Beyond writing posts and formatting text, you can enhance the post page in a number of ways. You can change the post layout, add custom sidebars, schedule posts for publishing at a specific day and time, change the byline and add co-authors, make a post display more prominently on the homepage, and connect it with related posts. We cover these things here.
Top Term and Related Posts: The Additional Options Panel
Top Term
The Top Term is a taxonomy term you choose to display above the headline of a post. Here’s an example from the INN Nerd’s website showing the Top Terms highlighted:
You use the Additional Options panel to choose the Top Term from any of the taxonomy terms you have added to the post, including any Categories, Tags, Series, or other taxonomy terms. If you haven’t yet added any taxonomy terms, the Top Term dropdown is empty:
As soon as you add some terms, they’re added to the Top Term drop-down menu:
Notice that the Top Term drop-down remain grayed out, and you can’t select from its terms until you save the post at least as a Draft. After the post is saved as a Draft you can select a term from the drop-down menu:
With a Top Term selected when the post is published, that term appears above the headline and links to the archive page which displays all posts assigned to that term.
Related Posts
In the Additional Options panel of the Post Edit screen is a field for Related Posts. This can be useful to display headlines and excerpts of related articles at the bottom of the post page, using the Largo Related Posts Widget. You can select related posts by entering their post IDs separated by commas:
To find the ID of a post, open it as if you were editing the post. In the browser address bar, you’ll see a number in the URL similar to http://yoursite.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=31400&action=edit. In this case, 31400 is the post ID.
The site administrator can add the Largo Related Posts widget to the single post page template. A common place for it would be the Article Bottom widget area:
Note: If you are using the Largo Related Posts Widget and don’t add related posts to a given post, the widget will display related posts based on series, category, or tag.
Changing the Post Layout
Your website administrator will have set a default layout for all post pages. It might be a single-column layout with no sidebar, which is increasingly common for story pages. But if you want a specific sidebar on any given post page, you can override the default layout.
The Layout Options panel allows you to select a different template for the post:
- One Column (Standard Layout) is a default article template in Largo version 0.4 that focuses on readability, reduces distractions and allows for a beautiful presentation of visual elements within a story with a large “hero” section at the top of the article for featured media (photo, video, slideshow or embedded media).
- Two Columns (Classic Layout) is the previous article template from Largo version 0.3 and before which features a content area on the left and a sidebar on the right.
- Full-Width (no sidebar) is an option when posts need a wider content area for things like maps and interactive data applications. The full-width template is not ideal for text, as the line length is non-optimal for a good reading experience.
Setting Custom Sidebars
If you select the Two Column (Classic Layout) you can also select any existing custom sidebar for the post:
New custom sidebars can be created by site administrators and populated with a wide variety of content. You might want to use specific custom sidebars for different posts based on subjects, ad campaigns, etc. If that’s the case, talk with your site admin about setting up these sidebars for use in posts.
Schedule a Post for Publishing at a Later Time
You write a post now and schedule it for publishing at a specific day and time. In the Publish panel click the Edit link next to “Publish Immediately”:
This opens a date picker where you can select a date and time for publishing the post:
The Publish button will change into a Schedule button. Push it to schedule the post:
WordPress will publish the post on that date and time with no further action needed by you.
Post Visibility and making a Post “Sticky”
Note: Your user role must be at least Editor to use the visibility features.
Published posts are accessible to everyone by default. You can use the Visibility settings to:
- Password-protect the post, and assign a password
- Keep the post Private so only logged-in users can access the post
- Stick the post to the top of the homepage (if enabled in the layout set by the site Administrator).
Click the Edit button next to Visibility to edit its settings:
To make a post Sticky, select “Stick this post to the front page”:
A Sticky post will display at the top of the homepage, and on any category archive and other Landing Pages where the post would normally appear based on date order. It will “stick” to the top of these pages even when a newer post is published (unless the newer post is set to Sticky, which nullifies the sticky status of the previous post).
Notice that when a post is set to be Sticky, this is shown in the Publish panel:
Only one post can be set to Sticky at any given time. If another post is set to be Sticky, it will unstick any previous sticky posts.