Teaching Faculty at UMW may now take control of their online biography posted on the UMW Website. Using the WordPress profiles, faculty can add their blog feeds, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, and a host of other content. In addition, any news releases written about that faculty member will automatically aggregate to their bio. All data is taken from Banner web services, so faculty course listings, department affiliations, contact info is all automatically rendered to the page! Are you a department web administrator? You can now generate an automatic listing of current teaching faculty in your department. Here is how > We invite all teaching faculty at UMW to login to http://www.umw.edu/faculty/wp-admin/profile.php and customize your faculty personal page today. This is a great way to create an online aggregation of your scholarly work, and your day-to-day commentary within the online space. It's a great showcase for you, and for UMW. Individual faculty data managed … [Read more...]
Building Top Bar Navigation For Your Site
Did you know you are not locked into using only the side links on your site? Lots of folks have been learning how to add a navigation bar to the top. We have put together a tutorial to enable you to do this on your own. Just know that a top navigation bar requires that you be more thoughtful about the length of your links and the number of links. Top bar navigation has to fit within the page, unlike a sidebar that can scroll down for a long time. If you think you'd like to explore using top bar navigation, either in conjunction with a sidebar or in addition to it, this is the tutorial for you! … [Read more...]
Website Logins Disabled for Maintenance, July 13-14, 2012
Due to systems maintenance, the UMW Website Wordpress logins (NOT UMW Blogs) will be disabled on Friday, July 13 and Saturday, July 14. The website will remain live during this time. Information Technologies will be performing network maintenance. The UMW Web team will be upgrading to the latest WordPress version and updating plugins. We will notify you of the changes once they are complete, and let you know when you can login again. Meanwhile, if you anticipate having to make changes to your site, please complete them by 8:00 am on Friday, July 13. … [Read more...]
Need Site Statistics? Now, it’s In There!
Now you can collect statistics on your site visitors using the Jetpack stats plugin. We've had the plugin activated on UMW.EDU for some time, monitoring it on selected sites to make sure it would work within our multi-network environment. We are proud now to roll this out to ALL sites on the UMW.EDU WordPress domain. Jetpack Site Stats allows you to view visitors on your sites and track your most popular content. With Jetpack Site Stats, you can get an at-a-glance view of basic information on the number of visits, the search terms/referrers that brought them to your site, the top pages or posts, and the number of clicks off your site and where they went to. Jetpack Site Stats began accumulating once it was installed for your site. If you are in need of statistics that precede the date when Jetpack was installed on your site, please contact the UMW Web Team and make a request for a Google Analytics report, including the site URL and the date range (earliest date is 10/7/2011, … [Read more...]
Making Professional-Looking Email Newsletters
If you've ever wanted a reliable way to send out professional html newsletters, instead of attaching a PDF file, here is your chance. UMW.EDU websites are equipped with plugins to help you create great looking html emails, to allow folks to subscribe/unsubscribe, and to manage your mailing lists all in one location. Using the Gravity Forms plugin, and a FREE online service called MailChimp, you can say goodbye to the PDF newsletter and hello to a better way. LEARN HOW> … [Read more...]
What We Did Today: WordPress Updates
As you know, logins were disabled this morning to allow us to perform updates to Wordpress. These were tested in our staging environment, but please let us know if you perceive any weirdness in your sites. Here is what we updated: Updated WordPress from 3.3.1 to 3.3.2 Updated Plugins Akismet – from 2.5.5 to 2.5.6 Business Hours – from 1.2 to 1.3.2 BWP Google XML Sitemaps – from 1.1.6 to 1.2.1 CMS Tree Page View – from 0.8.4 to 0.8.11 Feedburner Email Widget – from 1.1.5 to 1.1.6 Genesis Nav Menu Amplified – from 1.0 to 1.0.1 Gravity Forms – from 1.6.2 to 1.6.3.3.4 Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types – from 3 to 3.0.1 Image Widget – from 3.2.11 to 3.3.3 Jetpack by WordPress.com – from 1.2.2 to 1.3 MCE Table Buttons – from 1.0.4 to 1.5 Network Privacy – from 0.1.1 to 0.1.2 Page Links To – from 2.6 to 2.7.1 Post Expirator – from 1.5.1 to 1.5.3 TubePress – from 2.2.9 to 2.4.2 Types – Complete Solution for Custom Fields and Types – from 0.9.4.2 to … [Read more...]
Gravity Forms Not Submitting? Check your “Spam” List
We just heard from a department that was not receiving emails through its Gravity Forms, and a particular user was not getting a confirmation. It was then discovered that they wound up in the "spam" listing of their forms. If you are concerned about receiving ALL of the entries from your Gravity Forms, be sure to check the spam folder. Here's a tutorial > … [Read more...]
How Much Do You Know About WordPress Roles and Permissions?
As a Wordpress site administrator, you can add users and assign them different permission levels. These permission levels get pretty granular. For instance, you may want some folks to draft things, but have them reviewed before publishing them. You may want to share site administration with another person (always a good idea), or allow other people broader privileges to edit other's content or upload files. The Wordpress.org codex has a very detailed breakdown of what all of these user roles mean. Bookmark this site as a reference for when you assign permissions to different people to edit your sites. http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities Happy Wordpress! … [Read more...]
New Tutorial on Managing the Users on your Site
Did you know that you can add users on your site yourself, without the intrusion of the system administrator or webmaster? Did you also know that everyone in your department is automatically an "Author" on your site? To find out about what all this means, plus how to use Wordpress user management tools in UMW.EDU, visit the new tutorial video and instructions > … [Read more...]
Randomize Your Slideshows!
Now you can click a button and have your Wordpress slideshows display in random order! For more, visit the tutorial at http://technology.umw.edu/wordpress101/make-it-spiffy/department-home-page-design/making-a-slideshow/ … [Read more...]
