The Bryn Mawr WordPress theme is available upon request for blogs that require Bryn Mawr branding. If you would like to request this theme, please contact help@brynmawr.edu and include the address of your blog if it has been created.

For the most part, the Bryn Mawr WordPress theme works like any other WordPress theme, and all of the usual WordPress documentation here applies. However, it has a few features to make it look and function like the College website that require some additional documentation– menus and contact information.

Headers:

You must select a header for your blog to display correctly.

Select your header by going to Appearance->Theme Options. Most blogs should use the Bryn Mawr Only header, but there are options available for Bi-Co and Tri-co branding.

Contact Information

The Contact Us Info Box plugin must be activated with this theme.

Once it is activated, you may edit your contact information by going to Settings->Contact Us Info Box.

Enter contact information and format it with simple HTML:

Common HTML for contact information:

Line break: <br>
Email link: <a href="mailto:you@brynmawr.edu">you@brynmawr.edu</a>
Bold: <b>bold text</b>

Left Navigation menu

Add left navigation menus by going to Appearance->Menus

To create your first menu, click the “Create Menu” button. For additional menus, click the + tab.

Add WordPress pages or categories, or Custom Links (links to any web page) to your navigation menu using the panels on the left:

Drag and drop to reorder menu items as needed. When a menu is complete, click “Save Menu” to save your changes and make your menu available to add to the navigation.

Select the menu you want to appear first in the “Bryn Mawr Top Menu” dropdown. Select additional menus to appear below it (if applicable) in the next two dropdowns:

Click “Save” beneath Theme Locations to make your menu(s) display in your left navigation.

Breadcrumbs

Need breadcrumbs to link back to your department or office like this?

Under Appearance->Menus, Create a menu named “Breadcrumbs” and add Custom Links to it. Reorder items as needed, and click “Save Menu.” Your links will appear as breadcrumbs above the navigation menus, just as they do on Bryn Mawr web pages.

Left Navigation Buttons:

If you want callout buttons between the left navigation and contact information like this:

Activate the Left Navigation Button Plugin.

Then go to Appearance->Widgets

Drag the Left Navigation Button Widget into the Left Nav Callout Button widget area.

Then add your Link Text and Link URL to the widget.

The recommended maximum number of buttons is 3.

RSS Subscribe Button

To add an RSS subscribe button to the right column, activate the RSS Subscribe Button plugin, then go to Appearance->Widgets and drag the RSS Subscribe Button widget to the desired location.

1. Log in to your club blog. If you are having trouble logging in, please contact help@brynmawr.edu or call the Help Desk at 610-526-7440

Once logged in, you should see the Dashboard with the name of your club at the top like this:

If you just need to update your contact information, click on Posts in the left sidebar:

And hover your mouse over your Welcome post, then click “Edit.”

You should be on the edit screen for your Welcome post. In the editor, you can update your contact information just as if you were typing in a Word document or an email.

If you need more text formatting options, you can click the “Kitchen sink” button (as in “everything but the…”) to get big headings, indenting, underlining, paste from Word, and more!

To add a link to a Facebook page or email address, highlight the text you want to make into a link, then click the link button:

To link to a Facebook page or other website address (any address starting with http:// ), paste the address into the “URL” box and click “Update.”

To link to an email address, type “mailto:”  followed by the email address (for example, “mailto:help@brynmawr.edu”) in the “URL” box and click “Update.”

Once you are done updating your contact information, click “Publish”.

Want to see your changes? Click “View post” in the yellow box that appears, and you will be taken to your new and improved post!

Are your old blog posts getting nonsensical or oddly generic comments? Do these comments link to websites that have nothing to do with your post, and everything to do with selling random and perhaps questionable products?

Our WordPress antispam plugin, Akismet, should catch most of these comments, but you can eliminate a large source of them by closing comments on your old posts and pages. Feel free to leave comments open if you expect discussion to continue, but you can help reduce spam and the number of comment moderation emails you get by closing comments on posts where they are no longer needed. Many pages also do not need comments open at all, since pages aren’t always a logical place for discussion.

