Creating a new WordPress Faculty Web Site
1)Open Firefox.
2)Go to the “CCRI Faculty WP Web Sites Network Admin” at: and login.
3)Click on the arrow next to the Sitescategory (if it’s not already open) then click on Add New.
4)In the Site Addressfield, enter the user’s CCRI user name. In the Site Title field, enter the user’s full name and in the Admin Email field, enter the user’s CCRI e-mail address. Click the Add Site button to create the site.
5)You will then see “Site added”. Next, click the Users category:
6)When the Users page is open, hover your cursor under your new user and click on Edit:
7)On the Edit User page, under the Name section, fill-in the faculty’s first and last name and select how the name will be displayed publicly:
8)At the bottom of the Edit User page, underLDAP Options, Account Authentication Type, change “Local” to “LDAP”, then click the Update User button:
9)You should then see a “User updated” message at the top of the Edit User page:
10)Click on Sites, then hover over your new site and select Dashboard:
11)You will now be in the Dashboard of the new site. First, select Settings from the bottom of the left navigation column:
12)This will bring you to the “General Settings” page. Click on the enter your Akismet API key link:
13)On the “Akismet Configuration page”, enter the following number in the Akismet API Key field, check the Auto delete spam… box and click the Update options button:
14)You should then get an “Options saved” confirmation:
15)Click on the site name at the top left corner to see the site in its basic state:
16)It should look something like the screen shot below. Notice that the site has two “pages” in its horizontal navigation bar: “Home” and “Sample Page”:
a)Return to the dashboard, by clicking on the Site Admin link under the Meta category in the right column navigation.
17)On the Dashboard page, click on the Pagesbutton in the left navigation then hover over the Sample Page link and click on the Quick Edit link:
18)In the “Quick Edit” area, change the Title to: “Contact Info”, change the Slug to “contact-info” (all lower-case, hyphens instead of spaces), change the Order to “1”, un-check the Allow Comments box and click the Update button.
19)Next, apply the CCRI faculty web theme by selecting Themes under the Appearance category, then Activate under the CCRI Faculty Web Fusion 1.0 theme:
20)Click on the site name in the top left corner again to view the site with the new them applied. Also note that “Sample Page” is now “Contact Info”. Also note, at the top of the right nav column, there’s a section of links called “BlogRoll” –we will be changing that next. Return to the dashboard by clicking Site Admin again:
21)Under the Links category ion the left nav, click on Link Categories, then on the Link Categories page, under the Add New Link Category section, type, “Helpful Links” under Name, ‘”helpful-links” (lower-case, hyphen instead of a space), under Slug, then click the Add New Link Category button:
22)You should now see Helpful Links along with “Blogroll” on the Link Categories screen:
23)To add a new link:
a)Under the Links category, select Add New
b)In the Name field, type: “Academic Calendar”
c)In the Web Address field, type:
d)Under Categories, check “Helpful Links”
e)Under Target, select _blank
f)Click the Add Link button
24)Repeat the above for:
a)Admissions
b)Available Courses
c)Blackboard Help for Students
d)Bookstores
e)College Catalog
f)Faculty Web Sites
g)(Faculty’s department web page)
h)Library
i)MyCCRI Help
26)Under the Settings category in the left column nav, select Writing. On the “Writing Settings” page, check, WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically, change the “Default Link category” to Helpful Links, check, Enable the WordPress…XML=RPC publishing protocols, and click the Save Changes button:
27)You will see a “Settings saved” confirmation:
28)Under the “Pages” category, click on Add New. In the Headline area, type: “News & Announcements” and in the body text area, type “post here” (“post here” won’t display once we assign posts to display on this page but for some reason, you need to add something in the body text area for it to function properly as a posts page).
29)Click the Publish button:
30)Under “Settings” click on Reading. On the “Reading Settings” page, under Front page displays, select “A static page” and for Front page, select: “Contact Info”…
Then on the same page, for Posts page select, News & Announcements change Blog pages show at most to “5” and click the Save Changesbutton:
31)Go back to the “Links” page, check all of the “Blogroll” links, under “Bulk Actions” drop-down, select Delete , then hit the Apply button, (Note that I had miss-assigned the CCRI college catalog to “Blogroll” so, I deleted it here and then added it again under “Helpful Links”:
32)Go back to “General Settings”. In the Tagline field, type the department in which the faculty member is an instructor, change the“Timezone” to New York, “Week Starts On” to Sunday and click the Save Changes button.
