Bookmark this page for reference (climatesolutions.org/instructions). Revised 9 Jul 2026 by JL

Adding content

Site editors have access to add or edit articles, events and  pages. The below instructions explain general procedures, along with some specific tips for each content type. 

First, a couple of notes about editing things that have already been saved. When you are logged in, most articles, events and pages will have an "Edit" button above the title. You can use this to edit the post, and click "save" when done. 

Format troubleshooting tip: to avoid formatting weirdness including inconsistent font sizes, alignment issues, etc., please ALWAYS clean your copy of invisible markup before copy-pasting into the website. Use the site html-cleaner.org or a similar tool. Also, it is usually safe to ignore the "Text format" selector at the bottom of a text editing window when posting an article. But if things are looking weird, it sometimes can help to switch from "Filtered HTML" to "Full HTML" or vice versa.

Articles

Articles are the most common content type on the site. Blog posts, press releases, and ClimateCast newsletters are all forms of Articles. All articles by default appear in the website's main feed; checking options for "Category" or Washington/Oregon state tags will cause them to also appear in specialized sections, such as the Washington or Oregon pages, the Take Action page, the Press Room page, etc. 

Before adding an article, note who the author is. If the author does not already have a record on the site, an administrator will need to create a "person" record for him or her, ideally with a photo and short bio. At present, only administrators can create person records.

To add an article, select "Add Content" > "Article" from the admin menu.

On the edit screen, enter your title, summary and contents in the forms shown.

Usually you will be copying and pasting text from an external source (a Word document or sometimes from another website). When pasting from Word, the system may ask you whether you want it to "clean" the text before pasting--the answer to this is always YES. 

The editing toolbar includes other options for formatting text, including header styles, bold/italics, bulleted lists, a link button etc. Examples of special formatting can be seen at the bottom of this document. There is also a "Source" button allowing you to view the underlying HTML code if needed. 

If an article is a ClimateCast, a press release, or a Take Action post, check the appropriate "Category" box.

A few more considerations to watch for:

• Make sure to add a summary manually (click "edit summary" to expose the edit window). The summary is the short excerpt (usually a sentence or two) that represents the article in lists such as the front page.
• Select the author at the bottom of the screen under "Authoring information," unless the author of the article is you. 
• Make sure the publishing date is correct if it's a post-dated article.
• Before saving, you can preview the article. If you want to save it as an unpublished draft, simply un-check the "Published" toggle above the edit window

Instructions for adding images, embedded videos or PDF links are in sections below. In general, to keep the site looking pretty, all new articles should have a featured image at the top.

External Action

There are two ways to add content to our website's Take Action page. One way is to publish an Article with the category "Take Action" checked. But in most cases, we will use the External Action content type, which is new as of 2026. External Actions allow us to choose a title, a featured image, and summary text, while the link leads to an external page--either an action on our Soapbox platform, or a completely separate action page used by a coalition campaign, for example. External Actions should be given an expiration date.

Events

This content type is solely for Climate Solutions events. Basic instructions for adding events are much the same as for articles. Select "Add event" under "Add content" and follow onscreen instructions. 

Title, Summary, Description, Date.

Short location: This is the summary version of the location--what you'd tell someone in the elevator, i.e. "Governor's Hotel, Olympia."

Location: This is the more specific info, including address. OK to be redundant with short location.

Website, email and phone: Echo whatever contact information is being shared by event organizers.

Body and Summary: These are the same as article summary and body, with the same formatting options. Please make sure to add a short summary by clicking "Edit summary"--the summary is what shows on the Events page along with the event title.

Tags: Tag events with relevant topic and geographical tags.

Author: Does not display, so ok to leave it alone.

Like articles, events should always be posted with a featured image (see below).

Pages

Editing or creating pages works exactly as articles and events, but pages should only be edited or created after consulting with program leads/communications staff (see workflows above).

Adding Images

Articles, events and news releases all need a Feature image (display dimensions: 620x410). Articles that are promoted into the front page carousel or other banner locations around the site also need a Banner image (display dimensions: 960x306). 

You can also add images within the body of an article (or event, etc). 

Feature and Banner images

Feature and banner images are added from the article's edit screen; look for the "Add media" buttons for each below the main edit window.

After clicking "add media," you can either upload a new image or select one from the media library. To search for an image in the media library, enter a keyword or part of the title in the search box and broswe for the image. 

To upload a new image, follow onscreen instructions. Make sure to fill out the alternate text, title and credit fields. 

