Staff, Categories, Sponsors? & Widget help.

Support Area Forums Progress Staff, Categories, Sponsors? & Widget help.

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  • #16513
    Jim Moyer
    Participant

    Are the Staff, Categories, Sponsors all types of pages? I am not sure i understand exactly what they are and how to use them.

    I have the google cal widget and i want to have it on a page to display the calendar. How do i add this widget to that specific page. Do i do this though Staff, Categories, Sponsors or am i off base on this.

    Thanks for helping with my elementary questions.

    #16515
    Bill Robbins
    Moderator

    Hello Jim,

    Great question. The sponsors, and staff are called “custom post types.” These are like pages and posts, but created for specific types of content — in this case, our staff and sponsors. We use them so we can keep them separate from your pages and posts for better organization.

    On your site you’ll go to the staff section and add any individual staff members you’d like to display on the front end of your site there. Each one is added individually. The same goes for sponsors. If you don’t need one (or both) of these, then you can safely ignore them.

    To display them on the front end of your site, there are a couple of options. If you only need one listing of staff and/or one listing of sponsors, then the easiest option is to use a page template. To do that, create a new page. Look in the right hand column while you’re editing your page and you’ll see a drop-down menu for templates. Choose the staff or sponsors template and publish your page. You can then add your page to the navigation menu and your visitors will be able to see your staff or sponsors.

    If you need to have multiple lists of staff or sponsors say for various sponsor levels (Gold, Silver, Bronze) or for different staff groups (Leadership, Administrative Staff, Volunteers), you can do that. Those will be organized around staff or sponsor groups. These are ways of categorizing like items together.

    Say you needed two staff groups, one for senior leadership and one for administrative staff. You would create two staff groups, one for senior leadership and one for administrative staff. Then while you’re creating each individual staff member, you would add them to the appropriate group. There is a box in the right hand side while editing a staff member that you can use to check a staff group.

    To get the staff groups to display on the front end of your site, you don’t use a page template. Instead you go to the Navigation Menu builder (Appearance > Menus) and add your staff groups directly to your navigation menu. Look in the left hand column of that screen for Staff Groups. If you don’t see them, click the “Screen Options” tab in the top right hand corner and make sure that the boxy by Staff Groups is checked.

    Then select the staff group you’d like to add to your navigation menu and add it, just like you would a page. Once you publish your menu that will add a “page” to your site that lists all the staff members in that group. Sponsor groups work the same way.


    It is possible to choose where a widget is visible. If you’re using the Jetpack plugin that is often installed along side of WordPress, it has a “visibility” feature that lets you choose where the widget appears.

    Say you want to add a widget only to your about page. You would first add the widget to the “Page Sidebar” and then choose the “About” page from the visibility options there. That would cause the widget to only show up on your about page.

    It’s also possible to create new sidebars and specify where they appear using the Content Aware Sidebars plugin. This lets you create new sidebars and specify where they are seen on your site.

    If you have any questions or trouble, just let me know.

    Have a great weekend,
    Bill

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