FAQ Group: WordPress environment

The WordPress Codex is the official documentation site for WordPress.

The University maintains a site license for the entire LinkedIn Learning online training library, which includes thousands of WordPress training videos. Visit linkedinlearning.princeton.edu and log in with your Princeton netID to access their library from anywhere.

The production WordPress servers are locked down, secure environments.

Web Development Services tests all themes and plugins for security problems, compatibility problems, user experience issues, and performance issues before deploying them to the live servers.

With over 58,000 plugins and 8,600 themes on WordPress.org alone, not all of them play nicely with each other or with the latest version of WordPress. Not all are designed for a multisite environment, and some can kill performance on high traffic servers. Some plugins are banned by our hosting provider, Pantheon.

WordPress, itself, and all plugins and themes are uploaded to a separate version-controlled repository, then deployed via scripts to the QA and production web servers. This allows us to quickly roll back to a previous version of the environment if we discover a problematic plugin or theme.

We tried to mimic many of WordPress.com's features, and we have added many other plugins based on feedback.

To simplify the interface for casual users, not all plugins are activated across the network. Site administrators can activate certain plugins just for their site. These include a Poll/Survey plugin, an FAQ plugin, and a LaTeX plugin.

We welcome suggestions for added functionality and new themes to add to our WordPress environment. Please use the Contact link above.

As long as your site is active and does not violate University policies, we will continue to host your site. However, if your site has been inactive for three (3) years, we reserve the right to remove your site from our servers.

We ask that each site request designates an administrative contact and a technical contact. These designated individuals become the site owner(s). Before deleting an inactive site, we will attempt to contact a site owner. If none of the designated site owners are still with the University, we will contact another individual within the administrative contact's former department. If your site has a sponsor organization, such as the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students or Princeton in Asia, we will also coordinate with that organization.

With the site owner, we will discuss options for archiving an inactive site's content before removing it from our servers.

1. Edit the page onto which you want to insert the video. If you are using the Block Editor, paste the oEmbed URL for the video right into the content area, and it will automatically transform into a preview player for your video.
2. If you are using the Classic Editor, paste the oEmbed link right into the content area, on its own line. That link should automatically transform into a preview of your video.
3. You can find the oEmbed link by viewing the Media Central video in a new tab in your browser, clicking the "Share" button beneath the video, and then clicking the "oEmbed" tab.
4. To add the video, you can also click the "Add Media" button in the WYSIWYG toolbar.
5. On the left sidebar of the dialog, click the "Insert from URL" link, then paste in the oEmbed link for your Media Central video.
6. After you paste in the link, a preview of the video should load. Click the "insert into page" button on the bottom right.