Difference between revisions of "Code4Lib Journal WordPress Input Guidelines"

Revision as of 11:46, 4 June 2010

Please follow the guidelines below when creating or editing Code4Lib Journal articles in WordPress. Enter all articles as "Posts".

The WP Admin Interface

To get to WordPress interface for entering an article, choose 'Site Admin' from the footer of any Journal page, login if necessary, and then choose Write//Write Post from the WP admin menus. (Alternatively, go to http://journal.code4lib.org/wp/wp-admin/). If you don't have a WordPress editor login and need one, talk to our web admin (Jon Brinley).

Proofs for Authors

A read-only login that is shared with authors can be found in this message on the c4lj-articles listserv.

Title

Title, including the subtitle, goes in the "Title" field.

Article Content

The body of the article goes in the "Post" field. The top-level header (<h1>) is used for the title of the post, so start with second-level headers (<h2>) for sections of the article. Any header from second- to sixth-level may be used as appropriate. Use HTML markup appropriately and semantically, e.g., <em> for emphasized text, <strong> for strongly emphasized text, <blockquote> when quoting blocks of text. Avoid such monstrosities as <font> and <blink>.

Pasting from Word

If you just paste content from Word into WP, it ends up with REALLY BAD html. Fortunately, WP has a built-in feature to help with this. Open the 'advanced toolbar' in editing GUI (right-most link), then click on the paste-from-word icon. This transforms Word's html into really nice pretty html.

Images and Attached Content

In-line images should be no wider than 500px. The caption for an image should be entered in a p with class="caption": <p class="caption">Figure 1. How to Caption an Image.</p> In general, we bold the figure / table label using the strong tag: <p class="caption"><strong>Figure 1.</strong> How to Caption an Image.</p>

Two options for images and other attached content/media:

1. use WordPress uploaded content managing feature, or
2. upload the content to our host manually.

jrochkind found the WordPress content managing feature to be more of a pain than it was worth, so is uploading content manually. To do that, sftp to c4ljeditor@login.ibiblio.org. Ask jrochkind for the password for the c4ljeditor account (or see this post on c4lj-articles).

Change directory to: /public/vhost/c/c4lj/html/media

in there you'll find an "issue1" subdir (or issueX subdir--if you don't, create one or ask for help creating one!). Inside THERE, create a subdir with the last name of the first author, and put all your image and other attached content in there. It will now have this sort of url:

Add to your img src or a href's as desired. You can use this not just for images, but for extended code attachments, etc.

Code

Put all code in <pre> tags.

Code Highlighting

If the code is in a supported language, we can do syntax highlighting.

ibiblio has a PHPS extensionm, so if you an "s" on the end of .php files, e.g.,

 <filename>.phps

it does syntax highlighting for you.

We're still deciding if we like the syntax highlighting, don't feel compelled to make it work if it's not working for you (but please let other editors know what your experience is). To make this work, you still wrap your code in <pre> tags. Inside of the <pre> tags, but around your code, include

[sourcecode language='langcode']...[/sourcecode]

Replace langcode with the appropriate code from the following list (if more than one option for a language, any one will work).

Example:

<pre>[sourcecode language='css']body {
   font-size: 0.625em;
   background-color: #0000ff;
   color: #ffff00;
}[/sourcecode]</pre>

Abstract

While you are editing the article, there is a box labeled "Optional Excerpt" a little ways below the "Post" field. Put the abstract here. Use HTML markup as appropriate. What you put in this field is what will be distributed in our syndication feed and what will appear before the article as the abstract.

Assigned editors are ultimately responsible for a good abstract. Authors aren't always the best at writing good abstracts for their articles, you should probably revise or even write a new one from scratch as necessary, even when the author has provided one. Some of the abstracts for my assigned articles haven't even mentioned what I consider the most significant features of the article.

Since indexes (like EBSCO) may end up indexing abstracts and not full text (and even full text indexes may weigh abstracts more highly), the abstract should probably include any important terms that should 'hit' on the article, such as key technologies or concepts.

I've found that extracting sentences or clauses from the article itself is a good way to build an abstract that will represent the article as the authors intended. The conclusion section is often a good place to look for such key sentences/clauses.

Final abstracts should be passed by the authors for approval.

Bibliographies/Endnotes

We would like to provide COinS information with every appropriate citation that does not have a publically accessible url.

