Writers guidelines

Written by RichardGaywood on 19/01/2009  –  Filed under: Featured

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Workflow
Each Beexer who wants to write for the site should register first, and ask to be given “contributor” permissions. This will allow them to use the site’s management pages to write their content in a powerful WYSIWYG editor. Once they are happy, they save the post, and a subed will then check it over and publish it.

By encouraging all writers to sign up to Wordpress, we can mark them as the authors of each piece so Wordpress’s built-in tracking features work (so you get a page with “all posts by this guy” on — for example, Grim…’s). But by requiring a subed to vet all stories, we can be sure the (unfortunately quite complicated) requirements below are all sorted. Rest assured these are as simple as we can make them; everything below is important for visual reasons.

Review contents
Each review should consist of:

• Headline (the name of the game).
• The body text. Somewhere inside here, probably at the end, it should contain “{score}{remark}” (but with square brackets rather than curly ones) to tell Wordpress where to put the summary box with the score and the closing remark will be placed. This means you can control where it goes, and perhaps add text after the box — like in Grim…’s Uncharted review where he added video links, for example.
• Screenshots or other images — these should never be linked to external sites, but rather uploaded to UpToJump. The “edit post” interface has an “upload/insert” section at the top which allows you to copy files from your local computer into the site’s storage hivemind. Images should be 450px wide in the original post with a link to the fullsized version. All pictures should have captions.
• Excerpt - a one-line summary of the review, used as teaser text in various bits of the site. Wordpress has a special area for this below the body text.
• “score” custom field — a single lowercase letter, s-f. The site will transform this into the appropriate graphic.
• “closing_remark” custom field — a couple of summarising sentences to be shown next to the score.
• Wordpress tags added for the system the game was reviewed on and the name of the game. You do not need to tag with your name, or the type of article (review etc) — these are taken care of by other parts of the system.
• One category per post, as these are used as top-level site navigation. Current categories are News, Reviews, Gamefuqs, Retoons, Articles. There’s a special Featured category used for articles that get the big spot at the top of the front page.

The above is unfortunately a little complex, but don’t worry about the details, as our highly trained subeds (sub please check) will sort things out and make your content look great.

Summary of Wordpress roles

When you create your account you’ll initally have no ability to do anything. Ask one of the mods and we’ll make you a Contributer, which will give you permission to access the site’s backend management tools and write content. You can then pass your content to anyone with Edit rights, who will worry about the complex guff up there ^^ and put the article live.