Placing images inside the article

To place an image within the body of an article, place your cursor in the edit window where you want to insert the image, usually at the beginning of a paragraph. Use the add media button in the edit window's toolbar. (It 's a photo icon with a music note superimposed). Notice that the popup offers you the choice of adding an image, a document (pdf) or a video. As with the feature and banner images, you can search the media library or upload a new image. When uploading a new image, be sure to fill out the following fields:

• Title (this will be used to find the image later, so choose a basic descriptive title)
• Alternate text (a phrase describing the contents of the image for sight-impaired readers)
• Credit (if applicable, the photographer credit. OK to include HTML link if desired)

After you upload the image to the media library, you can click Insert image to place it in the article body. Once the image appears there, click "edit media" to align the photo (left, center or right), and/or use the Display dropdown to change the style of the photo.

Alignment: by default a photo will have no alignment, and will display as an 'inline-block'. Choosing left or right alignment will place the image on the left or right border and cause text to flow around it. Center alignment will display the image on a line by itself, centeredm with no text on either side.

Tip: If you're not seeing the image alignment features you're expecting, try changing the Text alignment selection (below the editing window). Switch from "Filtered HTML" to "Full HTML" or vice versa.

Display: by default, the display style is Entity Embed (the image shows at the same size it was originally uploaded). Full Width display style, combined with center alignment, will cause the image to span the full width of the column.

Captions: to add a caption to a photo, first insert the image into the article. Click "edit media" and set the "caption on" switch. When you close the edit dialogue window, a caption field will display below the image in the WYSIWYG.

Image sizes

Before uploading images, make sure they are sized correctly. Adding images that are the wrong dimensions will have unpredictable effects and may slow down page loading. Contact staff from the Communications team for assistance with editing images if needed.

Feature images for articles, events etc. will display at the dimensions 620x410, so best practice is to edit them to that exact size or to a multiple of that size, e.g. 930x615. 1240x820, etc. Different-shaped images may get automatically cropped/resized in unpredictable ways, so please avoid.

Banner images display at the dimensions 960x306, so edit to that size or a multiple of that size, e.g. 1440x460. 

Images appearing in the body of an article or page must not be wider than 620 pixels across (the width of the column) and will often need to be much smaller. Images aligned right will show up with the paragraph text wrapped around them. Please size these images to the correct size before uploading. 

Adding PDFs

Adding a document (PDF) is similar to adding images. The uploaded and inserted PDF will automatically appear as a text link in the body of the article; if you want to link it to text in the body of the article, first insert it using the media library, then locate the actual URL of the uploaded PDF and create a link using the WYSIWYG link button.

Display the contents of a PDF visually on a page or in an article (advanced)

Once a PDF has been uploaded, it is possible to use an iframe to display the PDF as part of a page or article.

1.  Copy the html address of the actual PDF file. 

2. While editing an article or page, select "Source" to view and edit the underlying html. At the appropriate place, paste in the following iframe instruction:

<p><iframe allowfullscreen="" height="810" src="[filename]" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="600"></iframe></p>

Make the following changes: insert the PDF file location for [filename], and adjust the height and width instructions to approximately fit the pdf. This may take some experimentation, but use the following guidelines: width should not exceed 620 (the width of the column). 810x600 will fit a standard, portrait-oriented document. 

Adding Videos

Adding a remote YouTube or Vimeo clips is similar to adding images. Select "remote video, and enter the video's URL. You can then insert the video in the body of an article or page. 

Text formatting options

In addition to a number of heading styles (located in the WYSIWYG toolbar under "Normal"), there are a couple of special styles for notes. 

For column-wide pull quotes such as this, type your text, then select it and apply the style "Pull Quote." The attribution line should be entered as part of the paragraph before applying the style; then you can select the attribution by itself and apply to it the style "Attribution." Benjamin Franklin

This is a different style of pull quote. For this style, type the paragraph, select it and apply the style "Pull Quote Regular."

This is heading 1

This is heading 2

This is heading 3

This is heading 4

This is Formatted text

 

Anchors and internal links

Long articles and static pages (especially with multiple subheadings) are often dense and difficult for readers to navigate. Adding a table of contents with hyperlinks to in-line HTML anchors will allow readers to quickly "jump down" to what they're looking for.

More on Tags

Tags are used to sort content on the site. Some tags determine where on the site an item appears, while others are mainly for associating an article with others on the same topic. It is important to understand the different levels of tags and how they work.

Category: Used only for Take Action items, Press Room, ClimateCasts and Solution Stories.

Regions: Geographic regions; if the article or event involves a specific geographical location or policy jurisdiction.

