32. How it works
• You create content
• Content stored in a database
• Pages don’t ‘exist’ until requested
• User clicks on a link
• PHP code retrieves content from database.
• CSS used to style page
• Page is displayed
45. Technical Requirements
• Currently Version 3.0.1
• PHP version 4.3 or greater *
• MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Hosting_Word
Press
* Might find some plugins require more recent version of
PHP.
46. Hosting on your own server?
• Cost?
• Storage capacity?
• Bandwidth?
• Tech Support?
• Install software yourself
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamisonjudd/2433102356
47. “If you have no idea what to do with
this download….”
48. Commercial Services
• Often under $10/month
• Tech support
• One Click Install!
For more hosts: http://wordpress.org/hosting/
56. Writing a Post
• News & events & updates
• Most recent appears at the top
• Older posts get bumped off the page
• Stored in Archives
• Special page for posts
124. A quick look at the Theme Editor
• Modify existing themes
• Change fonts, colors, graphics
• Create your own themes
• Wordpress.com – ~ $15 year extra
149. Get rid of default ADMIN user
• Sign in
• Create a new user with total admin rights
• Sign out
• Sign in to the new user account
• Delete the old admin account
• Use your new account just for
adminstrative stuff
150. Manage User Accounts
• Give yourself a separate account for
writing/editing
• Define what access your contributors
need
151. Security Keys
• Check your wp-config.php file
• Does it have security keys?
– define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
– define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
– etc…….
– More Info: http://goo.gl/SIhf
152. Use reliable themes & plugins
• Check WordPress.org directories
• Check the ratings & forum discussions
• Test, test, test! And test some more.
• Keep them up to date!
• Deactivate & Delete
unwanted plugins
154. Back it up!
1. Backup your database:
– Via web host control panel
– Or wp-db-backup plugin
(wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/)
2. FTP to server and copy:
• wp-content/themes
• wp-content/plugins
• wp-content/uploads (images, files, etc.)
174. More Plugins…
• WP Plugin Repository
– http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
• My links to plugins
– http://delicious.com/grdnldy/wordpress+plugins
• Lots of great plugins discussed on this blog:
– Lorelle on WordPress http://lorelle.wordpress.com
177. The Academic Commons...is designed to support faculty
initiatives and build community through the use(s) of
technology in teaching and learning.
...Creating networks and support systems that are enabled by
easy access to quality digital resources will nurture faculty
development through sharing replicable materials and best
practices.
About the CUNY (City University of
New York) Academic Commons
183. … features – similar to Facebook, Twitter, etc – will probably seem
familiar to many.
My philosophy of teaching includes instilling in my students a sense of
exploration and play. And dealing with change.
The Buddypress site is an extension of that. In my email to my classes
as school starts, I asked them to configure their blogs, get an RSS
aggregator and explore the site. Explore is the keyword.
Dr. Michael Stephens on his
BuddyPress enabled course
184.
185.
186.
187. Set up a network of sites with
WordPress MultiSite
191. “..easy to let library staff at the various libraries contribute articles to the blog, ensuring a
lively, regularly updated blog/catalog.”
(isis.pbcantwerpen.be/)
(translated with google translate)
194. Selected WP Books
(There are tons more great ones!)
• Digging into
WordPress by Jeff
Starr & Chris Coyier
(digwp.com)
• Beginning WordPress
3 by Stephanie Leary
• Smashing WordPress
by Thord Hedengren
195. More Help!
• WordPress Codex -
http://codex.wordpress.org/
• WordPress Forums -
http://wordpress.org/support/
• WordPress FAQ’s -
http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ
• New to WordPress? –tips
http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_New_To
_WordPress
Going to cover a lot in 3 hours. Usually a 6 hour hands on class!
And really could be a 2 day session.
The goal is to give you a taste of all the pieces you’ll need to build a website with WordPress. And a lot of tips and tricks along the way.
WON”T BE SPENDING TONS OF TIME ON THE REAL BASICS.
With those pieces you’ll be able to let your imagination go to town! Because there are limitless ways you can customize and enhance WP.
Please ask questions as we go – if you have a question, someone else probably does too.
If something comes up that is beyond what we can cover during the session, I’ll be happy to talk to you after the session or get together during the rest of the conference.
Who’s using blogger?
Wordpress
Blogging on other platforms?
Creating web sites with dreamweaver? Hand coding html?
Open Source
Helps you organize all the information about your library and manage it easily
Tool for creating & managing a website
Web-based interface
Contributors can focus on CONTENT!
Update “look & feel” easily
Flexible
Source code is open and available to modify
You make changes, you share them
Modify it & develop tools to enhance it!
Other familiar open source software:
Firefox
Open Office
Community working together to create better software and help each other out.
