We have several content writers adding content for sections of the voting information section.
November 2015-January 15, 2015
We have a very lightweight content contribution system while we are understanding all of the kind of information that makes sense to publish for the state, for a county, or by an election. We expect to train our volunteers sometime in January with our system, but in the meantime, we just want to know what information you need to share with voters.
If you are writing content that applies to the whole state of California, we will share a Dropbox folder with statewide content, and you will be able to contribute new templates. Please keep formatting to a minimum, and if at all possible, please provide us with markdown files or please send your content coordinator share a google doc with us. If that is too difficult, then just send us text in an email or in a word doc and we will convert it for this first early pass at the online voting information section.
For the time being, we have a template you can follow. If you can provide us with markdown files instead of Word documents, that would be really appreciated.
Please include in your file:
title: The name of your section. This is what will appear as a menu link. published: true or false. True means this is ready to be published. weight: a number between 0 and 100, where 100 will appear first, and lower numbers, like 30 or 20 are less important. priority: should be "Minor" unless you are a state content editor. county: please include your county name state: please include your state name
Here is an example. -- beginning of file --
title: "Election calendar" published: true weight: 0 section: when-to-vote priority: Minor county: Alameda County state: California
Your section content goes here
-- end of file --
We have 8 sections, or categories, right now. You may contribute content to subsections in these categories. 'where-to-vote' 'register-to-vote' 'how-to-vote' 'when-to-vote' 'important-dates-deadlines' 'voting-basics' 'my-rights-as-a-voter' 'other-topics'
Markdown is a simple language for formatting text for the web. It uses simple formatting like this should be bold to write. Here are the formatting tips. Markdown Cheatsheet.
If you would prefer to use a tool that will format it for you with a button, this free-online tool that allows you to write markdown formatted text. https://stackedit.io/editor
All you really need to write Markdown is a text editor (not microsoft word!) There are other tools such as Mou, Retext.
We also have a really awesome tool called Prose.io which our state content editors and tech team will be using to finalize the content before it is pushed to the web.
You will be able to preview content sometime in mid-January. For now, please bear with us.