33)Click on the visit site link again and take a look at how the site is shaping up. Note that the “Tagline” is now the faculty’s department and that “Blogroll” links are gone and “Helpful Links” have taken their place. One issue we need to address is to make the “Contact Info”tab be positioned as the first tab in the horizontal navigation so, go back to the dashboard…
34)Go to the “Pages” page, hover over the “News & Announcements” page link and click on Quick Edit, change the Order to “10” –just to insure it’s always at the end on the nav bar), then click the Update button.
35)Click the visit site link again to check the change. Hmmm…something’s missing… back to the dashboard!
36)Don’t worry…it’s not you (well, it could be but, I haven’t discovered how to avoid this yet). What happens when we do a quick edit (maybe the answer is, don’t do a quick edit when changing page order) is the page automatically goes back into a “Scheduled” to be published status. The way to fix is, go back to Pages, hoverover the page again but select Edit this time. One in the full editing mode, in the “Publish” box, you’ll see that the page is now “Scheduled for:..” with a future publishing time. Click on the Edit link:
37)Change the future time to a time in the recent past, click the OK button, then click the Update button:
38)Visit the site again to make sure both tabs are displaying. Click in the “News & Announcements” tab, then click on the “Edit” link for the existing “Hello World” post:
39)Go to a related site on the Web, copy some “teaser” text from a news story, go back to the WordPress “Edit Page” window, click on the Paste from Word icon in the toolbar and when the “Past from Word” pop-up appears, follow the directions highlighted in yellow below, “Use CTRL + V on your keyboard to paste the text into the window”, then click the Insert button:
40)Add the following:
a)A headline for the post
b)Edit the “Permalink” from “hello-world” to something more meaningful to the post. If you skip this step, WordPress will insert its best guess for the permalink, based on the headline.
At this point, you can go as far as you like in making this a complete post. It is a sample but, the more complete you make it, the more likely the faculty member will understand how the page is meant to be used.
Some other items you may consider adding:
c)A photo linking to the complete news item from which you copied the “teaser” text.
d)A “Learn more” link to the complete news item
e)Add a new category which is relevant to the news item
f)Then click the Update button.
41)Click on the View post link:
42)Note a couple of things.
a)The post is tagged with the category you added
b)There is already a sample comment to the post. (It’s probably a good idea to delete this. So we’ll do that soon.)
c)There’s an “Edit” link with which you can easily access the editing mode for the post. Only the site owner or an IT Admin will see this editing link.
43)Go back to the dashboard and select Comments from the left column nav. In the “Comments” view, you should see only one comment –the one displaying on your mock news item. Hover over the comment section and select Trash from the links that appear:
44)Under “Settings” go to Revisions. Change both Post and page revisions to a “Maximum of 5 Revisions stored”. Click the Save Changes button.
45)Provided the Faculty member has filled-out the faculty Web site request form, or they have a current site on the old FrontPage site, you could customize the “Contact Info” page. In this case, I had neither so I improvised using their info from Banner and a place-holder image which links to a file upload form with which the user can send Web Services a photo to edit for inclusion on their site:
46)Ok, almost done. Go back to your dashboard and clickAdd New under the Pages category and…
- Name the page Courses
- Click the unordered list button on the toolbar
- Enter your courses on each line. For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll call them Course 1, Course 2, Course 3 etc.
47)We now have to create links to each individual Course page, which we will be creating after this. Highlight Course 1 and click the Insert/Edit Link button on the toolbar.
48)Insert the URL for Course 1 (For this instance, we will be naming the URL course-1) and hit Add Link. Feel free to do the same for the other courses. Hit the Publish button on the right side of the page when finished.
49)We will now create the page for Course 1. Click the Add New button under the Pages category from the Dashboard on the left hand of the screen and…
- Name your page Course 1. Make sure the URL is the same as you made it on the previous page.
- Enter the course info and syllabus.
- This is important. Under Page Attributes, choose Courses in the Parent drop-down menu.
- Click Publish when satisfied.