explanatory ways to remove images (X), quickly move them left or right (<, >), or drag and drop new images to upload them:

What’s less obvious is that it’s actually easier to move items around by clicking the Media Library button and then, if it’s not active already, clicking on Edit Gallery on the side:

From here, you can drag and drop images into whatever order you want in a much quicker, easier way. Finally, if you want to change the gallery’s number of columns, you have that option on the side of the page back in your editor:

Video Tutorial

Let’s say we wanted to create a brand new page. Let’s see how we might go about that and what it could consist of. First, hover over Pages and click Add New from your main admin menu:

Let’s start simple: Give the page a title and then click below and you can just start typing.

You can perform simple formatting just by selecting text and then using the buttons in the toolbar above:

You will probably want to make pages out of more than straight paragraph text, though. This is why WordPress created their new block editor. This lets you mix and match different ‘blocks’ and types of content – text, images, embeds, buttons.... There are a lot of different elements to choose from. First, how do you access them? One way that you can pick from them as a sort of list is to click the little + button before each section (and in other spots on the page too, but for ease of use, I’ll just demonstrate this one). This will bring up a ‘picker’ for the full collection of blocks arranged into self-explanatory panels:

Let’s add a button. If I know what I’m looking for, I can just start typing it into the search bar to bring it up:

I can add my button text, add a URL or start typing a page on my site to pick it from the list, and set my styling options. Easy.

But let’s look at one more one that you’ll probably use a lot, which will teach you a handy shortcut. You will probably use images quite often. And we already saw one way you can add them – using the + button. But if you know what you want to add, you can just enter a new block (e.g., click Return from the last paragraph), type / and then start typing what you want, e.g. /image:

Now I can select my image, add a new one, and then, once I’ve got an image, click on the tools above or along the right hand sidebar to decide how I want it to look:

There are lots of blocks you will never use, but I can’t be sure which ones you will and won’t. But if I had to guess, I would get familiar with the ones in Common, Formatting and Layout – those will probably cover 99% of what you need to do. Possibly Embeds if you want to add a YouTube video:

When your page content is either ready to go or you are done working on it for now, you can turn your attention to the Document settings in the sidebar. Here you will want to set a Featured Image. These images are pretty ‘short’ and get cropped, so something abstract is best when you have that (to avoid the problem of cropping out people’s faces):

And then, based on where the page is ‘at’, you can pick if you want to publish it now (Publish) or save it to work on later before it goes live (Save Draft):

Lastly, you very likely will want to add it to the menu. For that, check out the section on Menus:

And that’s a quick walkthrough of how to add a new page. Your ‘Homework’ is to think of what sort of design you want to achieve and to see if you can find the best available blocks to achieve that. Make a note of the design options for each one or look at the blocks in use on existing pages to see how you are best able to layout the page the way you want. The simpler the layout (primarily text-based, for example), the quicker the job will be. So, add some flourishes as needed to bring a page to life, while keeping your processes manageable – that’s the tightrope you want to walk. Good luck!