Managing council meetings
Contents
To add or edit a meeting, click on the “meetings” editor in the left panel of WordPress. This will take you to a list of current meetings. You can add a new meeting by clicking “add new” at the top of the page or edit an existing meeting by clicking on its name.
The title field at the top of the page sets the name of the meeting (e.g. "planning meeting"). This is also the name that appears in the meetings listing in WordPress.
To set the date of the meeting, click in the date box and a calendar will open allowing you to set the date and time. Click ‘done’ to close the calendar and set the date. You can also click anywhere outside of the calendar to close it without changing the date.
The brief description field lets you set a short description of the meeting to display on an individual meeting’s details page. Keep this short (one or two sentences).
The agenda contents field is where you enter the full agenda details for display on the site. Typically, you will do this by pasting in the contents of the MS Word file you have of the agenda.
The agenda file field lets you upload or link to a file for users to download, so they can read the agenda offline. Typically, this will be a .doc or .pdf file but can be anything. Click on the '+' button to either choose an existing file from the media library or upload a file by clicking “upload files” in the top left of the media library). There is no need to change the title field here.
The minutes contents field is where you enter the full minutes for display on the site. Typically, you will do this by pasting in the contents of the MS Word file you have of the minutes.
The minutes file field lets you upload or link to a file for users to download, so they can read the minutes offline. Typically, this will be a .doc or .pdf file but can be anything. Click on the '+' button to either choose an existing file from the media library or upload a file by clicking “upload files” in the top left of the media library. There is no need to change the title field here.
Accessibility guidance
Documents such as Word, Excel or PDF are not great in terms of accessibility so we encourage you to use the contents fields rather than uploading a document.
We understand that doing this for meeting all the way back to 2015 and earlier is a big task so any documents created prior to 23 September 2018 can be classed as a disproportionate burden as it would take too much time and money to convert the files to an accessible format. However, you must be shown to be actively improving the accessibility of all documents from 23 September 2018 to present.
To do this, please copy the content from your agenda and minutes files and paste into the content boxes available. Please remove any bad formatting and use the headings and bullet point functions available. Do not use BLOCK CAPITALS for headings.
You can keep the agenda and minutes files to accompany the HTML versions as a printable or downloadable option if you wish to.
In the right panel, underneath the tags panel, is the year of meeting panel. The box or boxes you check here determine which pages the meeting will appear in.