Topic: Select as many topic tags as are applicable to the article. You can request that staff from the Communications team add a tag if needed.

Tags: These DIY tags are like topic tags; use as needed to help people searching for content.

Resource Library 

The Resource Library presents short lists of links to information on a set of topics. Site administrators choose the topics and the resources listed for each.

Updating resources, creating resource topics and adding links

The Resource Library can be edited by anyone with admin-level access using these instructions. Begin by browsing to the page (/resources) and click "Layout." Scroll down to see the list of resource blocks, organized in three columns. Reorder the blocks by clicking and dragging. Edit or Remove a block by clicking the round icon at the top right of each block.  

Add a new block by clicking "add block" at the bottom of a column. In the right column, click "Create custom block," then "Resource." Give the block a descriptive title. To add resource links to the block, find the "Resource link" inputs below the body field (always ignore the body field). enter the address of the first resource you want to list, and a descriptive link text. Note that if you want to list an article from the CS website, just start typing the title to autoselect. If you want to list a resource from any other website, enter the entire URL. To add more resources, click "Add more" and repeat. Optional: you can add a "More" link; if applicable, this would usually be to a page on the CS website with more articles on the same topic, such as /topic/climate-change (where the topic is any "topic" within the climatesolutions.org taxonomy). After fyou have completed work on a block, click "Add block" to save (or "Update" if editing an already-created block)

When done making all changes, remember to save layout changes to the resource library.

Featured article sidebar block

This creates a special sidebar block featuring a single article or event, with its image, headline, summary and a final linked line of text. It can be placed anywhere on the CS site.

To create a new featured article sidebar block:

1) On the admin toolbar, go to Structure –> Block Layout –> Add custom block

2) Select the block type Sidebar Content

3) Configure the custom block with the article you want to display on the sidebar, filling out the following fields:

1. Block description (this is a descriptive title, not for display)
2. Article Summary (enter/select the title of article or event to be featured)
3. Link URL (enter/select title for the linked text below article summary, normally will be the same as above)
4. Link text (the line of text appearing below article summary)

4) Save the block; it is now searchable in the Custom Block Library.

To place your custom block on the website, there are two methods:

Method A (from the target page): On the page where the custom block shout display, edit the layout of the page and add your block in the right sidebar through these steps:

1. On the right sidebar, click “Add block”
2. Find your custom block in the list or by typing its block description in the search field
3. Deselect “Display title” to prevent the block description from showing at the top of the block.
4. Click “Add block.”
5. After adding, remember to save changes to the page layout (at page top).

Method B (from the blocks administration section): Use for placing blocks on multiple pages or the entire site. Instructions TBA. 

The Basics: Access and Workflows

Access

A number of Climate Solutions staff will share the ability to make changes to the organization's website: helping move articles from the old site to the new one, adding events, making edits to program- or campaign-specific pages, or to staff bios. Each staff member who needs access to the site will have his or her own login--usually first and last name--and a unique password. Site administrators (Jonathan, Juan, Stephanie, Ariana, Ally) have broad access to configure the site. Most other staff making changes to the website will have "Sitebuilder" accounts, which will give them access them to post and edit a range of content types.

To get started, login at http://www.climatesolutions.org/user. Enter your username (usually your first and last name, including the space) and your password. Once logged in, you will see a black administrative toolbar across the top of the window, with a link to "Add Content."

Workflows

Climate Solutions staff with website access will follow the below guidelines and workflows when making changes to the site. 

Under normal circumstances, Articles (blog posts or Take Action items) will only be posted to the site by staff from the Communications team. Once a draft article has been through its editorial pricess and has final approval, it can be posted to the web by an administrator. Any changes that need to be made to an article after it has been published should be done in coordination with Jonathan, Stephanie or Juan.

Changes to Pages (program, campaign, donate pages, etc) should be made only in coordination with Jonathan or the communications team. New pages will usually only be created by staff from the Communications team.

Events can be added to the calendar by any trained staff member or intern at the direction of a program lead or staff from the Communications team.

Other content types, including news releases, webforms and basic pages will usually only be created by staff from the Communications team. Other site elements which cannot be edited by most staff include sidebars, menus and front-page content. 

Workflow tip: If an article or event posting needs to be approved by an administrator or program lead before publishing, it can be saved in "draft" mode instead of  "published." Unfortunately only administrators can easily browse lists of unpublished content--so if you create an article or event and leave it unpublished in order to edit or publish later, make a note of the URL so the item can be accessed directly.

revised 9 Jul 2026 by JL