This plugin allows you to easily publish news on your website by simply sending an e-mail to a specified addressed containing the Title in the Subject and the Article content itself within the body of the e-mail. You can even include photos and images.

You can also assign your article to different categories by including the desired category within brackets in the e-mail subject, as follows: “[Opinion] My Editorial…”

The Settings for this plugin are advanced and are not accessible by Our-Hometown Customers. Instead, we ask that you reach out to our support team at ops@our-hometown.com for help adjusting your Email to Post settings.

The post Email to Post first appeared on Our-Hometown.

This guide provides instructions for adding video content to your articles and pages. There are two primary methods: uploading video files directly to your website’s Media Library or embedding content hosted on third-party platforms like YouTube or Vimeo.

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Method 1: Direct Video Uploads

You can now upload video files directly to your WordPress Media Library. This is ideal for short clips, breaking news, or local highlights that you wish to host natively on your site.

Technical Requirements and Constraints

To ensure optimal performance and compatibility, please adhere to the following specifications:

• Maximum File Size: 256MB.
• Supported Formats: .mp4, .mov, and .webm.
• Filename Sanitization: Before uploading, you must sanitize your file names to prevent playback errors.
  • No special characters: Do not use symbols like /, ?, #, !, or @.
  • No spaces: Replace all spaces with dashes (-) or underscores (_).
  • Example: Rename "high school game.mp4" to "high-school-game.mp4".

How to Insert a Direct Upload

1. Open the article or page editor.
2. Add a new block and search for the Video block.
3. Select Upload to bring a new file from your device, or Media Library to select a previously uploaded clip.
4. Once selected, the video will be embedded directly into your content.

Adding the video block

Video Content in the Media Library

Mobile Workflow

Our platform is fully mobile-ready. You can capture video on a smartphone and upload it directly to an article via your mobile browser. Ensure the file meets the size and naming requirements before uploading from your device's gallery.

Mobile Video Upload (Safari on iOS)

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Method 2: Third-Party Video Embedding

If your video is hosted on an external platform, you can embed it using a dedicated block or a direct link. This is recommended for long-form content to preserve site storage and performance.

Option A: The YouTube Block (Recommended)

For YouTube content, use the dedicated block to ensure the player is responsive and correctly formatted.

1. In the Block Editor, click the (+) icon and search for the YouTube block.
2. Paste the URL of the YouTube video into the input field.
3. Click Embed.

Adding the YouTube Block

Option B: Automatic Embedding (URL Pasting)

WordPress has built-in support for major video platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).

1. Copy the URL of the video from your browser’s address bar.
2. Paste the URL directly into the editor on its own line.
3. The editor will automatically convert the link into a live video player.

Option C: Custom HTML or Classic Editor

If you are using the Classic Editor or a hosting provider that does not support automatic embedding, you must use an embed code.

1. Copy the Iframe or HTML embed code from the host site (usually found under a "Share" button).
2. In the Block Editor: Add a Custom HTML block and paste the code.
3. In the Classic Editor: Switch from the "Visual" tab to the "Text" tab and paste the code exactly where you want the video to appear.

Custom HTML Block for Video embed

Classic Editor Video Embed

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Best Practices

• Storage Management: Use direct uploads for short, high-impact clips (e.g., sports highlights, 30-second interviews). For full-length meetings or documentaries, we recommend hosting on YouTube and embedding the link.
• Accessibility: To assist users with visual or hearing impairments, consider adding a brief text summary or transcript immediately below the video block.
• Advertising: Direct video uploads can also be used within articles to showcase local video advertisements, such as property walkthroughs for realtors or vehicle showcases for local dealerships.

The post Adding Videos to Articles or Pages first appeared on Our-Hometown.

For Full Service customers using our extraction service, this is automatically done by our software during extraction and processing.

For Self-Service customers and those not using our extraction service, this must be manually done after you add your PDF edition and stories. The process is outlined below.

Tagging PDF Edition with Articles

Before tagging your PDF Editions with Articles, you must first make sure that your PDF has been tagged with the proper Edition. Likewise, any Articles that you are going to link must be tagged with the same Edition as the PDF.

To begin:

1. Open your edition in the PDF Pageveiwer & Click “Edit Mode” to enable edit mode. (Must be logged in as admin/staff to see the “Edit Mode” toggle)
2. Click once at the corner of a story to start tagging. A red selection box will show up and follow your cursor. Click at the opposite corner of the story so that is it selected. (Do not click & drag — just click once to begin selection, and click a second time to end selection.)
3. In the right hand side of the screen, a text box will appear.
4.  Begin typing the article title in the text box. If you don’t get a result, try using just some of the key words from the titles — For an article titled, “Fire on Elm Street” you might just search “Fire” and see if there are any results that way. This is because the online title can differ slightly from the print edition in some cases.
5. Click “Assign Article” when you have found the correct match.