For more on moderating comments and identifying comment spam, please see “Moderating Comments and Spam in WordPress.”

 To close comments on a single post:

Go to Posts->All Posts

Click “Quick Edit” and uncheck “Allow Comments”

Click “Update”

To close comments on all new posts:

WordPress has a setting to close comments on all posts after a given number of days. This is a great way to automatically close comments on posts after discussion is likely to have ended. However, it only affects posts you make after changing the setting, so other solutions are available below if you have a lot of existing posts to close comments on.

To close comments on posts after 14 (or a number you choose) of days:

Go to Settings->Discussion

Check the box for “Automatically close comments on articles older than __ days” and be sure to set the number of days you want (14 is the default).

Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click “Save Changes.”

 To Close Comments on Many Old Posts:

If you have many old posts to close comments on, we recommend contacting Web Services via help@brynmawr.edu , as we have an automated way of doing it in the WordPress database. Please don’t spend your time clicking checkboxes on tens or hundreds of posts!

More Ways to Manage Comments and Other Features:

(recommended for experienced WordPress users) If you need to turn comments on and off on posts frequently, or need more efficient ways to manage categories, tags, post dates, etc., try the Admin Management Xtended plugin. It has the following features:  “toggling post/page visibility inline, changing page order with drag’n’drop, inline category management, inline tag management, changing publication date inline, changing post slug inline, toggling comment status open/closed, hide draft posts, change media order, change media description inline, toggling link visibility, changing link categories”

To activate the Plugin, go to Plugins, locate “ Admin Management Xtended” in the list, and click “Activate“.

Your All Posts screen will then have additional post management options– the option to toggle comments on and off is circled in the screenshot below.

Your WordPress username cannot be changed, but the name displayed publicly on posts can be change. You can change your profile so that it uses only part of your name, or you can choose a different nickname (your personal nickname, or a pseudonym– whichever you prefer). Keep in mind that this name will appear on all posts on all blogs where an author name is included (so you can’t be “Jane Doe” on one blog and “Lisa Simpson” on another).

To change the name displayed on your posts, log into WordPress, and from the Dashboard go to Users->Your Profile

Then go to the Name section and edit your First, Last, and/or Nicknames if needed.

Choose the name you want to display from the “Display name publicly as” dropdown menu and save your profile. Check your blog posts to be sure your name is displayed correctly.

To see which theme your blog uses:

1. Log into your blog.

2. From the Dashboard, go to Appearance.

3. You will automatically be in the “Manage Themes” menu. At the top of the screen, you will see “Current Theme” followed by an image and the name of your theme (e.g. “Atahualpa” in the example below.)

Changing your theme:

1. Log into your blog.

2. From the Dashboard, go to Appearance.

3. You will automatically be in the “Manage Themes” menu.

4. Click on a new theme from the list of Available Themes below to see a preview.

5. If you like the theme, click Activate in the top right corner of the theme dialogue box.

6. Visit your blog to see how it looks.

We highly recommend composing your blog posts in the WordPress rich text editor itself. WordPress allows you to compose and format in rich text or HTML, while autosaving drafts.

Write your post in the window that looks like this. Not enough room to write? Click the button that looks like a blue computer screen (circled below) for full screen editing. Click it again to return to the normal Edit screen.

You can click “Save Draft” if you’re not ready to publish and need to come back to your draft later.

And you can format the post as you compose (or after) exactly the way you want to see it published in WordPress. Use WordPress’s Preview function to see how your post looks.

If possible, please do NOT compose posts in Microsoft Word. Copying your post from Word generally also copies excess formatting code from Word, which produces unreliable results that are difficult to correct.

Here is the kind of code generated by pasting directly from Word.:

If you must copy content from Word, please use WordPress’s “paste from Word” button to paste the content into the WordPress editor. This should remove the problematic code and allow you to correctly format your post.

That results in nice clean code like this:

No second row of buttons? Click the “Kitchen Sink” button to display all options.