Here are some notes for our content editors. Thanks in advance for your work and your patience. Please feel free to edit these guidelines as you see fit.

Stuck?

If you're stuck, please submit requests for assistance through spiceworks .

Repetition

A tidy website contains everything it needs to contain. Once. If the information already exists somewhere else on the site, link to it rather than copying and pasting it. Do not feel guilty for making the reader follow a link -- quite the opposite, in fact.

References to current library employees

This is particularly important for information that changes several times a year, such as who does what task and how to contact them. Wherever possible (granted, there are obvious exceptions\) avoid referring to a specific employee. Refer instead to a job or responsibility and include a link to the staff directory. We can also, where appropriate, slice and dice the table of users in various ways and include it on other pages, as we're doing for example on the list of liaison librarians. However:

• PLEASE DON'T: Eddie Rubeiz will help you with task X, and his phone number is Y.
• DO: Anyone in the Systems department can assist you with task X. (See our staff directory for contact information.\)
• DO: The Librarian for XYZ can assist you with this. (See our staff directory for contact information.\)
• As a last resort, if you really need to refer to a specific person's contact info, link to their entry in the staff directory like this: Eddie's entry in the staff directory.

Getting started

• Log in
• Once you're logged in, use the menus to move around, and click the blue 'Edit' button on the top left of any page to start editing the copy.
• When you're done editing, click the blue 'Save' button.
• Delete pages by clicking 'Edit', then the blue 'Delete' button. Please think twice before doing this.
• New Page (use sparingly\)
• Rearrange Menu (use sparingly\)
• When in doubt, ask Systems.

Titles

Please keep page titles consistent with the links in the menu.

Blurbs

Every page should have a brief intro saying what can be found on the page and how the page is organized. Just imagine what you would say to an undergrad while giving a tour of the library. You can also suggest other places they might want to check for related items.

• DO: Short, helpful, friendly intro: http://www.library.drexel.edu/about/info-and-services
• DON'T: No blurb, unfriendly: http://www.library.drexel.edu/guides/funding/

Backups

We're backing up the site once a day, so Systems can bring up yesterday's version fairly easily if you liked it better before. Sporadic backups of the database as it was more than 24 hours ago should also be available upon request.

Formatting
Keep it simple. Tables are turned off at the moment (tables are annoying on very narrow screens.\) Whenever you need to paste a large chunk of content from www, please paste it into a plain text editor before copying it into the new site. This will strip the tags out of the content and allow you to apply your own markup in a way that makes sense to you.
It's much easier to add markup than to remove it. Please apply it with care. You should be able to do almost everything using just h1, h2, and the occasional sprinkling of bold and italic.
Please don't use color.
Use heading 2 for top heading and heading 3 for internal blocks

Challenges
As is perfectly normal, the library is changing as you write about it. Policies in place when you write copy in April may well have changed by the time we go live in the fall. Also, as you write this content, we are moving some functionality to third-party vendors. All this means that it is impossible to do a perfect job writing copy the first time around. Please plan to enter your content in stages, allowing time and energy for the inevitable last-minute changes. One way you could approach this problem might be to come up with a draft version of the copy on the site for each page, then come back and expand it / add formatting / add links / add pictures.

The site is still under construction. There will be distracting error messages; features will go down unexpectedly; from time to time you will be unable to log in. We apologize in advance and thank you for your patience; please do your best to work around these hurdles.

Long-term suggestions
We're under a tight deadline, but if you think of an easy way to make the site better while you're writing the content, do let Spencer know and we'll do our best to address it in the fullness of time.

Link hygiene
Getting links to be consistent with each other is a never-ending struggle, as mentioned above. The following guidelines should help a lot:

• DO links of the form /content/printing-scanning-and-computing (relative links.\)
• DON'T use links of the form /content/printing-scanning-and-computing (absolute links\). These will break when we move the content to www, since they refer explicitly to ww2.
• DON'T use links with the word 'node' in them -- such as  /node/12345 . They work fine, but they're a pain in the long run.
• DON'T use links containing consecutive dots. (If you're unaware of their existence, thank your lucky stars.\)
• DO create anchor links to label important parts of your page and allow folks to link specifically to that part of it. Click the rightmost button in the wysiwyg menu above to show the 'Advanced' buttons, then click the anchor button to create an anchor. We're happy to explain this if you get stuck.
• DO use target='_blank' in links to outside resources (e.g. summon or the catalog or libguides\). (e.g. <a href='http://innoserv.library.drexel.edu/' target='_blank'>Visit the catalog! </a> \)

Images

We haven't tested them much, but they do seem to work:

[[{'fid':'105','view_mode':'teaser','fields':{'format':'teaser','field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]':'Giraffe-turtle.','field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]':'Giraffe-turtle'},'type':'media','attributes':{'height':'159','width':'240','alt':'Giraffe-turtle.','title':'Giraffe-turtle','class':'panopoly-image-quarter media-element file-teaser'}}]]Use some, but not too many. Use titles and alt tags. (The site prompts you for these.\)

Editorial style
Drexel's official editorial guidelines, based on the AP guidelines, can be consulted at http://www.drexel.edu/identity/style/guide .

 
Files

You should be able to add and remove files (images, PDF's, presentations, Word documents\) on the file upload page. This is not a feature we've tested extensively, but it does appear to work. If you get stuck, we're happy to upload a file manually so you can link to it. We'll be exploring more elegant solutions in the longer term.

Anchor tag demo

To demonstrate the use of anchor tags, we feature a charming but lengthy poem by Robert Burns that takes up a lot of vertical space. ( Not into Robert Burns? Skip the poem and go directly to the anchor tag: /content/notes-content-editors#test_link .\)

*****

Ca' the Yowes

Robert Burns

Chorus:

Ca' the yowes to the knowes,

Ca' them where the heather grows

Ca' them where the burnie rows,

     My bonnie dearie.

Hark! the mavis' evening sang

Sounding Cluden's woods amang,

Then a-fauldin let us gang,

     My bonnie dearie.

We'll gae down by Cluden side,

Thro' the hazels spreading wide,

O'er the waves that sweetly glide

     To the moon sae clearly.

Yonder Cluden's silent towers,

Where at moonshine midnight hours,

O'er the dewy-bending flowers,

     Fairies dance sae cheery.

Ghaist nor bogle shalt thou fear;

Thou 'rt to love and Heaven sae dear,

Nocht of ill may come thee near,

     My bonnie dearie.

Fair and lovely as thou art,

Thou hast stown my very heart;

I can die--but canna part,

     My bonnie dearie.

*****

Test link

I'm putting this text all the way at the bottom of the page. You should be able to access it at:

/content/notes-content-editors#test_link