User talk:Tony1/The Signpost "Featured content" toolkit

The start of this talk page is a "how to do it" guide for writing F and A. The text would be inappropriate on the user page, which is entirely a template for pasting into each F and A. Please leave any feedback at the bottom of this talk page.

The guide shows one way to produce the page the way I designed it. Please don't hesitate to change this if you have different ideas.

General

The "window" for F and A is from Saturday to Friday before publication (which is usually towards the end of Monday UTC). Do not include events outside this window.
Two paragraph spaces are used above each section heading.
You might find it convenient to double-click on the INSERTWORDS in the template.
Judges for FA, FL and FP Choice of the week should be asked in advance, preferably by email. A week's notice is good, since where there's no reply after a few days, another editor will need to be asked. If there are six or fewer promotions in any of these sections, it is fine to conflate the items into the subsquent week's pool for judgement.
You may find it more efficient to complete each item as a single job (article/file name, text, username) rather than trawling through all promotions for, say, article names, then returning to do other components.

Establish the page

Go to toolkit page; hit "Edit"; highlight the whole page in edit-mode; copy.
Go to the Newsroom#Article_status.
Hit "Start article" to the right of "Features and admins"; highlight the whole edit-box; paste in the template.
Fill in the author(s) and the day and month within the template at the top, where indicated.
Fill in the dates of coverage on the next line, where indicated.
Save.

New administrators

Open a new window at the link in the lead of this section (i.e. newest admins). It will list the promotions with dates and links from top down. Click on each link to visit the RfA(s).
Remove this section if there were no promotions.
If there was one new admin, write: "The Signpost welcomes {{goa|NAME|}} as our newest admin." And follow the blurb without cutting to a new line. For two or more new admins, use the text as is.
For each new admin, double-click on USERNAME and type or paste in their username. Glean what you can from the RfA intro; visit the admin's user page for other information; if unsure of what you've written, leave a note asking them to review it. A short para is appropriate.
The RfA lead should say loudly and clearly if it was a repeat request. If so, you will need to write "2" (or even "3", if that is the case) after the second pipe-line in the goa template. This field is left blank by default, assuming the RfA is the user's first.

Featured articles

Click on the link featured status at the top of the section.
Click on the lastest month (if the boundary between two months lies within the F and A window, the records of two months will need to be visited in turn).
Highlight and copy-paste the first promoted title into "ARTICLENAME" in the first bullet of the featured-article section in F and A.
Read the nomination intro; sometimes text can be copied over (and pasted in by double-clicking on "TEXT") and tweaked, but sometimes the article needs to be visited to make sense of the topic. Usually we keep the blurb short.
Double-click on "USERNAME" in {{u|USERNAME}} and paste in the username(s) of the nominator(s). Sometimes it's easier to simply type in the name directly. We tend to render the full, formal name; if you want to display an alternative username, it will need to be re-formatted in the usual way. A few users have nothing on their user page and will need the link to be to their talk page. The first username in the section is usually preceded by "nominated by ...". The period for the final sentence of the blurb goes after the closing parenthesis, not before.
The practice is generally not to wikilink in the blurb, since (i) we want readers to visit the article before diverting to other link-targets, and (ii) the page is already heaving with links.
Click on

Useful syntaxes

{{Quote box |quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=right |width=170px |align=right | quote = We were a show the network acknowledged should never have been on at 9 and should have been at 10. It's like they said, "Let's put it in the wrong time slot and see what it'll do." | source = — Barry Levinson<ref name="Shales" />}}

{{multiple image | align = center | image1 = Chicago world's fair, a century of progress, expo poster, 1933, 2.jpg | width1 = {{#expr: (390 * 1832 / 2544) round 0}} | caption1 = New featured picture: a poster advertising "A century of progress", the world fair held in Chicago in 1933 to celebrate the city's centennial. The theme of the fair was technological innovation. | image2 = Monadnock.jpg | width2 = {{#expr: (360 * 1412 / 1862) round 0}} | caption2 = From the new featured article: The [[Monadnock Building]], an icon of Chicago architecture }}

{{wideimage|Peveril Castle over the town of Castleton, 2008.jpg|900px|alt=A view into Hope Valley. Peveril Castle is on the right, standing tall above the landscape, and below on the right is the settlement of Castleton.|From the new featured article, [[Peveril Castle]], a medieval building overlooking the village of Castleton in the English county of Derbyshire. Its site provides views across the Hope Valley and Cave Dale.}}