Tag Archives: Blogs

Social Software, WordPress Blogs

WordPress Basics

WordPress is a blogging tool that allows you to share thoughts, reflections, and other communications over the Internet.  WordPress blogs can be customized to look and feel the way you want and content can easily be added, removed, archived, or changed.

So you have a blog…

Once you’ve set up your blog, there are many ways to customize it to give it the look and functions you want. This guide gives an overview of the most important features of WordPress and their options.

Here are some different Bryn Mawr blogs to give you an idea of the range of appearance and features possible with WordPress:

NELI Jobs Blog
Student Government Association
Flexner Book Club
Titagya
edtech

Basic Elements of WordPress:

Pages:

While WordPress is known for its blogging capabilities, it is also easy to create a more static site with WordPress by using Pages. For blogs, pages are useful for displaying information you’d want to always be available to your readers– an “about the author/blog” page, or mission statement page (as the art club does ) , for example. The Solomon Asch Center site demonstrates extensive use of static pages in WordPress as well as the blog capabilities. The About, Activities, Summer Institute, etc. links across the top are all static pages.

Posts:

Posts are blog posts. Normally, these appear in chronological order, but WordPress has additional features to allow you change a post’s date, or to schedule posts in advance. This is good for periodic meeting reminders, other content that can be prepared in advance and posted on a schedule, or for queuing up content to post during a blogger’s absence. The WordPress codex has instructions for writing posts.  Please also see our recommendations for composing WordPress posts.

Note: If you don’t see the full list of formatting options in the Post window, click the “kitchen sink” button to see them all.

 

Media:

WordPress makes it easy to add images, video, or audio content to posts or pages. You can add media via the media library or from the New Post or Page panel.

 

Themes:

Themes determine the look and layout of your WordPress blog. Many departmental blogs have a theme that looks like the Bryn Mawr website; those wanting to use this theme must contact Web Services to have it configured correctly.

There are many themes ready for your use under “Appearance” and then “Themes” in the WordPress dashboard.

 

While Web Services cannot develop custom themes, there are several customizable themes available. The following themes can use custom image headers (the large image at the top of the page):

  • Atahualpa
  • Carrington
  • Tarski
  • Twenty Eleven
  • UnLimited 1.0
  • WPMU-TRIDEN
  • Yoko

The following themes offer some customizable font and/or color options:

  • Atahualpa
  • Carrington
  • Mandigo
  • Tarski
  • Twenty Eleven
  • WPMU-TRIDEN
  • Yoko

Some themes allow CSS customization, which allows a lot of flexibility for changing the layout and look of a blog, if a user is familiar with or wants to learn CSS . Atahualpa is one such highly customizable theme.

We also offer themes (Bryn Mawr Refresh and Bryn Mawr Refresh with Menu) that look like the College’s current website design, for use with official College and departmental blogs. Please contact Web Services via help@brynmawr.edu for assistance in implementing these themes.

Categories and Tags:

Categories allow you to organize your posts, and allow your readers to find content of interest to them. Categories, unlike tags (which also allow you to identify posts with particular content), can be hierarchical, thus allowing for further organization. One concise way of describing the difference between the tools is that categories organize content, while tags identify it.

To see categories and tags in action, take a look at the TECH Bar blog , which uses categories to identify the main topics for documentation, and then uses tags to identify more specific topics. For example, there is an Adobe category, and then tags for particular pieces of Adobe software, such as Contribute and Illustrator. This could also be theoretically accomplished with categories (e.g. child categories could be created for Illustrator and Contribute, and then listed under the parent category of Adobe), but would likely make for an extremely long list of categories if there was one for every possible TECH Bar documentation topic.

Categories may also be used to create separate RSS feeds for content from a given category.

How to manage categories

Tags can also be utilized to form a Tag Cloud, which indicates which tags are used most often by making those tags larger. Here is a Bryn Mawr blog that uses a tag cloud in the left sidebar.
You can add a tag cloud to your blog using the Widgets panel.

Widgets:


Under “Appearance” next to themes.  Widgets go in the sidebar- they can add things to your blog like simple lists of pages, posts, archives, categories.  They also include extra add-ons – for example, Feedburner subscriptions. Many widgets are installed via plugins (see the Plugins section for details). See the WordPress codex for further descriptions of widgets.

Plugins:

Plugins extend the built-in functionality of WordPress.  They allow you to do things like automatically display a list of attached files, customize your menus or  allow users to receive blog posts via e-mail, reduce spam, and more. Plugins often appear as widgets for the sidebar. Plugins already available in Bryn Mawr’s WordPress installation can be found under Plugins (between Appearance and Users) in the WordPress Dashboard.

 

Those already activated for your particular blog will be listed under “Active” like this:

 

 

Links:  WordPress’ official help page.

WordPress Blogs

User Roles for Blogs

Users can be added by blog administrators- the creator of a blog is the administrator, and she can designate other users she adds to be administrators as well.

Users are added by going to the “Users” link in the dashboard and clicking “Add New.”  A user must already have signed in to blogs.brynmawr.edu before they can be added to a blog.  Once added, they receive an email with an activation link.

wp_users

User Roles: What they are and what they can do:

  • Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
  • Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
  • Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
  • Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
  • Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc.

[from the WordPress Codex]

Change user roles in the Users menu by going to Authors and Users:

wp_role2

Then check the box next to the user whose role you wish to change, and select the desired role from the “Change role to…” dropdown menu, then click the “Change” button.

wp_role1

WordPress Blogs

Logging in & Creating a New Blog

There are different ways to access and post to a blog, depending on whether you are creating a new blog or joining an existing one.

If you are creating a new blog:

  1. Log-in: If you have a Bryn Mawr College email address, logging in is easy.  Just enter your email username & password.
  2. Create a new blog:  Once you’ve logged-in, you’ll see the WordPress Dashboard.  This is where you will make changes to your blog once you’ve created it.  To create a blog go to the sign up page, pictured below.
  3. Enter your blog domain name.  This name will be part of your blog’s URL, and will appear in the address bar of web browsers.  For example, the Film Studies blog URL is http://filmstudies.blogs.brynmawr.edu and the domain name that goes in this first form field would be filmstudies [see screenshot below].  The domain name should be typed as one word, must be at least 4 characters long, and it is not necessary to capitalize it (in fact, it’s better lowercase).
  4. Enter your blog title.  This name will display as the title on your blog’s homepage, as well as in the title bar of your web browser [see screenshot].
  5. Choose which privacy option you prefer.
  6. Select a blog topic from the dropdown box- this is important for categorizing the general nature of your site.
  7. Click “Create Blog >>.”
Screen shot of sign-up page
Screen shot of sign-up page

If you are joining an existing blog:

  1. As above, Log-in with your Bryn Mawr College email username & password.
  2. Have the administrator of the blog you want to access add you to the blog.
  3. After the administrator adds you, check your email.  You’ll receive an activation link.  Click on it and your account will be activated for accessing the blog.  Depending on your user role, you may be able to post to the blog now; contact your blog admin for questions about your user role.