KiwiCanyons needs volunteers..

This site needs your help!

This site has been long-overdue for some maintenance and upgrading. The COVID lockdown gave me the chance to do some work on the look, feel and functions of the site, but each canyon page needs a little bit of copy/paste and clicking to bring it up to the same visual and functional standard.

If you can volunteer, please email me: chucky@kiwicanyons.org

The site was established in 2008, and since then it has been free for everyone to use, at the cost of considerable time, plus more than a decade of domain registration and hosting. It’d be awesome for people who’ve had fun courtesy of the information to give back to the site!

So if you’ve got some time and you are confident with editing WordPress posts, I’d really appreciate your help.

Even if you can only do a few canyons (or maybe just the ones you’ve submitted or descended) it’d be a huge help.. There’s nearly 300 which need doing….

Which canyon to start with?

Once you’ve got a log on, view all the posts on the dashboard. Anything earlier than 2020 is likely to need some attention. I’ve been working on the ‘oldest’ posts first, some which are pretty broken/obscure.. Feel free to choose whichever ones suit you, and let me know when you’ve done them so I can take a look to double check ;0)

Jobs to do for each post (canyon):

Right hand ‘settings’ panel

  • Check the Summary so the post is visible, not sticky.
  • Category: Ensure only one category per canyon, and that the category matches the number of stars in the title.
  • Tags: Check the region and subregion are added correctly
  • Featured image: Select one from the media libary “images uploaded to this post”. Or use your own photo or let me know if you don’t have any imagery.
  • Check the featured image looks good on desktop and mobile, change if it doesn’t look good.
  • Populate the excerpt, which makes the quick canyon info.
    • See the format in the excerpt box on this post…
    • Remove the ‘highest drop’ wording
    • Add rope recommendation if appropriate (2x30m)
    • Add a line which says roughly where the canyon is (so people can see at a glance from the homepage)
    • Remove the spaces between each line. (Check what it looks like on the home page and you’ll see why..)
  • ‘allow comments’ is checked.
  • “allow pingbacks’ unchecked
  • If you want to change the ‘author’ to yourself, then feel free, as an acknowledgement of the work you’ve done to help this site!

Update the post content to block format

  • Delete the old gallery and old shortcode
  • Add a ‘Live map’ block (under the ‘reusable blocks’ tab) or just type /live
  • Add a gallery block.
  • Re-add the images to the gallery. Ensure the gallery settings include LINK TO – Media file.
  • If there’s no images, either use your own, or get in touch with the person or people mentioned in the text and ask for some images and upload them! (Dan can help with contacts!) Or if there’s a PDF topo, then extract a few images (at least one for the featured image!)
  • A good size for images is 1600×1200 px, or about 400-800kb. Anything more is unessecary on most screens, and just makes for slower loading and a bigger, clunkier site to host!
  • If you add images, please rename the files to “Canyon name – photographer name” so know what files belong if anything needs repairing later on.
  • Check that the page looks right on desktop and mobile.
  • Test the gallery photos by clicking them to see if the lightbox comes up.

Finally, update the date to ‘today’ to show you’ve upgraded it!


How we’ll manage the process

Let me know wether you want to have a crack at a region, a few specific canyons or will update anything. I’ll try to give people the areas suitable to thier knowledge (especially for adding absent photos)

If you update the date of the post when you’re finished to todays date. That’ll allow us to easily see which canyons need a look, when we sort the posts by date.

Also if you come across any weird posts (which aren’t about canyons) or duplicates (ie, two posts about the same canyon) let me know so I can take a look.

Any questions, just let me know!

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