About 14 million at .com
And 14 million independent installs
We’ll quickly cover some basic blogging terms and look at some examples of blogs
And then look at examples of some libraries are using blogging tools to create a complete website.
We’re all familiar with blogs! A website designed to be used as something of an online diary or journal – or For an organization, a newsletter.
?? What’s the key thing that makes this recognizable this as a BLOG?
POSTS! Reverse chronological order news updates.
Colorful, fun, easy to update, frequently updated news or “POSTS”
This one is designed to serve a specific purpose or targeted at a specific audience.
http://www.hcplibrary.org/teen/wordpress/
Each post can be assigned to categories – topics or subject headings
And the categories are listed on the side
The categories help readers find content of interest.
These are the posts from the BOOKS category.
We can relabel that – TOPICS, NEWS SECTIONS, whatever
Also notice how older posts are collected into monthly back files ARCHIVES
We can relabel that with something like OLD NEWS, BACKFILES, etc. Doesn’t need to be called ARCHIVES
Very easy to do - Web based interface for writing and publishing your content.
Can do it from anywhere you have access to the web.
No software to install on your computer.
What’s different about this one?
Nothing on first glance – posts, sidebar content
But also PAGES
Events, research tools
Click on the RESEARCH TOOLS link on the navigation bar and
Start to see how you can build a web site with news AND pages of more static info.
This is the KEY creating a web site
We all have web pages with information that isn’t easily crammed into chronological news posts.
SERVICES – ILL, WIFI, REFERENCE
CHILDRENS, TEENS, ADULT SERVICES
LIBRARY HOURS
POLICIES
HOW TO’S
ACCESS TO DATABASES
ETC
Fuzzy line between “blog” and full web site, add enough content, replace your old ‘regular web site’ and you have a WP website
Attractive custom graphics
Double navigation bar
http://thegrovelibrary.net/
Use Suffusion theme which comes with lots of built in options
http://stillwater.sals.edu/
This was done with wordpress too and looks more like a magazine than a blog.
http://tamworthlibrary.org/
Nice website – put together by Lichen Rancourt
Of course it can also be used as a personal web site –professional resume etc.
!!
Add content via easy to use web-based interface
Type content – hit publish and it’s done!
AND it looks good.
Since it’s web based and easy to use, you can have other staff members contribute content to the site
This text is stored in a database with content labeled “the_title” “the_content”
And when user clicks on a link to read this article, the CMS gets the text from the database and displays it.
Uses the options you’ve selected to add layout, colors, text and more.
Storing the content in a database makes it easy to reuse it on various pages.
Same content on main page, single post page, archives page, search results page etc.
Choose from lots of free themes to make it look good.
Many themes have options to customize headers and such.
You can also edit the CSS (cascading style sheet) files to change fonts, etc.
Or you can create your own customized theme (or hire someone!)
With the click of a button, the look changes, but the content has stayed the same.
Free hosted versions at:
-- Wordpress.com
-- Edublogs.org
Limited themes, plugins
Charge $15/year for access to CSS
$15 a year to redirect your URL to the blog.
Still this could be a great way to get started and to work with the ideas.
Just don’t let the limits put you off the whole WordPress idea.
When you’re ready, you can move to a self-hosted version.
Wordpress has a page of suggested hosting companies.
http://wordpress.org/hosting/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Hosting_WordPress
http://wordpress.org/download/
Wordpress has a page of suggested hosting companies.
http://wordpress.org/hosting/
This is your Dashboard (control panel) where you write your news, create pages, change the themes and everything else that you’ll need to do to administer your site.
For these sample sites, your user name has been set up for you
When you start your own wordpress project on your own server, your user name will probably be ADMIN.
Create a new user with a distinctive username, make that user the adminstrator, and get rid of the original ADMIN user.
Just makes it a little harder for someone to guess your login and password.
NOTE: This is disabled on the libraryblogs.net test blogs
Add new users who will help you maintain your site. Remember that’s one of the great features of a CMS.
Roles:
Administrator – access to all admin features
Editor – write, manage, publish all posts
Author – write, manage and publish their own posts
Contributor – write and manage their own posts, can’t publish
Change the name of your website
Add a slogan or tagline
Select the format for dates and times
Choose your permalink structure.
Default and numeric aren’t great
Some people recommend not using dates either.
One option is to use a custom structure: /news/%postname%/
WHY?
-- friendlier readable links
-- search engine optimization
NOTES:
Wordpress won’t let you name two posts by the same name. Handy that!
You can edit the permalink of any post or page as you’re creating it
You can change your option later, but best to start out right! Links back to your pages won’t work if you change.
