Commodification Processes - WordPress Field Study

Access your site

Your sites have been pre-created based on a site template. To access your site:

1. login to blogs.evergreen.edu
2. navigate to My Sites in the upper left for a listing of all sites connected to your login

Site Visibility

Your sites are currently set to be publicly viewable.

1. To change this go to Settings > Reading > Visibility
2. You have the option to choose Visitors must have login to limit access to Evergreen community members or can leave the sites publicly viewable.

Display Name

How your Author display name can be changed sitewide.

1. Go to Edit Profile from the "Howdy, your name" drop down in the upper left admin bar
2. Change the "Display name publicly as" field to your choice. First name last initial is a good option.

Writing and Managing your content

• Get Published - Pages and Posts
• Categories and Tags - Every post you write should be added to a category otherwise they will not be easy to find on your site.
• Custom Menus - let you modify your site's navigation and add links to new pages or post categories or create sub-navigation.

Images, video and linked files

• Insert an image
• Set a featured image for each post.
• WordPress built-in image galleries
• You can display Instagram Image Galleries as well. See: Setting up the Feed Instagram Pro plugin.
• Embed video from Vimeo or YouTube by pasting the the URL link into the content area of your page/post
• Link to a file
• Audio

Bibliography with Zotero

We will be using Zotero in combination with the WordPress plugin ZotPress to connect your WordPress sites to your Zotero account and dynamically display bibliographic collections. You will need to:

1. Create a Zotero account (if you haven't already) at www.zotero.org
2. Add a few citations using the Firefox extension (should be installed in the lab)
3. Organize your citations into folders or "Collections"
4. Follow the ZotPress instructions for connecting your WordPress site to your Zotero account to display a collection on your site's Bibliography page

Customize Your Site

Recommend Themes

TwentyFifteen

This is default theme your site is already set to use. This theme has a flexible Theme Customization panel located in Dashboard > Appearance > Customize, that lets you customize a few components.

Additional themes

If you feel compelled to use a different theme, the following themes will work well on mobile devices (they are responsive) and make good usage of navigation (Menus) and widgets so you can design a site where viewers can easily find and interact with your content.

• Baskerville (custom header image)
• Editor
• Hemingway (custom header image)
• Ignite
• Padhang
• Tracks (works best with featured images saved to posts)
• Twenty Twelve, Twenty Thirteen, Twenty Fourteen, Twenty Sixteen

Additional themes may not have Theme Options but can be modified by Appearance > Customize

Sidebars (Widgets)

Sidebar content in WordPress is controlled via "Widgets". Often times if you don't anything to your side bar a default set of "widgets" will appear. You can change this by adding your own widgets.

• Widgets - add additional features to your sidebar

Additional WordPress Resources

• Built-in Help
  • when you're logged into the Dashboard look in the upper right under "Howdy"
  • Help is context-aware so will provide directions based on where you are in the WordPress Dashboard
  • Built-in help videos (part of built-in help)
• Wordpress Tutorial: Blogs
• Wordpress Tutorial: Sites
• Lynda.com Video Tutorials

Need More Help?

• WordPress Tutorial - for a step-by-step tutorial to get you started
• FAQs - common questions about using WordPress at Evergreen
• All WordPress articles

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Still have questions or problems with WordPress, send Academic Computing a message or call the Computer Center at 360-867-6227.