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Create and Run a Toastmost Website Powered by WordPress
Wednesday June 21, 2023 9:00 PM to 10:15 PM EDT
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Join David F. Carr, DTM, creator of WordPress for Toastmasters and operator of Toastmost.org to learn both WordPress basics and how to take best advantage of the agenda and member management features. David will start by demonstrating how to create a club website on Toastmost.org, the club hosting service of the WordPress for Toastmasters open-source software project. You will learn how to customize the digital agenda and apply basic search and social media marketing techniques to your club’s online marketing.
Guest presenter Loni Huff of Dungeons & Toast will share pro tips on how to make your club website shine.
Simpler Tools for Customizing Your Agenda
If you have been noticing a lot of changes to the agenda tools lately, please believe me when I say they all have the goal of simplifying things.
Two tasks that just got simpler:
- Seeing at a glance whether changes to your agenda mean it’s likely to run past its scheduled end time.
- Making simple changes to the agenda layout and font sizes.
Planning out your meetings
The new Organize screen you see when working with the agenda allows you to add, remove, and change the timing for roles. In the example below, I’ve added a fourth speaker and fourth evaluator to a meeting that normally has three of each — and can see that my 7 to 8 pm meeting will now end a few minutes past 8 pm. I can use that information to adjust the time allotted for Table Topics or other activities.
Although we don’t expect a meeting to run like clockwork, a planning tool like this can allow club leaders to avoid stuffing so much into one meeting that they wind up running over time.
The Organize screen allows you to make other adjustments, so your printed (or emailed) agenda reflects your plans. For example, if you’re not sure how long an activity like electing new officers will take, you might move Table Topics to the very end of the meeting and hold that activity only if time allows. The Up, Down, and Move To controls on each role and content block allow you to rearrange things more easily.
You can still open the meeting event document in the WordPress editor and make changes that way, but working with the Organizing tool will typically be easier.
Changing the Agenda Layout
The new Agenda Layout tool allows club leaders to make some of the most common adjustments they might want to make to their agenda layout, such as adjusting the size of the fonts or getting rid of the sidebar.
The default design uses relatively small fonts and was designed to make it easier to create an agenda that is more likely to fit on one printed page (although it still might not if there’s a lot of detail in the different agenda items). A sidebar on the left-hand side allows room for some additional information — by default, the club mission and a listing of the officers.
Now, if you click Agenda Layout at the top of any meeting agenda page, you will be taken to a screen that shows a preview of the agenda, along with controls for changing its layout.
From the controls at the top of the screen, you can:
- Change the font size for the main agenda content or the content of the sidebar
- Set the layout to the default one including the sidebar or to a version with no sidebar
- Open the layout document in the WordPress editor. This used to be the only way to change the layout, and it tended to confuse non-technical webmasters — but the option is still available for those who are comfortable with it. This is how you would change what is displayed in the sidebar, for example.
- Enter custom Cascading Style Sheets code, for those who know or want to learn this technique for making more elaborate changes to the styling. For example, if you wanted to turn all the text of the agenda green for St. Patrick’s Day, you could enter:
* {color:green; font-weight:bold}(Yes, I tested this.)
Please take time to explore these features and let me know if they do in fact make working with the digital agenda easier.
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