After the title is added, the title will show up in the Permalink
Use the EDIT option to customize the keywords in the link
For more info on Permalinks see: Wordpress Codex - http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
Under the Posts option
Edit existing posts
Add New
Tags
Categories
Type in the title
Add the text
Hit publish!
That’s it.
Really!
Makes news/blog page easier to scan.
Keeps that post at the top of the news page.
Rest of posts are reverse chronological orders
Stored in archives by month
Problem with adding images, make sure you add text to the “CAPTION” field to get the ALT text entered.
To get rid of the caption afterwards, edit the html OR go back to the image properties, delete caption. Add alt text in the Advanced section.
Very awkward
Click on the icon on the image itself to go back to edit settings for image
This deletes caption from displaying.
But use leaves those words in the ALT tag – see the Advanced settings.
Upload a bunch of photos
You can get the video embed code from YouTube, but this is easier and you can add video from many more places
Tons of settings
With the click of a button, the look changes.
From the APPEARANCE panel
-- Themes
Browse through them.
Click on the image to popup a preview and the ACTIVATE button
Click on ACTIVATE
When you visit the blog it will have a new look.
Appearance Add New Themes Make selections
These are all themes that have been checked by WordPress
Use your ftp program to copy the full folder with the theme into the Themes folder.
It will then be available when you return to your Themes admin panel.
Suffusion – example of a theme with tons of custom options built in.
Boxes of content
Lists of pages
Lists of categories for news items
Links to other resource
And much more
Lots of prebuilt widgets
Just drag and drop to the sidebar
Click to open and change settings
Some plugins will include new widgets – like the newgen gallery manager
Things to add to the sidebar – text boxes with basic info.
http://nplibrary.org/
Use the text widget to add content from other websites to the sidebar.
Some familiar 3rd party content includes: Librarything book feed, meebo chat widget, flickr photobadge and much more.
Plugins can add tools to help you administer your blog
And add features to the public side of your blog
Accessories!
Lists the plugins that are available on your install of WP
Click on Activate to use them.
Install and activate one at a time to test for possible conflicts.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
Need to sign up for an account with wordpress.com to activate this and Akismet
Both were created by the wordpress folks and make use of resources on the .com server.
You don’t need to blog on wordpress.com, you just need the account
Getting stats to load can be VERY slow sometimes.
For stats – you might also want to try google analytics – more detail.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
Adds your google analytics code to all your WP pages and posts
Requires API code from wordpress.com
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/
More on essential Plugins later!
Options for formatting the links for your News Posts
Default is UGLY! Not very human or search engine friendly
Numeric is ok, but doesn’t have keywords to help with search engine optimization
Consider the options that have year, month and keywords from title of post.
When you write a post, the title is used as the “postname” in the permalink
You can edit that when you first write the post – it’s the POST SLUG
Custom structure lets you create your own link structure.
This example uses “news” in front of all blog posts and adds the post-slug (post name) to the URL.
Create the PAGE you want to have as the main page.
I’m calling it WELCOME – you could call it anything.
Create a PAGE that will hold the blog posts too.
Call it NEWS or some such thing.
No content on this page!
Settings Reading
Change the Front Page Displays option to Static Page
Select HOME for the front Page
Select NEWS for the Posts Page.
Now when we click on NEWS we get the blog postings.
BUT look at that double link to the HOME page
Uh oh! We now have two tabs at the top that link to the main page
HOME
WELCOME
Default behaviour of WP is to have a LINK called HOME that goes to whatever page you designate as the start page.
Awkward.
Need to edit the header.php file to get rid of this! Not hard to do, just scary!
Look for the code inside that makes the default link to the home page on the navigation bar – it will be in the <UL id=nav> section.
Get rid of that line of code Leaving the rest intact.
Depending on the theme – there may be other lines of code. This is a simple example. But there will be one line that creates the HOME link and the a bunch of other code to create all the other links.
Yay, extra tab gone!
Used to be your pages made up the menu by default
And it was a bit fussy to add anything else.
Include pages, categories, external links, etc.
You may want to add additional information to each of your posts and have it be in a separate field so you can format it and display it in a special way.
Currently reading – if each of your post writers want to share something they’re reading.
Extra thumbnail image
Tip of the day.
Etc.
Custom Fields created with the MORE FIELDS plugin
Officially called Custom POST types – confusing,
I’ll use CONTENT
Method for creating a whole different type of content for your site.
Directory entries
Lists of databases
Materials that just aren’t going to fit in with your newsy POSTS or your fairly static PAGES.
Created with the MORE TYPES plugin
And uses the MORE FIELDS plugin to create the fiields
You won’t see this on your test blogs, since this is a multiple user installation, more than one person might be using the same theme files.
Editing these php files would affect anyone using that theme.
Twenty Ten files
Lets edit the Stylesheet.
