Now what do I do?

The answer is “not a lot” if you’re a mere Subscriber. You can change your profile.

The core members of the Group, though, can do much more and are confronted by a humongous WordPress dashboard after logging in.

Don’t panic.

The most important bit is the left-hand side and you can safely ignore the rest. From top to bottom you’ll only need the Posts, Pages, Calendar, Profile and Email sections.

Posts and Pages allow you to add new and edit existing posts and pages. Posts are what appear in the blog; pages appear in the Visit menu. Feel free to post like crazy. You should only need to change your own pages and subpages, and not often.

You can add events to the Calendar and change existing events. It’s really a tool for whoever does the rota but, hey, if you want the group to know about your birthday or dental appointment, knock yourself out. Note that only the core members (and a few select others) will be able to see the events.

The Profile is pretty much self-explanatory.

You can Email any number of users without having to know their addresses. The more useful aspect of this is the ability to email a group, as in Administrators, Editors, Authors, Contributors and Subscribers. These are WordPress categories of user.

The core members are all Administrators and Editors so you could send an upload of your week’s submission as a media file. You may also want to include Authors in this.

Which brings me on to what they can do. They can post but not page. They can add events but can’t see the calendar from the website. They can email one or more users but not as a group.

Contributors can post and an Editor needs to approve the post. Otherwise they are only one step up from Subscribers.

This is a Post. I’ll also create it as a Page when it makes sense to everyone – in fact a subpage of a new How To page. There will be more.

So, go forth and… post, page, email, whatever.