The Councilpapers WordPress plugin

What the WordPress plugin does

The CouncilPapers WordPress plugin puts your council's meetings, agendas, minutes, committees and councillors onto your council's own WordPress website. The pages are drawn live from CouncilPapers but rendered by your own theme, so they match the rest of your site, and they include search-engine niceties such as breadcrumbs and social-media preview tags.

It shows exactly the same public information as your public portal - nothing more. Draft agendas never appear, confidential items are shown only as a Title, with a confidential note in place of their content. Minutes appear only once they are published, and councillor details follow your publication settings. You do not have to publish anything twice: keep working in CouncilPapers as usual and your website follows.

Getting and installing the plugin

1. Go to councilpapers.com/counciladmin/wordpress-plugin and download the plugin zip. Do not unzip it.
2. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip, click Install Now, then Activate.
3. Go to Settings → CouncilPapers and enter your council's CouncilPapers permalink - this tells the plugin which council to show. Your permalink is shown on the Website Integration screen in CouncilPapers, and the two must match exactly.

Installing the plugin and configuring WordPress is a website task rather than a CouncilPapers one, so if your website is looked after by someone else, this is the part to hand to them.

Showing the content on your site

Once the plugin is active and your permalink is set, it works in two ways.

Automatic pages. The plugin creates a set of pages under a base path on your site (by default /councilpapers/) - a meetings list, a page for each meeting showing its agenda and, once published, its minutes, and pages for your committees and councillors. These stay up to date on their own.

Controling what is shown

In the Wordpress admin (under Settings->Councilpapers) the behaviour can be configured to display or omit specific categories:

• A homepage
• Meetings List
• Meeting Details
• Committees List
• Committee Details
• Councillors List
• Councllor Details

If Meetings are displayed, it is also possible to display or omit Agenda and Minute content in the plugin.

Shortcodes, which you can drop into any existing page, post or widget to surface CouncilPapers content where you want it:

The plugin's own Settings → CouncilPapers screen is where the base path and display options live; its settings and exact appearance belong to the plugin rather than to CouncilPapers.

Keeping the plugin up to date

The plugin updates itself through WordPress like any other plugin - when a new version is released you will see the usual update prompt on your Plugins screen. A site on an older version needs to install the latest version once by hand (the same Upload Plugin steps above); after that it updates itself.

How quickly your site refreshes

The plugin checks CouncilPapers for changes on a regular cycle - roughly every ten minutes - so edits reach your website on their own without any action from you. If you want changes to appear within seconds instead, turn on instant website updates.