• Recommended COinS generator: http://generator.ocoins.info/
• Another option is to use the WP COinS plugin. Open the Code tab, put the cursor before the citation, and click COinS. Enter the appropriate information. This works so-so for journals, and not at all for books.
• COinS should really always have an ISSN or ISBN.
• Inside the span tag, put the string "(COinS)" with a link to our coins explanation page. Ie:

<a href="http://journal.code4lib.org/coins">(COinS)</a>

This is so the user without a browser extension will see that something is there she might be interested in, and get an explanation of COinS and how to make use of it.

Endnotes style and HTML coding

• Endnote number in text: The number is the link which appears in square brackets. Square brackets themselves are not part of the link. HTML coding for the text: [<a id="ref1" href="#note1">1</a>]

• The link should work both ways. So, the endnote will link back to the text. HTML coding for the endnote: [<a id="note1" href="#ref1">1</a>]

Author Information

Start off each article with a paragraph stating the name(s) of the author(s). Something simple like "By Jonathan Rochkind". If desired, the author's name can be a link to something appropriate.

End each article with a second-level header that says "About the Author(s)", with class="abouttheauthor" set. Then give a short paragraph about each author. We do want to have some kind of contact information published (personal web page, email address (obscured if desired), etc.) for each author.

There is a box beneath the article-editing box with the label "Author(s)". Anything you put in this field will be treated as the author of the article. This will show up in the ToC and in the syndication feeds. If you don't populate this field, WordPress will use the username of the editor, instead.

Categories/Tags

Posts will have "Uncagetorized" checked by default. Uncheck that box, and check the box next to the current issue, which will be a subcategory of "Issues." Do not check the "Issues" category. We generally do not add tags, except for Conference reviews

WordPress Buttons

Save

Saves the article, sets the post status to whatever option is selected in the Publish Status form.

Publish

Saves the article, sets the post status to Pending Review and assigns a timestamp to the article.

If an issue is not yet published, setting the post status to "Published" or clicking the "Publish" button will set the article to "Pending Review" status. If the issue is already published, this would actually publish the article.

WordPress Post Status

An article has four possible statuses. However, only the first three statuses are available to editors.

Draft

Use for not yet complete articles. Only editors can see these.

Pending Review

Use for sharing the article with authors. Editors and anyone logged in with user ID 17 (i.e., the author account) can see these. See this post on c4lj-articles for the login information for the author account (username: author).

Private

We don't use this option anymore.

Published

A published post is visible to everyone. It is part of the RSS feed. If you're editing an already published post, don't select anything in the post status form, just hit Save.

Publishing an Issue

1. Let everyone on the c4lj-articles list know you are getting ready to publish (so they can save and close any open articles).
2. Log in to WordPress
3. Make sure that all articles for the issue have the correct issue category selected and have been set to 'Pending Review'. Make sure that the "Uncategorized" and "Issues" categories are unchecked (only the specific issue should be selected).
4. Sanity check: count the number of posts which should appear in the publish list
5. Click on Posts -> Issues (on the left side)
6. Click on "Publish" for the issue you'd like to publish.
   1. You'll get a list of every "Pending Review" article in that issue. Make sure the number of articles in the list matches your previous count. Don't see all the articles you think you should see? They could be still in Draft status, or not in the correct Issue category, or still have "Uncategorized" selected, or someone may still have it in edit mode. Go back to the posts list and make any necessary changes, and start from #5 again.
7. Drag and drop the article titles until they're in the order you want. The order you see there is the order you'll see on the home page (and probably the opposite of the order you'll see in your feed reader).
   1. Note: It's the coordinating editor's responsibility to decide what order he or she would like the articles to show up in, and order them appropriately when publishing the issue. In general, we try to put the articles with the widest appeal first, and special types (columns, special reports, book reviews, etc.) at the end.
8. Click "Publish Issue" (optionally setting the publication time, first). Setting the time should only have an impact on readers who are not logged into the c4lj site. Editors will be able to see the published articles.
9. Go to the Journal front page; check the number of articles is correct (again) and that they are in the right order. If there is a problem, go back to the admin interface, click on Posts -> Issues and click Unpublish for the issue. Make whatever corrections are needed and proceed from #5 again.
10. Once the issue is finally published, go to Code4Lib_Journal_Entries_in_Directory_of_Open_Access_Journals and follow the directions to upload the issue metadata to DOAJ.
11. Send out announcements (see Code4Lib_Journal_Publicity_Venues)

Corrections

See editors' list for how to make corrections. Generally, use an Errata or Correction section at the end with information about the change that was made and have the actual text link down to that section. See also Code4Lib_Corrections