Author Guidelines
These guidelines are for content providers, authors and administrators of the web site. They contain notes on acceptable sizes for uploaded files, and writing accessible content.
Important: only posts with a category of ‘Blog’ will appear on the home page. Posts can be in multiple categories.
File Upload
Image file can be uploaded to the gallery using the ‘Upload 2′ plugin. Please select the appropriate destination directory, typically by year:
www.midlandmusicmakers.org/gallery/
www.midlandmusicmakers.org/gallery/2001/
…
1. Images: Maximum image file size is 120 KB. Maximum image dimensions are 600 x 600 pixels (so that people with 800 x 600 pixel screen resolutions do not need to scroll horizontally). Acceptable image formats are JPEG, GIF and PNG.
2. Thumbnail images: reduced sized images are automatically generated by the gallery system used on the Site. Simply upload the full-sized image, and a 160 x 160 image will be generated.
3. Documents and PDFs: the maximum acceptable PDF file size is 300 KB, though sizes less than 200 KB are preferable. Consider converting large PDFs to HTML, or break PDFs with many pages into double-page documents.
Accessible Content
When writing posts and pages, please consider your audience, who may not be music or theatre literate, or be familiar with Birmingham and the local area.
1. Do not use obscure acronyms and abbreviations. Common abbreviations such as BBC, UK and PDF will be handled automatically by the system. That is, they will be output as an HTML ‘acronym element’: <acronym title="British Broadcasting Corporation">BBC</acronym>
2. Some domain-specific acronyms will also be expanded and are acceptable: MMM (Midland Music Makers), MD (Music Director), CBSO (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra).
But many are not acceptable: TV (television), NODA (National Operatic and Dramatic Association).
3. Where an acronym or abbreviation will be used many times in a post or page, the full title should be used in place of the first usage.
Links and embedded images
1. All links to pages and embedded images should start with a leading slash ‘/’, or ‘http://’. The following are acceptable:
<a href="/venues#crescent">Crescent Theatre</a>
<img src="/gallery/2004/artsfest15_3.jpg" alt="Artsfest 2004" />
The following will cause errors:
<a href="venues#crescent">Crescent Theatre</a>
<img src="gallery/2004/artsfest15_3.jpg" alt="Artsfest 2004" />
2. Plain text URLs will be expanded to HTML hyper-links by the system. So a post containing ‘http://www.bbc.co.uk’ will be output as follows: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk">www.bbc.co.uk</a>
You may of course provide the link as HTML, with your own choice of text: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk">BBC web site</a>