Structure of the site – SF Volunteers

There is lots of information on this page and much of it will be new if you are not familiar with WordPress. Please don’t feel overwhelmed. Read it once now, being sure to follow all the links to pages on the suttafriends.org website. Then read it again a few weeks after you work on the site. It will make much more sense when you are more familiar with the site in general.

Suttas: The Meat of the Site

In addition to the sutta text itself, suttas have several other important parts. Some of these are found in the center column of the sutta editor, some are found under the Document tab in the right hand column.

Date. Dates are used on the website not to indicate when it was published. Dates are an artificial way to put all the suttas in order. There is a spreadsheet that includes the date for each sutta that will ever appear on the site. If you don’t add that per-determined date, WordPress will automatically add the date you add the sutta. Required
Title. The title contains the citation, Pali sutta name (except Thag, Thig), and the English title. Required
Introduction. Single line that gives some idea about the sutta. It is not really an introduction. It can even be a question, like, “How should we treat our parents?” Required
Further Reading. A place to tell readers about other suttas related to the current one. For example, in the Dhammacakka sutta, we recommend they read the Saccavibhanga sutta. Optional
Explanation. This is a way to give important information for the whole sutta. For explanations to a single sentence, use the footnote feature (see below) Optional
Questions for Reflection. Questions to get the reader thinking carefully and personally about the sutta. Optional
Print Book Link. This is the url for the book page on SuttaFriends.org. Note: Do not link directly to Mahamevnawa website. Optional
Audio Recording. This is the url for the mp3 file of the audio recording. Optional
Category. The collection the sutta is in, e.g. Digha Nikaya. Note: Each sutta should only have one category. If a sutta appears in two different places, e.g. Metta Sutta, we need to create two suttas. Required
Tags. See explanation below. Only required for SN and AN suttas.
Topics, Names, Similes. See below. Optional
Printed. If this sutta appears in a printed book, you can give it a term that allows it to be listed on the printed book page. For example, we add the “chanting” term to suttas found in the Paritta Chanting Book. A code on the book page displays all the suttas with the term “chanting” in this field. Multiple terms can be added if the sutta appears in multiple books. Optional.
Featured Image. This is the image that will appear on Facebook and Twitter is the sutta is shared. The image is assigned automatically when the post is published. If this doesn’t happen, it can be added manually. Required.
Excerpt. This should be an exact copy of a sentence in the sutta that gives some important idea. It is used automatically when sharing on Facebook. It may be used in other ways in the future. Required.

Where is this Information Used?

Date

The date should not appear anywhere on the site for the reader to see. If you can see a date anywhere, please report it to the site designer as soon as possible. The date field is only used to put suttas in the proper order starting from the first DN sutta to the last Thig sutta.

Introduction

The introductions currently appear in two places. One is in lists of suttas, e.g. on the table of contents pages. You can see them after the sutta names in the lists:

The other place is at the top of a sutta, below the title:

Explanation, Further Reading, Topics, Names, etc.

At the bottom of every sutta is a “More Information Button,” often called a hamburger menu.

Clicking on this button opens up an area that can (if the information exists) display Further Reading; Explanation; Questions for Reflection; Print Book Link; Audio Recording; and Topics, Names, and Similes terms. Examples:

Featured Image & Excerpt

The featured image and excerpt do not appear anywhere on the site for the reader. They are only used for social sharing, such as Facebook and Twitter:

Footnotes

If you want to add an explanation for something in the sutta at that spot in the sutta, you can enclose it in special tags like this:

“Monks, one thing when developed and cultivated leads to analytical wisdom … to passing away with no residue left[footnote]Parinibbana[/footnote]. What one thing? Mindfulness of the body. Monks, this is the one thing when developed and cultivated leads to analytical wisdom … to passing away with no residue left.”

On the front end, it will look like this:

And when the number is clicked, it looks like this:

URLs for Suttas

If you know the citation for a sutta, you can just type it into the url bar after suttafriends.org/. There should be no dash between the abbreviation and the first number. If there is a second number (as in SN, AN, Vv, etc) place a hyphen. For example:
suttafriends.org/mn10
suttafriends.org/sn6-2
suttafriends.org/dhp2
suttafriends.org/vv3-8

You may notice that the actual link for the above suttas are
suttafriends.org/sutta/mn10
suttafriends.org/sutta/sn6-2
suttafriends.org/sutta/dhp2
suttafriends.org/sutta/vv3-8

The /sutta/ part is optional. In general, our citation are the same as suttacentral.net, but ours use a dash instead of a period.

