OHT Feature Guide
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Overview
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WordPress Customized for Local News Publishers
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Generate Revenue, Engage with Readers, and Increase Efficiency with Our Hometown’s Digital & PrePress Content Management System
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First class customer support for the world’s most popular Content Management System
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Features to Fit Your Needs & Budget
Easy to add/edit articles
Creative Text Layouts in the Block Editor
In this post we’ll be covering the basic blocks for handling text content as well as how to combine these blocks with others to build engaging and creative designs.
The Power of Patterns: Block Editor Basics
The WordPress block editor (often called Gutenberg) has revolutionized how we create content, moving from a single text field to a modular system of blocks. One of the most powerful, yet sometimes overlooked, features within this system is Block Patterns.
Navigating the Block Editor
This post provides a general overview of the block editor interface, including the List View, Block Transformation, Styling Options and using the Classic Editor block.
Platform Updates and New Block Editor Features
This update provides an overview of new text styling, color options, the Table block and an introduction to several types of Layout blocks.
Customize your design
Using the Customize Tool to Adjust Your Website
One of the largest benefits to building a website on Our-Hometown’s WordPress Platform is the impressive level of customization available, primarily via the Customize Tool. The Customize Tool is designed in such a way that anyone with limited technical know-how can change site colors and fonts, re-arrange a vast variety widgets & ads, and apply custom CSS to update an ever-evolving vision of your website.
Introducing AJAX Article & Slider Widgets
These new widgets are essentially updated versions of the existing Articles and Slider Widgets, but with some important new features — including the ability to include more than one category inside of a widget! The new widgets also utilize AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) to improve performance and responsiveness.
Default Sidebar vs Front Page Sidebar
This functionality just gives you the freedom to display content differently on the homepage than you do on the internal pages. There are many reasons a customer may want to do this:
- Display Latest Edition and Special Section PDFs on the homepage sidebar, but not internal pages.
- Display an Article Widget on the homepage sidebar, but not on internal pages.
- Display an important Advertisement or Button on the front page sidebar, but not on internal pages.
- Display a Podcast Player, Video, or other media on the homepage, but not on internal pages.
Scheduling changes in the Customize tool
Scheduling Changes in the Customize tool is another useful feature that ties into the Draft functionality. Much like Articles, PDFs, and other post types on our platform, you can schedule your drafted changes in the Customize tool to Publish at a certain time in the future.
As an example, let’s say you’re updating your site with a brand new spring-themed logo and color scheme. Rather than staying up late to publish the new logo and colors at midnight on March 20th (the first day of Spring), you can save these changes as a Draft and then Schedule them to publish automatically at the desired time.
The “Related Stories” Block
The Related Stories block appears at the bottom of articles on Our-Hometown’s WordPress Platform and is a useful tool for transitioning readers from one article to another. If a visitor has clicked a link to read an article on your site, there’s a good chance that they’re interested in the topic that the article is about.
Blurred Borders on Article Sliders
With the Blurred Border option enabled, the slider will display the entire photo regardless of the height/width ratio, and will use an enlarged, blurred version of the image in the borders to create a more aesthetically pleasing effect in situations where a perfect image is not available.
Manage where social share icons appear on your site
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. This video provides a brief walkthrough on how to manage where these icons appear via your admin dashboard.
Measure pageviews, visitors, and other metrics
Matomo Stat Tracking Overview
Our-Hometown offers publishers a comprehensive suite of stats tracking options through the Matomo platform.
With access to all of this data, Matomo gives you the ability to ensure that everything you publish is serving your readership’s interests and needs.
Analyzing Website Metrics
By tracking the most basic of factors relating to your website, you can use real-world data to confirm what works and what doesn’t, spot any unpredictable results (such as those caused by broken links or software updates) and demonstrate to advertisers the value of placing an ad with your digital publication.
Multimedia
Bring Your Stories to Life: Video Uploads Are Now Live on Our-Hometown
In the world of digital storytelling, words and photos lay the foundation. But to truly capture the energy of a moment—the roar of the crowd, the passion in a speech, the buzz of a community event—you need motion.
That’s why the team at Our-Hometown Web Publishing is thrilled to announce our latest, most-requested feature: Direct Video Uploads are now available on your WordPress website!
Adding Videos to WordPress
Part of enhancing your digital presence is to include multiple types of media beyond just text and photos. Incorporating videos into your website is a great first step, as online readers will enjoy the visual content while creators or advertisers can capitalize on the added exposure. When done effectively, you can make videos an integral part of your marketing strategy.
NextGEN Gallery Plugin
Our-Hometown is pleased to announce that we’ve added a new, more robust photo gallery plugin to our suite of tools available to customers: NextGEN Gallery!
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, much like our previously-supported photo gallery plugin, MaxGalleria. 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.
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