Special Use or Hidden
The news blog serves as part of a multi-system CMS, some categories exist just for feeding college pages, like the home page. The categories will usually start with the words zz-special-use so they will fall to the bottom of the list. Keep in mind this is shared space and a shared part of a CMS, if you are unsure of a category, don’t use it!
Like taking someone’s lunch from the refrigerator, using the wrong category will upset a few people. Unlike a stolen lunch, there will be a trail directly to the culprit. Innocent mistake? No problem, we’ll uncheck the category. If we get a repeat offender we will remove permissions to edit in the blog. In six years we have yet to get a frequent flyer, let’s keep it that way.
Need a hidden category? Ask Jeff to help, he needs to do some shenanigans behind the scenes to hide it from the public.
Reusing Categories from Another Post
Don’t feel like clicking a bazillion check boxes for a similar post? Clone an existing post that has just about everything you wanted already set. It is super easy.
- View all posts.
- Hover over the post you would like to copy.
- Look for the word clone to appear along with edit, trash, etc.
- Click clone and edit the duplicate post that just appeared.
Warning: Obviously you are going to change the title and body copy and watch out for the URL too. The URL is going to be the same as the original with a -2 at the end. So if you copied the post title Kittens with Mittens and made a new post titled School Tragedy I am going to bet you don’t want to see kittens-with-mittens-2 in the URL!
It is simple to edit, right at the top of the page when editing the post, just don’t forget.
Parents Bring Their Children Along
If you pull a feed of a parent category it will bring all the child categories with it whether the parent was selected or not. So keep that in mind, skip the parent category if it isn’t relevant to the post. See making a feed for tips on using these behaviors to your advantage.