Repeat for each story that appears in the edition.

NOTE: Only stories that are tagged with the edition date assigned to the PDF will show up to be selected. If you try a few key words and still are unable to find the story, check to make sure the article was tagged with the correct edition date.

The post Tagging Articles in the PDF Edition first appeared on Our-Hometown.

This is also important for sharing your stories on social media to ensure that your article preview appears crisp and professional.

Creating A Default Image

You can be as creative as you want to be with your default image. A good place to start is a simple document with a light gray or white background featuring your logo in the middle. Facebook recommends using a 1200 x 630 pixel document.

Be sure to leave ample white space around your logo like in the scaled-down example below:

Setting your Default Image for Articles

Setting the default image for articles is very easy.

1. Navigate to your homepage while logged in with your admin account.
2. Click the “Customize” button on the admin menu across the top of the page.
3. When the Customizer loads, click the “General Options” tab
4. Under Upload a Default Image, click “Select Image” and select a graphic from your media library, or upload a new one from your computer.

Once you’ve completed this, any article without an image will automatically use this default image as a preview image anywhere that one is required. This includes article sliders and widgets on your homepage, category pages, and anywhere else that the featured image would normally be shown.

Setting your Default Image for Social Media Sharing

Despite setting the default articles image above, there are instances where articles being shared to social media do not include the newly set default image.

To prevent this, we’ll want to set up a default image to be used specifically for social media sharing. We can do this using the All in One SEO Plugin included with your website.

1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard with your admin account.
2. Navigate to the All in One SEO plugin tab
3. Select Social Meta from the sub-menu

There are two sections here you’ll want to pay attention to: Home Page Settings and Image Settings.

Home Page Settings helps determine how the preview will appear on social media when someone is sharing your homepage rather than a specific article. This could be the same image as your default article image, or you could create a different one specifically for your homepage. Whichever route you take, click Upload Image next to the Home Image field and select your default image.

The Image Settings section relates more to sharing specific articles.

1. Make sure the OG:Image Source is set to “Featured Image” — this tells Facebook to look for the featured image attached this article for sharing.
2. Make sure the checkbox below is marked for Use Default Image if No Image Found. This tells Facebook to use the default image (set below) when it cannot find a proper “Featured Image”
3. Next to Default OG:Image, click Upload Image and once again select the Default Article Image you have created.

Once you save these settings, you should be all set to share your articles on social media.

A great resource to use anytime you’re making adjustments to the default social media image is Facebook’s Sharing Debugger Tool. Using this tool, you can enter the URL for any article on your website to generate a preview. If the article has ever been shared on Facebook before, you can see what the current preview looks like. Once you’ve made changes to your default image and uploaded the new one to your website, click “Scrape Again” to get Facebook to recognize the new image. Read more about this tool here!

The post Default Images for Homepage & Sharing first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Check out the “Most Read Stories” example from The Herald of Randolph, VT below.

You can easily create your own “Most Read Stories”
or “Trending Stories” section with the Top Stories Widget.

Open the Customize Tool and choose Widgets, then select the Widget Area that you’d like to place the new widget. From the list of available widgets, select the Top Stories widget.

You’ll be presented with options to select the number of articles to display and set the Range of Trending Time.

You can choose to display the most popular articles from “Last 2 days” or “In the past week” all the way up to “Past 6 months”.  The widget ranks articles by the amount of views received during the selected period and lists them in the widget.

You are also able to customize the look and feel of the Top Stories widget using custom CSS. However, if you are not experienced with HTML/CSS, it is recommended that you contact our staff to help you with any customization.

The post Articles Widget – Top Stories first appeared on Our-Hometown.

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 can be 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:

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

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

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.

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.  For example, when you move one article above another, the Edit Order tool adjusts the Publish Date by a few seconds to create the order you laid out.

There is a dotted line that indicates where the first date change occurs. If you take a newer article, and drag it after an article that was posted at an earlier date, the publish date of your article may change.  Usually you are only re-ordering articles from the same day so this shouldn’t affect most re-ordering.

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.

The post Edit Order of Articles on Homepage first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Posts are entries that display in reverse order on your home page. Posts usually have comments fields beneath them and are included in your site’s RSS feed.

To write a post:

1. Log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
2. Click the ‘Articles’ tab.
3. Click the ‘Add New’ sub-tab.
4. Start filling in the blanks: enter your article title in the upper field, & enter your article body content in the main post editing box below it.
5. As needed, select a category, add tags, and make other selections from the sections below the post. (Each of these sections is explained below.)
6. When you are ready, click Publish or Set a Future Date for Publish. (save as a draft if you’re still working on it)

Descriptions of Article Fields

Title/Headline Box

The title of your post. You can use any phrases, words or characters. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hyphens/dashes and other typical symbols in the article like “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”. WordPress will then clean it up to generate a user-friendly and URL-valid name of the post (also called the “post slug”) to compose the permalink for the post.

