Editing your web pages with
the Point Edit on-line web editor

Some web pages on The Westford  Web have been set up to allow a very limited portion of that page to be edited through the web browser. To do this, your page must have the Web Edit tags in the page, and the web edit system must be enabled for this page. The tags and enabling must be set up by the Westford Web administrators. If your page has been set up to allow direct editing through your web browser, the tips below could help your editing efforts. Using a web page editor such as Netscape is much more flexible than the on-line web editor, but this method is good for such basic items as meeting or event announcements.

You can start your editing process by clicking on the link to update the events or listing area on your main web page. The link to the update is on your web staff admin page. After clicking the link, you will be told which page you are about to edit, and then you should click on Submit Query. The next page will show you the text that can be edited. 

For the most part, you can type regular text in this area. The text you type will show up as one long text line on your main web page. Carriage returns, multiple spaces, and other formatting will not show up unless you use HTML tags. HTML tags are the formatting commands that make web pages display styles other than plain old text. 

Here are some of the basic commands that you might want to use when you edit:
Line Break <br>  Use this when you want to start a new line. Acts like the Enter key in WP.
Paragraph <p> Inserts an extra carriage return to start a new paragraph.

Most formatting requires tags that start and stop a format process. For example, to make text bold you would use the <b> tag to start the bolding, then end with a </b>. In the browser, the previous line would look like this: 
you would use the tag to start the bolding, then end with a . 

If you need to center something, try the center tags <center> center this </center>.

To make links, you need to use the href tag together with an anchor tag, which would look like this:
<a href="http://www.westford.com">The Westford Web</A> or <a href="stats.htm">Team Stats Here </A> 
The link to The Westford Web is the format that you would use if the web page is on some other system on the internet. The second format is used to link to a page in your web space. 

If your edit area already is centered without tags being visible when you edit, that means that the tag exists somewhere before your edit area starts. You can shut off the tag by using the stop tag associated with the formatting. For example, if your text is always centered, you can uncenter it by starting with </center> in your edit area. 

Tags are not case sensitive. Uppercase and lower case will work. Also, you can't do too much damage if you use the wrong tags. The web browser is very forgiving, so feel free to experiment!

One last note. If you ever use a higher level editor to edit the page that contains your web edit text, you might break the web editing ability. To fix this  you need to use a simple text editor such as Wordpad. Open the file, look for the line(s) that say <!-- PointEdit TYPE=Something -->  and enter a carriage return before and after this tag. These tags must be alone on the line for them to work properly with the on-line web page editor.

When you are complete with your changes, enter your password and click on submit!

If you want to add on-line editing to your pages, notify the Westford Web admin as to which pages you would like to edit. Then add the following HTML tags to your page:

HTML syntax reference

    on the line BEFORE the one you wish to edit, put the following:
        <!---PointEdit TYPE={TAG|LINE|AREA|SSI} NAME=helpfulname--->

    example
        <!-- PointEdit TYPE=TAG NAME=bodytag--->
        <BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff">

        <!-- PointEdit TYPE=AREA NAME=area -->
        Some lines
        Some more lines
        <!-- PointEdit TYPE=AREA NAME=area -->

        <!-- PointEdit TYPE=LINE NAME=this_line--->
        I want to edit this line.
        Using the line edit, this line will not be edited.

It is very improtant that the edit tag be placed BEFORE the lines in question. Also, the Point Edit line must be on a line by itself - no other code should be on that line. Once you insert the edit tags, follow the directions at the top of this page for editing online.