Our Hometown Blog

Our Hometown’s WordPress platform makes it easy to customize the layout and styling of your homepage with just a few clicks.  One example we’d like to highlight is the “Edit Order” tool, which allows you to easily adjust the order in which articles appear in a given article widget on the homepage.

We all know first impressions are a big deal, and your homepage represents your “first impression” to readers each and every day.  The Edit Order tool can be extremely useful in presenting your homepage in a clean and attractive way.

For example, if you publish an article that doesn’t feature a photo or graphic of any kind, you may not want the story to appear in the primary position of your “News” widget.  That space would be better utilized by an article that does include an attractive graphic or photo.  Using the Edit Order tool, you can simply move the article down the list to a more suitable position.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1:  Login to your Admin or Staff account and navigate to your homepage.  The “Edit Order” button is only visible to staff members.

Step 2:  In the right corner of each Article Widget (or category header), you will see a link to “Edit Order”

Step 3:  The “Edit Order” page lists all of the articles from the widget that you’ve chosen. Each article is displayed as a box that can be dragged up or down to adjust the order in which it appears on the homepage.

Step 4:  Remember to “Save Order” to publish your changes.

WordPress uses the article “Publish Date” to determine the order of stories within article widgets or on category pages.  When you move one article above another, the Edit Order tool adjusts the Publish Date of that article to create the order you laid out.  For example, if you move “Crime Report”, which was published on May 1st, above the “Music Festival” article, which was published on May 7th at 5pm, it will change the “Crime Report” Publish date to May 7th at 5:01pm so it is the most recently published article and therefore appears at the top of that section.

If you’d like to always display the original date that an article appeared online, open the Customize tool and select “General Options.” Scroll to “Use Edition Date” section > Select “Display Edition Date to readers“.

The edition date is not affected by the Edit Order tool.

Let us know if you have any questions!
Find this article, along with many other helpful tutorials on WordPress, on our Knowledgebase.

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