Taxonomies: The Bones and Tendons

The site is held up and connected by taxonomies. There are several taxonomies:

Categories
Tags
Topics
Names (aka People)
Similes
Printed

Each taxonomy has terms. For example, the Category taxonomy has terms for each of the nikayas and books (Digha Nikaya, Majjhima Nikaya, etc).

Each sutta can have terms in each taxonomies. It is these terms that allows suttas to be related to each other. For example, suttafriends.org/topic/merit/ is an archive page that will show you all the suttas that have the term merit from the topic taxonomy.

Topics, Names, Similes

The topics, names, and simile taxonomies all function the same way and serve the same purpose, just with different concepts. To see a list of all the terms for each of these on the front end, go to

Terms can be added “on the fly” as you are editing a sutta. However, it is important to make sure that you check to see if there is an existing term that is equivalent to the one you would like to add.

Note: Terms should, whenever possible, be singular, even if it is plural in the sutta. For example a simile about trees should use the term tree.

Each term has its own automatically generated archive page. The url format is

suttafriends.org/{taxonomy slug}/{term slug}

So the archive page for merit is

suttafriends.org/topic/merit

If the term has two words, the slug is usually hyphenated. For example, the slug for Ambapāli Arahant is ambapali-arahant.

Note: Slugs cannot contain diacritics (e.g. ā, ṭ, ṁ), spaces, or capital letters.

Topics

The topics taxonomy is the largest and does the most work to connect suttas to each other. For example, whenever a term appears on more than one sutta, there will be a button with the term in the sutta’s meta information section.

For some topics, names, and simile terms, we need to add a sort of introduction. This introduction appears at the top of the archive page. It explains the term and can even give direct links to specific suttas.

Additionally, the description area of the term allows us to list specific suttas that are key to understanding a term. This is what that looks like on the back end for merit:

And this is what it looks like on the term archive page:

Common terms

Some of the terms in the taxonomy are going to be very common, such as meditation, merit, and Four Noble Truths. For this reason, we need to follow some important principles when tagging.

If a term is likely to be assigned to more than 25 suttas, only assign it to suttas that explicitly give important information about that term. In these cases just having the word appear in the sutta is not enough to justify applying it.

Think of it this way: If there are 300 suttas assigned the term merit, how will the reader know where to begin to read? Too much! Almost every sutta in the Vimana Vatthu mentions merit.

However, if the term merit only has 25 of the most important suttas about merit, then the reader can rather quickly get a good idea about what the Buddha taught on merit.

If a reader does want to find every sutta that uses the word “merit,” then they simply can use the search feature. (At the moment this help article is being written there are 550 sutta on the site. A search for the word “merit” returns 129 results. See here.

Names

Similar to topics, the names taxonomy allow us to add names of people. You can see all the people on the people index page. Because most of the names only appear once on the site (in the Thag or Thig) the page is quite long. To help, there is also the popular people index page.

At the moment, name terms are written with the actual name first followed by the title for that individual. For example,

Kakusandha Supreme Buddha
Sāriputta Arahant
Baka Brahma
Bimbisāra King

Name terms need to be exactly the same in order to work. For example, Maha Moggallana, Mahā Moggallāna, and Mahamoggallana are three separate terms. They won’t connect with each other on the site in any way.

Similes

The simile taxonomy works the same way as topics and people. The one difference is that because similes are usually only in one small part of the sutta, we will do some extra work to send people directly to the simile. This is explained in detail on the Adding Similes Instructions.

Our Own Dictionary: ToolTippy KeyWords

KeyWords are words that are automatically dotted-underlined for readers and give a definition or more information such as images.

Important: KeyWords and topic terms are completely different things. In the first example with “merit,” that is not connected in any way with the term “merit” in the topic taxonomy.

One important feature of KeyWords is that you can include synonyms. Here is the “renounce” KeyWord entry on the back-end:

You can see under Keyword Settings in the field Synonyms is the word “renunciation.” That means that both “renounce” and “renunciation” will show the popup. This can be really useful.

All the KeyWords and their definitions can be seen on the glossary page.

Other Page Types (non-suttas)

News

These are pages that contain updates to the site, listing new suttas and new features.

Books

Each published book of suttas by Mahamegha has its own page. All links on the site for books should point to these pages. Each book page links to both the book page on the Mahamevnawa English site as well as back to the suttas on the site. For example, here is the Stories of Ghosts page.

Help and How-To

These are pages that give information about how to use the site as well as how to read suttas. For example, here is the article with help on finding suttas.