Documentation

Dashboard Overview

Posts – this is where Trip Updates live

Media – this is where all of your images live

Tour Sessions – this is where you create a new session for tours & assign data

Pages – this is where every page (not post) lives

Appearance – widgets (for the sidebar on the Trip Updates page) and menus (for the navigation) are the only things you are likely to touch here

Plugins – this is where plugins that add functionality to the site live – these will be automatically kept updated with the Smart Plugin Manager from WPEngine. do not remove or disable a plugin without making sure it is not critical to the functionality of the site.

Users – this is where you give or revoke access to the admin of your website

Tools – Redirection for 301 redirects of old pages is the only thing you are likely to need here

Settings – general settings for WordPress setup – you are not likely to need this

Custom Fields – DO NOT TOUCH THIS!

Theme Settings – there are a few global settings (ex. address) that live here

SEO – this is Snow’s domain

MC4WP – this connects your site to MailChimp so people can sign up directly for your email newsletter and have their info collected in your MC list

Smush – this is a plugin to reduce the size of images to speed up your site – nothing to touch here

Menus

You have 6 menus currently on the site that are editable in Appearance > Menus (or click below for link to edit each):

Creating Tour Sessions

First, create a tour if you haven’t already – this would be the grouping for the sessions you are going to create next, ex. 2022 Grand Western Tour or 2023 Grand Western Tour

Next, add a new tour session. Here you will choose which tour to associate the new session with. Fill in all of the fields that are applicable. If a field is optional and you don’t choose to use it, it will not display.

Don’t forget to add these tour sessions to the Costs & Dates page. Under the Costs & Dates table, adjust the Heading if necessary to reflect the current year, and select sessions from the left pane to add to the current display (it will then move to the right pane). To remove a session from display, hover over the session in the right pane and click on the (–) sign that appears to the right of the highlighted name.

Creating Trip Updates

Your trip updates live in the Posts tab. Choose add new to start a new post/update. Posts use a native WordPress interface called Gutenberg blocks. Here is a tutorial on the options available to use on your post content.

Important fields to use:

Title
Content area
- to add an image, gallery or video (as well as other options), click “add block” and choose the element you want to insert. You will be presented with a modified list to choose from but can expand the list or search for something if you do not see it at first glance. settings/options for each block are in a tab in the sidebar on the right of the page. toggle the sidebar using the black “settings” button at the top right of page.
- content copied and pasted from Microsoft Word can appear with strange formatting due to extra code that gets pasted in. the safest way to create content is to either write it in the wordpress post itself or create it in an email and paste it in from there.
- try to keep images to 1MB or less when uploading them to the website. to downsize, you can email them to yourself and select a smaller size when prompted or use an online tool like this.
Below content area – Post Fields > Location (this displays below the title on the posts)
Right sidebar (use black Settings icon at top right of page to toggle sidebar):
- Post > Status & visibility > Stick to the top of the blog to make a specific post featured (this displays as a larger post under the hero image on the main trip updates page). If you do not select this, the lastest post will display by default.
- Categories > choose the appropriate parent & child category to associate the post with. Ex. 2022 Grand Western Tour (parent) and 2022 Session I (child) – this will not only group the posts so we can display only the 2022 Session I posts on a page, but it will also display the child term above the hero image and on each post so people know what they are looking at.
- You can create new categories here, following the same format that we have established.
- Featured image – this displays on the main blog page with each post link block
- Excerpt – optional, but allows you to dictate what text appears in the post link block

Add Trip Updates to the top Menu

in Menus, choose Utility and add a custom link
link will look like this with current year /category/2025-grand-western-tour/
apply these classes to hide link on mobile and show on desktop d-none d-lg-inline-block

Changing Trip Updates over for the current summer

Under Posts > Categories > Add a New Category, create the following categories

Parent Category: CURRENTYEAR Grand Western Tour (it will automatically create a slug or URL for this)
Child Categories (choose CY as Parent when creating): CURRENTYEAR Session One & CURRENTYEAR Session Two (if applicable)

Under Appearance > Menus > Utility (upper-right corner), click on Trip Updates to expand options

Change the URL to /category/CURRENTYEAR-grand-western-tour/ — just updating the year to the current year should work if you formatted the parent category above the same way every other year has been

New Trip Updates page should be something like https://www.grandwesterntour.com/category/2024-grand-western-tour/ where the current year is correct.

You can now create new posts for the current summer and categorize them with the parent (ex: 2024 Grand Western Tour) and the relevant child (ex: 2024 Session One)

MailChimp

We are using MailChimp for email campaigns. Users can sign up on the website for:

Email Newsletters (tagged as “website” in MC); this form is created in the MC4WP plugin.

Email Newsletters (tagged as “google ads” in MC); this form is created in the MC4WP plugin and is used for landing pages that are used for Google Ads.

Trip Updates (tagged as “Trip Updates Subscriber” in MC); this form is created in MailChimp as an Embedded Form and hard-coded on the index.php file (Trip Updates main page) and as HTML in the Trip Updates widget. We could not hard-coded an embed code which is why this form is unique in its creation within the MC account.

Trip Update Auto-Emails initial setup (June 2025)

I tagged every parent who was in Session 1 & 2 for the 2025 season as “Trip Updates Subscriber” so they will begin receiving updates via the RSS feed / Campaign within MC. They can unsubscribe at any time. Additionally, people can join that list by using the forms on the Trip Updates page and any single post.

Best practices going forward

At the end of the year (or beginning of the new season — anytime before the start of new trip updates), untag everyone who is tagged as “Trip Updates Subscriber” to remove them from receiving updates. We should assume that people do not want years of updates if their kids are no longer on a program. Before trips start and once you have a complete list of parents in your database for the current summer, tag all of those parents as “Trip Updates Subscriber”.