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Princeton WordPress Quickstart Guide

Wordpress 3.8 admin interfaceThe following post is a quick overview of creating content in WordPress. The full text of the guide is after the break.

(Updated for WordPress 3.8)

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Tutorials

Carousel of Zodiac Heads

The new installation of monumental sculptures in front of Robertson Hall is the perfect opportunity to show off the Jetpack plugin's new Carousel feature, which extends the WordPress native gallery feature with a presentation overlay that dynamically expands to fill the entire browser window.

Below are photographs of Ai Weiwei’s “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” that I recently. A second gallery of closeups and some basic instructions for adding galleries follow.

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Tutorials

Activating Jetpack Comments

PU netID, WordPress.com, Facebook, Twitter
There can be more than one.

A recent addition to the Jetpack “mega-plugin” is a feature that WordPress.com users have enjoyed for over a year  — the ability for Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress.com users to authenticate in the comment form and use that identity to leave a comment. Native users (in our case, Princeton netID users) can still use that identity to comment.

Active WordPress.com users, may remember this comment system’s code name, Highlander Comments. There can be only more than one?

Other comment plugins offer multiple authentication options, namely Disqus and IntenseDebate; however, those systems store the comments on external servers, and the JavaScript to load those comments can be a bit slow. The Jetpack Comments feature just builds off of the native WordPress comment system.

jetpack comments
Jetpack Comments activation button

We will be enabling Jetpack Comments for all new sites on our network. Administrators for existing sites will have to go into the Jetpack area of the WordPress admin interface and click the blue "Activate" button. If the default WordPress comment system is preferred, site admins can deactivate that feature on the same admin page.

For more information about Jetpack Comments, check out the documentation on Jetpack.me.

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Tutorials

Launching Your Site

Updated February 14, 2014, for WordPress 3.8

New sites on our WordPress network are already "live" on production servers; however, there are a few items that you should review and some settings that you should change to make your site ready for visitors.

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Tutorials

WordPress Tutorial on Lynda.com

Lynda screenshotLynda.com is an online training and tutorial library available to the entire Princeton community. It contains training materials on many topics including WordPress

Log in to Lynda at http://lynda.princeton.edu and search for 'WordPress 3 Essential Training'

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Tutorials

Custom CSS

Edit CSS menu optionAlthough there are thousands of WordPress themes out in the wild, we will be initially making available only a small collection of "curated" themes. These themes will have a small amount of Princeton University branding. Most will be minimalist, with neutral colors, and some will have configurable options. As the service grows, so will our theme offerings.

However, site owners sometimes want to deviate from the default appearance of the themes, or they might (for some inexplicable reason) want to eliminate all traces of orange and black. Sites in our Roxen CMS environment have the custom.css file, and we wanted to offer a similar option with WordPress.

Fortunately, Automattic, the commercial entity behind WordPress.com, created a plugin that provides this feature. Site admins will find an "Edit CSS" menu under the Appearance section in the left navigation of wp-admin.