The new mongabay has many new features that are powerful but may require some adjustment. Let this post serve as an example.

In the upper right is a link titled “screen options“. Click this and enable “Authors”.

Note the visual vs text editor options for composing the body of the post.

Topics are what we once called tags. These aren’t “keywords”, they are topics that relate to the story. We want to avoid a crazy proliferation of topics so be judicious in adding new topics. First take a look at our existing list of topics. Be sure to click the “Add” button for a topic — once it is added it will appear below the add box.

Under article settings, you can check Editor’s choice, featured story, or evergreen.

• Editor’s choice designates to Google which stories may warrant special attention in Google News. We probably want to limit these to ~7 a week
• Featured stories are stories that are particularly excellent or important
• Evergreen are stories that are not time-sensitive so if they run 5 years from now they will still be relevant and won’t feel overly dated. We use this tag for historical (archive) posts on social media.

You may apply more than one of these (or none) to an article.

Pagination is an option for long stories. Logged in users will see the full text, but non-logged in users will click through pages.

Subscriber’s only almost never applies. This is for behind-the-scenes content, like the story behind the article. I’d expect to do 1-2 of these a month.

Coordinates allow geotagging of articles. Please geotag whenever possible so the story shows up on our maps. Also any geotagged stories that have “forests” as the topic will show up in Global Forest Watch automatically.

Legacy content: You won’t need to use this.

Serials: refers to a special series, like an MRN project. I hope to flesh out some examples over the weekend.

Licenses: Generally either Copyright or Creative Commons (for open use)

Authors is where you select the author of a piece. The convention going forward is to use only a person’s name — we’re not putting “Mongabay.com” in the author line any more. There is one exception for commentaries, where you’ll need to click the “commentary” box.

Format: should be standard in most cases

Locations: continents, regions, countries, districts, states, etc. Check the list/auto-fill to see whether the location is in the system. Generally we don’t go down to state level unless we do a lot of stories about a particular state.

Featured image: this is the image that appears in the banner at the top and as the thumbnail UNLESS you use an “external feature image” which will override this image.

Page category: will usually be general. Wildtech is for wildtech and Kids is for kids news stories.

Images can now be uploaded using WordPress instead of Amazon S3. The page now spans 768 pixels so in general you don’t need to upload images larger than that unless you want it to be clickable for an enlarged version (you might go up to 1200 pixels for the “featured image”). Mongabay images once found in the travel section will also now be larger. Upload size is capped at 2MB to encourage folks to bring images down to a reasonable size before posting.

Videos should be continued to be hosted on 3rd party sites like youtube and vimeo — not uploaded via WordPress. The benefits of using third party platforms far outweigh those of using our own server.

Previewing a post: First you have to save the post as draft with the button on the publish panel, and then use ‘view post’ button next to the permalink below article title, not the preview button next to the save draft button

To save an article, use the “Update” button on the right under Publish. You can also schedule posts for the future here. Testing testing 123.

Credits

Rhett Butler Editor

Topics

EnvironmentGreenCameroonCanadaCongo

See Topics