The jargon buster is a glossary of the acronyms, abbreviations and in-house terms that staff meet on the intranet. Each item is a small post: the title is the term and the content is its definition. A page using the Jargon buster template gathers every published item into one A to Z list. That page is the only place items appear: they have no page or web address of their own. This article covers adding and maintaining items; Jargon buster template describes the page that lists them.
Items live under Jargon busters in the admin menu. If the menu is missing, an administrator needs to switch on Jargon buster under Options, Modules; see Module settings and options. Contributors can write items for review, authors can publish their own, and editors and administrators can publish, edit and delete anyone’s. Client sites sometimes use custom roles; see Roles and capabilities.
Add an item
Go to Jargon busters, then Add jargon buster. The edit screen is the simplest in the theme: a title, the content editor, and the Publish, Featured image, Author and Excerpt boxes. Items have no categories, tags or comments, and none of the Document attachments, Related content, Sidebar content or Keywords boxes described in Boxes on every edit screen.
- Type the term as the title, exactly as staff would look it up: “FOI”, not “The FOI process”. The first character of the title decides which letter the item sits under on the Jargon buster page, and a title starting with a digit goes under 0-9.
- Write the definition in the content editor.
- Select Publish, or Save Draft to finish later. A draft item is not shown on the Jargon buster page until it is published, and a future date in the Publish box schedules it. See Save, preview, schedule and publish pages and posts.
Where an acronym has two meanings, add two items with the expansion in the title, for example “PA (personal assistant)” and “PA (public affairs)”. Both sort under P.
Write a good definition
Start with the expansion of the acronym, then one or two sentences on what it means in your organisation. The Jargon buster page cuts a definition off after about four lines and adds a Show more button, so put the essential meaning in the first sentence and keep the rest short. A definition that fits in four lines is shown in full.
Links, bold text, lists and images all work in a definition. Rather than repeating a policy, link to the page, task or team that owns the subject; see Add links to pages including documents and email address links. When the Accessibility copilot option is on, saving warns about “click here” links and images without alt text, as on any content type.
Excerpt and featured image
Both are optional, and neither is shown to staff anywhere on the intranet. The Jargon buster page shows only the term and its definition, and items have no page of their own and are left out of search results, so there is no need to fill in either. The Excerpt box is hidden until you tick Excerpt under Screen Options at the top right. See Generate an excerpt.
A featured image set on an item is not displayed either. See Set a featured image.
How the Jargon buster page shows it
As soon as an item is published it appears on any page using the Jargon buster template, under the heading for its first letter, in alphabetical order by title. The term is shown in bold in a narrow column with the definition beside it. The letter bar at the top only links to letters that have items; the rest are greyed out. Long definitions are collapsed behind Show more, which becomes Show less once opened; without JavaScript the whole definition is visible. There is nothing to edit on the Jargon buster page itself: its own content is not displayed. Only published items are listed; drafts, items awaiting review and scheduled items stay off the page.
Link to a jargon buster definition
Jargon buster items have no web address of their own. An old link to a single item, such as /jargon-buster/foi/, now shows the Page not found page. To point people at a term, link to the Jargon buster page itself. To open the page at a letter, add #jargon- and the capital letter to the end of the page’s address, for example #jargon-F, or #jargon-0-9 for terms that start with a digit. Selecting a letter in the letter bar puts this ending in the browser’s address bar, so you can copy the link from there.
Search
Jargon buster items do not appear in intranet search results. The theme’s own search does not include them. On intranets that use the Relevanssi plugin, they are left out as long as Respect exclude_from_search is ticked on Relevanssi’s Searching tab, which it is unless someone has changed it. If that box is unticked and the Jargon buster type is ticked on the Indexing tab, items can still show up in results even though they have no page to open, so leave the Jargon buster type unticked for indexing. The jargon buster is separate from the A to Z index, which lists pages and other content rather than terms; see Add an item to the A to Z index.
Update or remove an item
Open the item from the Jargon busters list, change the title or definition and select Update. The Jargon buster page changes straight away, and changing the first character of the title moves the item to a different letter. Revisions are kept, so an earlier wording can be restored. To take an item down, select Move to Bin; it leaves the glossary at once and can be restored from the bin for 30 days. Switching the module off under Options, Modules hides the menu and every item but deletes nothing.