Need to know a bit about CSS.
If you don’t know CSS, w3schools has great tutorials
http://www.w3schools.com/
A fun customized 404 - http://www.davidleeking.com/
The “404 file not found” page is an easy one to customize.
The code in bold/red is php code. It pulls in data from other files and from the database.
Examples of how PHP creates your website:
<?php get_header(); ?> - finds the header.php file and displays that data at the top of the page
<?php bloginfo('url'); ?> - goes to the database and finds the URL for the “bloginfo” field – that’s the URL for you website.
Some themes come with special template pages that vary from the regular layout
You can build your own template files too.
Handy to start with a theme that has some already built
And create new ones based on existing ones.
Documentation on building templates:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates
Easy way to start a template is find the page.php file and base your template on that
Save it with a new filename.php
Add the Template code info at the top of the file.
Try just deleting the <?php get_sidebar(); ?> line. That will delete the sidebar.
Upload the file to your themes folder
Create a new page and apply that template.
You should have a page without a sidebar.
This may not be a useful template for you, but it proves the process works.
Edit the rest of the file to your needs.
Ok, so this is the hard part! But it’s the best way to learn how the wordpress template code works.
Use the online tutorials or books with ideas.
WebDeveloper addon for Firefox is really handy for helping to identify the pieces of the page and css styles.
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ June 2009 version available for Firefox, Flock & Seamonkey
Will run on any platform that these browsers run on: windows, mac, linux
Adds toolbar and menu to browser. Select options from toolbar or menu to help you find what css elements you need to look for in the code files to modify the look of the blog.
Example: Information menu > Display element information = shows this is the ul .menu item. and show the attributes controlling the look of that section and what children that class has.
There are wonderful themes available from commercial developers.
Companies that repsect the GPL licensing
Pick and choose items from the menus to create a theme.
Save and upload to your server.
$49.95
Let’s say you love a particular theme, but you want to make some changes to customize it.
What happens when your chosen theme gets updated by the creator
All the customizing you’ve done to the template files and the css code will be lost!
Child themes to the rescue
The site is using the theme called TwentyTen – I could change that color and size code in the main style.css file for TwentyTen, but it would be wiped out when TwentyTen gets upgraded. Easy enough for a couple of simple changes, but what if you want to do a lot of customization?
Child Themes are brilliant!
-- set up
Set up a new theme directory
Add a STYLE.CSS file
In that file designate what theme to use as the base and import the styles from that theme
Activate the child theme and it should look EXACTLY like the PARENT THEME
Add new style rules to the child theme css file.
These styles will overrule anything in the original twentyten css file.
That goes for plugins & themes too
Plugins can get out of date.
Functionality may be built into a new version of WP
Or the developer may no longer support the plug in.
Deactivate
Then Delete
On demand backup of database tables
Or schedule the backup and have the file emailed to you.
http://johnmiedema.ca/portfolio/openbook-wordpress-plugin/
Simply add code to your page/post with the ISBN of a book in it.
[openbook booknumber="184195828X"]
Book cover will appear
WP Contact Form http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-contact-form/
Just one of many form plugins
CformsII – has tons of options, but is a bit more complicated to set up.
http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mobilepress/
Mick Jacobsen – Skokie IL PL
Main site is NOT WP
Mick Jacobsen of Skokie PL, Illinois is writing a section for the LTR
Separate sites for each topic.
Each blog has it’s own look and feel
Contributors have access to their blogs
Found it very easy to add content, images, videos.
Top menu bar takes users back to the main library website
There a sense of fragmentation at this point.
With changes in wordpress, the whole site could now be brought together under WP, instead of having a main stie and a bunch of blogs.
Suggests that the blog content in separate WP MU sites could be reintegrated into one site with CATEGORIES to distinguish the content.
PBC Library - Provinciaal Bibliotheekcentrum Antwerp Belgium
Regional Library System of 40 libraries
Central search for all libraries
Search catalog from the search boxes on the WP sides’
Lots of redirection to the catalog (note sidebar) and from within posts and pages
Hired a WP consultant to create a plugin that makes it very easy for those writing posts to link to the catalog easily.
Catalog has same page design, so feels pretty integrated
“WordPress’ user friendliness should make it easy to let library staff at the various libraries contribute articles to the blog, ensuring a lively, regularly updated blog/catalog.”
WordPress site integrated with Aquabrowser catalog - PBC, Antwerp, Belgium(http://isis.pbcantwerpen.be/)
Blog post about the project: http://goo.gl/Dgnw/
Casey Bisson
Created a set of amazing plugins that get data from your ILS and displays it in a fully functional search and display on a WordPress site.
Videos on flickr showing how it all works!
http://about.scriblio.net
Install the plugins