MIT - WordPress Portfolios

How to create portfolios in WordPress.

What Is an Online Portfolio?

• How are you going to use this site for your Advancement to Candidacy ePortfolio?
• The portfolio must:
  • contain a table of contents and organized structure,
  • include appropriate documentation for each area, and
  • contain Reflective Essays about each area of documentation.

Getting Started

Getting Started with WordPress - What is WordPress and how is it being used at Evergreen?

Access Your WordPress Site

Your sites have already been created with a template designed to help you match the ePortfolio requirements to your site.

• Navigate to your site at: blogs.evergreen.edu/a2cmit2016your Evergreen user name (e.g. mine would be a2cmit2016wiedenhs)
• You can also just go to http://blogs.evergreen.edu and click the Login button. Use the Admin bar to navigate to My Sites

Driving in WordPress

• Dashboard Overview

Settings

• Settings > General - change your site's title and tagline
• Settings > Reading - your site's visibility is preset so that only you and your faculty and see this site.

Writing and Managing Your Content

• Get Published - Pages and Posts - we're only going to be using Pages in the template but feel free to use Posts if you have a compelling reason to do so
• Categories and Tags - only applicable to Posts

Linked Files

• Link to a file - add files to your Media Library and Insert a Link into your Page
  • Note that your site will automatically provide a list of linked documents in the sidebar of every page. This list will only show the documents linked to from that page.

Images and Video

• Insert an image - using the Add Media button, set the size and alignment and insert into page
• Image Galleries - add multiple images in a grid layout
• Video - embed video from Vimeo or YouTube

Sidebars

Sidebars or "Widgets" in WordPress lingo allow for additional content and navigation and are supported by many themes. Often times if you don't change anything to your side bar a default set of "widgets" will appear. You can change this by adding your own in Appearance > Widgets.

• Widgets - add additional features to your sidebar

Front Page and Navigation

• Change what your front page displays - Settings > Reading is where you can change the location of your front page, your is currently set to Overview.
• Custom Menus - Appearance > Menu allows you to modify the navigation for your site. Note that not all themes support custom menus. Try to choose a theme that does.

Designing Your Site

Working with Themes

Themes allow you to change the design of your blog at anytime. Changing your theme will not affect the primary content of your site.

• Choose a theme
  • Note: you will need to revisit your Menu and assign a location for your menu each time you change themes.
• Customize your header image - some themes allow for you to add your own header image Appearance > Header Image (may only appear if your chosen theme supports custom header images)
  • Make sure to use an image that is at least as wide as the recommended header image width for your theme. Most themes have a built-in cropping tool so you don't need to adust the image outside of WordPress.
• Make additional changes to your theme (advanced)

Adding Functionality to Your Site

• Plugin Overview - use plugins to connect your site with a variety of web content including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Want to connect to a popular service that you don't see listed in the available plugins? Let Academic Computing know and we can look into adding it.

Wrap Up

• What happens to my site when I graduate?

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