The Media Library

Contents

1. Introduction
2. The WordPress Screen
3. The Dashboard
4. Categories
5. The Media Library
6. Pages and Parents
7. Editing Text
8. Scheduling and Managing Rides
9. Posting and Managing News Items
10. Creating and Managing Pages

The Media Library

All the images and documents used on our website can be viewed here and can be incorporated into posts and pages you edit. You have pretty unrestricted access to this library, so take care what you do! For example you can delete an image you have uploaded but remember it will disappear from all pages where it has been used – not just “your” pages.

Media Attributes

Media have attributes in addition to their content. These provide useful information and should be provided wherever possible. [Most of our media has been imported from the old website and does not have attributes set appropriately. You can help rectify these omissions!]

Important attributes (the rest are best left well alone!)

• Category
  These help with organising and searching for media. Sometimes it makes sense to set more than one category.
• Title
  Important for documents. When a document is inserted into a post or page it appears as a link. If the title attribute is present this will become the link text, otherwise the document’s file name will be used. So set the document title to something meaningful.
• Privacy
  Media set to private can only be viewed by people logged in to the site – effectively this means club members only. The great majority of media can be left as public. Some documents – for example committee minutes – must be set as private. In such cases it is important to get it right!
• Alt. Text
  Important for images. “Best practice” says that this should always be provided. It is used by visually impaired users who are using a screen reader to read out text. It should be set to something like “Image of Wheelers eating cake”
• Caption
  Used to provide a caption below an image.

Using the library

Two views of the library are available: list view, in which media items are set out in a scrollable list and grid view, which displays a grid of icons.

The library opens:

1. When you click Media from the dashboard. Both list and grid views are available. You can switch between them by clicking the buttons to the left of the All media items button.
2. When you click Add Media when editing a page or post. Only the grid view is available.

Editing attributes:

In list view
Point at an item in the list and click Edit. When you have finished your updates click Update.

In grid view
Click on a media icon. When you have finished your updates click either the X in the top right corner or Insert into post as appropriate.

Videos

Although it is possible to add videos to the media library this is not advisable. Videos take up a lot of space and are best served by embedding a YouTube video. Doing this is beyond the scope of this document.