Body Copy Box

The blank box where you enter your writing, links, links to images, and any information you want to display on your site. You can use either the Visual or the Text view to compose your posts. For more on the Text view, see the section below, Visual Versus Text View.

Byline

If you’re using our PDF extraction option, your author names & other important will be here. Displayed beneath the article headline.

Subheading

This content shows under the article headline & byline.

Preview button

Allows you to view the post before officially publishing it.

Publish box 

Contains buttons that control the state of your post. The main states are Published, Pending Review and Draft. A Published status means the post has been published live on your blog for all to see. Pending Review means the draft is waiting for review by an editor prior to publication. Draft means the post has not been published and remains a draft for you. If you select a specific publish status and click the update post or “Publish” button, that status is applied to the post. For example, to save a post in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all posts organized by status by going to Administration Panels > Articles > Edit). To schedule a post for publication on a future time or date, click “Edit” in the Publish area next to the words “Publish immediately”. You can also change the publish date to a date in the past to back-date posts. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also hit the “Publish” button when you have completed the post to publish at the desired time and date.

Publish box 

Visibility – This determines how your post appears to the world. Public posts will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected posts are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the post content. Private posts are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site.

Edition

Entered in the YYYY-MM-DD format for your normal edition or a name for special sections.  Will automatically create a page that you can set in the customizer panel as your most recent edition, if you want to limit the front page to only a specific edition’s articles. Learn more about setting the front page.

Save 

Allows you to save your post as a draft / pending review rather than immediately publishing it. To return to your drafts later, visit Posts – Edit in the menu bar, then select your post from the list.

Publish 

Publishes your post on the site. You can edit the time when the post is published by clicking the Edit link above the “Publish” button and specifying the time you want the post to be published. By default, at the time the post is first auto-saved, that will be the date and time of the post within the database

Categories 

The general topic the post can be classified in.  Readers can browse specific categories to see all posts in the category. To add a new category, click the “+Add New Category” link in this section. You can manage your categories by going to Administration Panels > Articles > Categories

Send Trackbacks 

A way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress sites, they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks. No other action is necessary. For those blogs that don’t recognize pingbacks, you can send a trackback to the blog by entering the website address(es) in this box, separating each one with a space. See Trackbacks and Pingbacks for more information

Discussion 

Options to enable interactivity and notification of your posts. This section hosts two check boxes: Allow Comments on this post and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this post. If Allowing Comments is unchecked, no one can post comments to this particular post. If Allowing Pings is unchecked, no one can post pingbacks or trackbacks to this particular post.

Password Protect This Post 

To password protect a post, click Edit next to Visibility in the Publish area to the top right, then click Password Protected, click Ok, and enter a password. Then click OK. Note – Editor and Admin users can see password protected or private posts in the edit view without knowing the password.

Post Author 

A list of all users who have publishing ability, you can select from to attribute as the post author. This section only shows if you have multiple users with authoring rights on your site. To view your list of users, see Users tab on the far right.  This is the name that will show on the front page article widgest if you choose to show the author name.

The post Writing a New Article first appeared on Our-Hometown.

To enable trackbacks and pingbacks, in the Discussion Settings of your Administration Panels, select these items under ‘Default article settings’:

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article.

Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)

Selecting one option and not the other would not be very neighborly 😉

Once enabled, trackbacks and pingbacks from other sites will appear in your Administration Panels just like other comments, but on your post pages, they will appear according to your theme’s design.

Once enabled, pingbacks are sent automatically when you publish your article, you don’t have to do anything. To send trackbacks, you will need to find the trackback URL somewhere on the post page you are linking to. If you can’t find one, try to determine if the site supports pingbacks. If it does, you should not send trackbacks as well. Copy/paste the trackback URL into the Send Trackbacksfield on your Add New Article screen. If you don’t see this field, go to the screen options and select the Send Trackbacks option. Note that selecting this does not send trackbacks, it only displays the field called Send Trackbacks. When you publish your post, trackbacks will be sent to the URLs you pasted into the field. This field will also show the status of trackbacks and pingbacks on your Edit Post screen.

If there is someone that wants to send a trackback to your WordPress blog because their blogging software does not support pingbacks, your trackback URL they should insert into their post edit panel is your blog post’s permalink with “trackback/” appended to the end. If their software supports pingbacks, they do not need to do anything, the process is automatic.

The post Using Pingbacks & Trackbacks first appeared on Our-Hometown.

