Ornithology - WordPress

Your Assignment

You will generate content for a species page on a website titled “The Birds of Evergreen”. The format will be modeled after “Birds of North America Online” which is available to view for free through the Evergreen Library. The content will include images and sound as well as research you conduct through reading and in the field on your assigned species.

Getting Started

• Getting Started with WordPress - What is WordPress and how is it being used at Evergreen?
• Login to the Birds of Evergreen site

Driving in WordPress

• Dashboard Overview - get comfortable navigating the Dashboard and moving between Admin and Public view
• Change your profile info

Writing and Managing your content

Adding new posts

Basics

• Title your post - use the common name for your bird
• Top of page: Include the Order, Family, Genus and Species.
  • Genus - Make sure Genus name is capitalized and italicized
  • Species - Remember the full Latin name always includes Genus name and specific epithet. The genus name is always capitalized and the specific epithet is always lowercase, and both words should be italicized

Creating collapsible sections

After the "Introduction" section (which should be set to a heading 2) we will be putting the rest of our content into collapsible sections using a WordPress plugin.

1. Start the section with the shortcode [collapsible_item title="your section title"]
2. Add the content for this section, you can include any kind of media you'd like
3. close the section with [/collapsible_item]

It will look like this for the "Distribution" section:

[collapsible_item title="Distribution"]
Your text and images for this section go between the shortcode. 
[/collapsible_item]

You can copy and paste the following sections template code:

[collapsible_item title="Distribution"] Your text and images here. [/collapsible_item]

[collapsible_item title="Habitat"] Your text and images here. [/collapsible_item]

[collapsible_item title="Food Habits"] Your text and images here. [/collapsible_item]

[collapsible_item title="Sounds"] Your text and sounds here. [/collapsible_item]

[collapsible_item title="Behavior"] Your text and images here. [/collapsible_item]

[collapsible_item title="Literature Cited"] Your text and images here. [/collapsible_item]

[collapsible_item title="Population Trends and Conservation Issues"] Your text and images here. [/collapsible_item]

[collapsible_item title="About the Author"] Your text and images here. [/collapsible_item]

Categories and Tags

1. Select the appropriate categories for your bird.
2. You may need to create some of these. Make sure to choose the appropriate "Parent category"
   • Order - Add the name of the order that your species is in
   • Family - Add the name of the Family your species is in
   • Genus - Add the name of the Genus your species is in.

Adding Links

1. While editing a post, highlight the text you want to be a link
2. Click the "add link" button
3. Paste the URL you want to link to and click "Add Link"

Tip: After your categories are created, try linking the classifications at the top of your species page to the category pages for each Order, Family and Genus.

Adding Media

File management: we will all be sharing a single media library. Make sure to use a unique file naming convention. Start your files with your species and it will be easy to find all files related to your species.
Example: n_wheatear_image1.jpg, n_wheatear_audio1.mp3

Images

• Insert an image - add an image to the body of a post
• Use the "Thumbnail" size for the first image next to the Introduction.
• Adding captions to cite your image sources
  • Creative Commons images from WikiMedia Commons is a great place to start. Once you find an image you'd like to use click the "Use this file on the web" link. Copy the "Attribution" (HTML) text and paste into your image's caption.
• Using Photoshop to resize very large images: File > Save for Web and Devices
• Scanning from a Macintosh in the Computer Center
• Set your featured image for all posts. Featured images will appear on the category pages.
• Working with image galleries (optional)

Audio

1. Add descriptive text
2. then upload your audio file (must be mp3) and insert into post. See Exporting Audio for instructions on creating an mp3 using Audacity.
3. Audio plugin will automatically detect file and insert a graphical player.

Working with GeoMashup Google Maps plugin (optional)

This part is not required but is really cool.

• Attach a google earth .kml file to the post using add media
• Use the following shortcode to embed the .kml file into your posts
  

[geo_mashup_map]

• Tips: if you need to update your KML file you need to delete the old kml from the Media Library and you may need to delete the old post and start all over again (use copy and paste to save your work and transfer into the new post.)

Citation Management

In the future, this project would benefit from using web-based group citation management via Zotero. Ideas on how this could work:

• Have faculty create a Zotero group, students would create individual Zotero accounts and then become members of the Zotero group. (Make sure the group name does not have any special characters or spaces - this seems to cause issues with WordPress integration)
• Students would add citations to group and use tags or collections to organize
• In the Birds of Evergreen WordPress site we would activate Zotero integration via the Zotpress plugin. Amy would handle the one-time setup of this.
• All posts would now have a sidebar in the editing window connecting to the Zotero group's citations.
• Bibliographies could be listed on a bird by bird basis by using Zotero collections or tags.

Additional Resources

• Wordpress.com Getting Started Tutorials - these tutorials are for working on wordpress.com but is nearly identical to using WordPress at blogs.evergreen.edu
  
• Lynda.com (on-campus) WordPress 3 Essential Training - this is another training geared towards using Wordpress.com but if you skip the account setup portion most of the rest is relavent to blogs.evergreen.edu