Navigation Label

This field specifies the title of the item on your custom menu. This is what your visitors will see when they visit your site/blog.

Original

A link to the original source of the menu item (e.g. a link to view the post or page).

Title Attribute

This field specifies the Alternative (‘Alt’) text for the menu item. This text will be displayed when a user’s mouse hovers over a menu item.

Link Target

Select “Same window or tab” or “New window or tab” from the pulldown.

CSS Classes

Optional CSS Classes for this menu item

Link Relationship (XFN)

Allows for the generation of XFN attributes automatically so you can show how you are related to the authors/owners of site to which you are linking. You probably won’t use this.

Description

Description for this link. The description will be displayed in the menu if the current theme supports it.

1. Click on the arrow in the top right-hand corner of the menu item to expand it.
2. Enter the values for the required fields that you want to assign to the item.
3. Click the Save Menu button to save your changes.

Social media icons can display across all of your website content allowing visitors to share stories or posts they engage with to their favorite social network or via email links. However you may not want this feature available on some content.

The following is a brief walkthrough on how to manage where these icons appear via your admin dashboard.

Firstly the social media share icons appear in two main places: Pages and Posts.

Pages

Pages are most often used for evergreen content such as contact and about us pages.

While logged into your website, simply visit the page you would like to manage the social icons and click the “Edit Page” link in the admin toolbar at the top of the browser window.

This will take you to the Edit Page dashboard where you would make other normal content changes. Look for the “AddToAny” option and here you can toggle the appearance of the ‘Show sharing buttons’ to show or hide the icons on this specific page only.

Click update and your choice will be saved.

Posts

The other place these icons appear is on individual posts or stories. The process is similar, but we’ll look at another way of finding the particular article where you might like to hide or show the social icons.

From your main dashboard on the left menu listing go to Articles > All Articles. This will display a list of all article content on your website. This list can be filtered or searched in various ways with the dropdown selections above the list or the search field.

Once you find the story you want to edit, click on its headline and you will be taken to the Edit Article dashboard (which will look very similar to the Edit Page dashboard).

Again simply find the “AddToAny” option and here you can toggle the appearance of the ‘Show sharing buttons,’ this time only affecting this single article.

The NextGEN Gallery plugin allows users to upload a collection of photos in the back end of the website and organize them into a gallery. The big advantage to NextGEN Gallery, aside from the general ease of use, is the ability to display the same gallery of photos in multiple locations and in different layouts each time.

I’ll demonstrate what I mean below. First, let’s create our first gallery using NextGEN Gallery.

1. Create the Gallery

You can actually create a NextGEN Gallery from any page or article editor, but for the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to keep it as simple as possible and start from the dashboard.

Find the NextGEN Gallery item on the dashboard menu and navigate to the Add Gallery/Images page.

You’ll be presented with a page asking you to select which gallery you want to upload photos to. Since we have not yet created a gallery, the only option for us is to “Create a new gallery.”

I’ve entered the name “New Gallery” and clicked Create and Select.

Once the “New Gallery” is selected, click the “Browse” button to upload some photos from your computer and add them to the gallery. The progress is visible as each photo is uploaded and saved to the gallery.

Once your photos have finished uploading, you can navigate to NextGEN Gallery -> Manage Galleries to edit the gallery you’ve created or any of the photos included within.

You’ll notice that we did not at any point select a “template” or adjust any settings that determine how this photo gallery will appear on a page or within an article. That is because, unlike with MaxGallery, a single photo gallery in NextGEN Gallery can be displayed in various places each with a different template.

2. Placing a Gallery

In this example, I’m going to place our first gallery inside of an Article named “Pet Photos of the Week.” We’ll assume this publication is highlighting some photos of their readers pets in the new article.

If using the classic editor, you’ll see the option to Add Gallery just above the toolbar. If using the block editor, you’ll want to add a new Block and search for the NextGEN Gallery block.

Once you’ve added the block and clicked Add Gallery, you’ll see a page asking you to select which Gallery (or galleries) you want to add to the page. Below that, there are a number of gallery templates available to choose from that determine how your gallery will display.

These templates include basic options for thumbnails, slideshows & image browsers, as well as the paid Pro versions of these templates. All are available to OHT customers.

Once you’ve selected a template, you can click the Customize Display Settings tab to further adjust the gallery settings.

I went with the simple Pro Thumbnail Grid to create the gallery below.

That is all there is to it! If I wanted to display the same set of photos in a different format somewhere else on the website, I would follow the same process: click Add Gallery from the NextGEN block/toolbar and select your existing Gallery of Photos, then choose the format you want to display it!

3. Setting a Featured Image

One final thing that NextGEN Gallery makes easier than ever is setting a featured image for the article or page to which your gallery is being embedded. In the past, if you embedded a gallery inside of an article, you would need to manually set the Featured Image for that article by separately uploading one of the photos from the gallery as the featured image.

NextGEN Gallery makes this quick and easy by providing a button right below the existing “Set Featured Image” option that lets you select one of the photos inside the gallery as the article’s featured image, saving you the time of hunting it down and uploading a second copy of the image.

The Google Docs Add-On allows you to connect your Google Docs account with your Our-Hometown website so that you can easily publish content directly from your Google Docs workspace to the web without having to switch between multiple platforms or copy and paste content.

For each Google Doc activate the Our-Hometown add-on and enter your website’s credentials. This will create a direct link between your document and your site with only a single login.

A new panel is now available replicating the relevant options from the WordPress article creation interface. Bylines, subheadings, scheduling, categories etc. can all be set here just as on your website, although images will need to be uploaded through the new panel.

Once you publish from the Google Doc, the article will then appear on your website as if created directly there, and most importantly, the link between the two is continuously active. This allows you to revise and update the article content from the document without ever having to login to your website.

Once your articles are published to the web, you can take advantage of our Reverse Publishing Suite to easily export all of those articles for placement in your InDesign layout for the print edition.

In this walkthrough we will demonstrate how to include display ads in your Reverse Publishing export for layout and pagination in Adobe InDesign.

From your website’s dashboard look for Reverse Publishing in the listing on the left. As you hover your mouse a submenu will appear then click on Reverse Publishing.

Here is where your website’s article content can be exported for a particular edition and filtered by category. In addition there is a checkbox labelled Include Ads. This will be the focus of our demonstration. Note that ads are not categorized and also cannot be exported without including article content.

Once you’ve selected the edition and filtered by category if needed, make sure the Include Ads checkbox is ticked and click the export button.

This export may take some time depending on the amount and number of articles and ads to be downloaded.

The export consists of a zip file containing all of the images and ads plus an XML file for import into InDesign.

Once the zip file is saved to you computer, extract it to a folder.

Open you InDesign template or create a new document. In this instance I’ve created a Marketplace Grid to layout the ads.

Under the File menu choose Import XML. In the window select the XML file in the folder extracted from the downloaded zip file. The default import options are fine for our demonstration.

Once the XML is imported the Structure pane will appear to the left of your document containing the Root tag. Click the small arrow to the left of the tag to reveal the contents of the XML import. You should see several tags, all beginning with “ad” followed by an ID number and the advertiser’s name.

Click the small arrow to the left of an ad tag to reveal the image associated with that ad. You can also Alt- or Option-click on one of the small arrows to open them all at once.

You can then simply drag the icon to the left of each image tag into a frame in your template for final layout.

Of course this last process will defer from publication to publication depending on the design of your template.