When creating or editing a WordPress page or blog post, you can easily add images at any time using the WordPress Media Uploader tool. Here’s how to add an image, step-by-step, using the media uploader:

Step 1 – Placing your cursor

In order to add an image to your page or post, you must first insert your cursor in the place in the text where you want the image to appear. By placing your cursor within your text, you can add images inline with your content. You can also place your cursor on a blank line if you want the image to appear by itself instead.

Tip: It’s a good idea to place your cursor on the left margin of your text, even if you want the image to appear on the right. That’s because there is a special setting called Alignment that allows you to control whether the image appears on the right or the left side of the text. It even controls how text flows around the image automatically.

Step 2 – Click the Add Media button

Once you’ve placed your cursor on the line where you want your image to appear, click on the Add Media button to launch the media uploader interface, and then select the Insert Media option from the list of actions in the left side of the media uploader window.

Step 3 – Add or Select Your Image

You can add or select the image you want to add to your page or post by choosing from either of the following options in the center of the media uploader window:

• Upload Files: Upload the image you want to use from your computer by dragging it into the upload area.
• Media Library: Select from any previously uploaded images in the media library by clicking on the one you wish to add to your page or post.

Once you have selected or uploaded the image you want to add, You will see a checkbox next to the thumbnail confirming your selection, and see information about it displayed in the Attachment Details pane on the right hand side of the media uploader interface.

Step 4 – Attachment Details

The Attachment Details pane displays a small un-cropped thumbnail of the image, as well as important information such as the filename, date uploaded, and image dimensions in pixels.

There are also action links that allow you to Edit Image, which takes you to the Edit Image page, or to Delete Permanently to remove the image from your site.

In addition, you can edit the following media information:

• Title: The title of this media.
• Caption: The caption for this image. The text you enter here will be displayed below the image.
• Alternate Text: Enter the Alt text for the image, e.g. “The Mona Lisa” to describe the media.
• Description: A description for this particular media.

Step 5 – Attachment Display Settings

The Attachment Display Settings pane controls how the image is displayed when viewed on the site.

You have options to set how you would like the image aligned on the page (in relation to the text and margins) and what the link behavior of the image will be, In addition you can set what size image you would like to display on your page.

Image Alignment

The Alignment setting allows you to determine where you would like the image to appear in your content area and how it interacts with any text on the page. You have the following image alignment options to choose from:

• Left: Aligns the image on the left hand margin, and any text that is on the page wraps (or flows) around the image to the available space on the right.
• Right: Aligns the image on the right hand margin, and any text that is on the page wraps (or flows) around the image to the available space on the left.
• Center: Aligns the image to the center of the page, with no text displayed around it.
• None: Inserts the image in to the page with no alignment

Image Link

The Link To settings determine the URL/web address to which the image will be linked when clicked on by a visitor to your site. You can specify the following image link settings:

• Attachment Page: Links your inserted image to its WordPress media attachment page.
• Media File: Links your inserted image directly to the original, full-size version of the file.
• Custom URL: Allows you to set a custom link URL for your inserted image to link to when clicked.
• None: This setting will remove the link completely, rendering the image “un-clickable”.

Image Size

The Size settings determine the size of the image you are adding to your site. By default WordPress creates a range of four image size for you to choose from:

• Thumbnail: Displays a small thumbnail-sized version of your image on the page/post. Note, by default the Thumbnail size is a square, so some cropping of your original image may occur.
• Medium: Displays a medium-sized version of your image on the page/post. This is a good size to use with Left/Right alignments, as it leaves sufficient space for legible text to either side.
• Large: Displays a large-sized version of your image on the page/post. Note: WordPress will determine the width of the content column of your theme, and display the largest possible image for that space.
• Full Size: Displays a full-sized version of your image on the page/post. Note: WordPress will determine the width of the content column of your theme, and display the largest possible image for that space. If your original image is larger than this column width, the full size of the image may not be displayed.

Step 5 – Inserting the image

Once you have determined your image settings, click on the blue Insert into post or Insert into the page button, to add the image to your page or post. After the image uploader window closes, you will see the image in the text editor window, including a preview of the alignment of the image, if you have specified an image alignment.

At any time, you can edit the image settings by clicking on the Edit Image button in the upper left hand corner. You can remove the image from your page/post by clicking on the Remove Image button.

The post Inserting Images into Articles & Pages [Classic Editor] first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Click here to learn more about using the articles widget.

The Headlines Style Layout is good for a simple list of articles with only one featured image required.  It's 1 columns of individual articles, with a large thumbnail above the 1st article, and no thumbnails or story excerpt for additional stories below.

It looks best in narrow to mid-sized columns.

The post Articles Widget – Headlines Style first appeared on Our-Hometown.