Help talk:Portal

I am parking old Congresspedia portal instructions relating to portals and pages that have already been built:

Congresspedia portal building
To build a portal on Congresspedia, simply find an existing portal (like this one), click "edit" and copy and paste that entire page into a new blank page of a new portal (make sure to use the right titles, which are generally categories like the U.S. legislation categories. It's best to click on a category and go directly into the address bar of your browser and simply change "Category" to "Portal").

You will get a lot of red links all over the place, this is normal.

Next, click on each of the four links that says "Portal:[name of your portal]/[a color]-box-header". There should be one for blue, green, turquoise and brown. Click on those links and then paste the following blocks of code into each blank page (make sure to use the code as it appears below, do NOT click "edit" and use the markup in this article):

Use this text for all the "blue-box-header" sub-pages:

Use this text for all the "green-box-header" sub-pages:

Use this text for all the "turquoise-box-header" sub-pages:

Use this text for all the "brown-box-header" sub-pages:

You should also click one of the red links for the "box-footer" and paste in this text:

This should give you mainly a bunch of colored boxes with red links within them. Click on those links will take you to sub-pages that get displayed within those boxes through fancy programming. The first thing to do is to paste a graphic into the main, blue box. The second thing to do is to paste in any assembled headlines in the "In the news" section.

Building state portals
The staff editors used portals to build entry pages for each U.S. state. This is the procedure.


 * 1) First, go to the main 2008 candidate category page and select the sub-category for the state you are building. (The ones that are finished are listed here) Click through to one of the candidates and in the first real sentence of the profile you should see a line of text that says, for example: "Benjamin Lodmell is a Democratic candidate in the 2008 congressional elections for the 1st Congressional District (map) of Alabama," where the state that is the last word of the sentence is a red link. Click that link and you should be editing the blank main page of the new portal.
 * 2) Second, open up the Alabama state portal and copy and past the entire content of that page into your new page and click "save."
 * 3) Third, you should see two filled-in boxes ("New additions" and "More resources") and three boxes with only a red link in them ("The [state name] Portal", "Senators, representatives and candidates" and "local blogs"). If you don't it's time to ping Conor and see what's messed up.
 * 4) Fourth, we'll fill in the "The [state name] Portal" box. Click the red link in the box and copy and paste the following content in (from the display of this page, not the underlying code - i.e. don't click "edit" on this page and copy that) NOTE THAT YOU MUST CHANGE THE NAME OF THE STATE BELOW FOR EACH PORTAL: ""Now click "save" and go back to the main portal page.
 * 5) Fifth, we'll fill in the state's senators, representatives and candidates. You'll find a list of the user pages for the interns below where they were stored. Open up the appropriate page and, on the main portal page, click the red link in the "Senators, representatives and candidates" box. On the first line there, paste this line:""Then, on the very next line, paste in the chart of the senators, representatives and candidates. Do this by going to the appropriate intern's user pages, click "edit" for the whole page and copy everything from the first " {| " above the image of the congressional districts down to the " " below the listing of representatives. Paste that into the portal page and then this line:""Click save and go back to the main portal page. It should all look nice and if not, time to ping Conor.
 * 6) That's it - you're done. There are some other holes to fill in, but Conor will be on those.

Where to find the lists of senators, representatives and candidates

 * Alabama-Connecticut
 * Deleware-Kansas
 * Kentucky-Minnesota
 * Mississippi-New Mexico
 * New York-Oregon
 * Pennsylvania-Rhode Island
 * South Dakota - Texas
 * Utah - Virginia
 * West Virginia - Wyoming