Hosting the testing and development of Puget Sound's Math/CS department site.
Below are some instructions for making changes to the website through WordPress and/or the actual PHP code.
You can log into the WordPress administration interface through virtually any web browser by going to the wp-admin page. If you need credentials to log in, ask Carl Toews, Giot Concepcion or Kyle Wenholz.
After logging in, use the menu bar to the left and select "Faculty". You'll be taken to a page with "Faculty" displayed at the top and a list of the current members below. Click the link "Add New Faculty Member" next to the title at the top or on your left menu bar. Fill in all of the appropriate information asked for in "Faculty Member Info". Avoid using the "Custom Fields" section, since this is intended for advanced users. Once you have filled in the appropriate information, click the "Publish" button inside of the "Publish" box to the right hand side.
After logging in, use the menu bar to the left and select "Seminar". You'll
be taken to a page with "Seminar" displayed at the top and a list of the
current seminars below. Click the link "Add New Seminar" next to the
title at the top or on your left menu bar. Fill in all of the appropriate
information asked for in "Enter Title Here" and "Seminar Info". You should
put abstracts in the large text box in the center of the page. Avoid using
the "Custom Fields" section, since this is intended for advanced users.
Once you have filled in the appropriate information, click the "Publish"
button inside of the "Publish" box to the right hand side.
Currently, the Tutoring and Academics pages can be edited through the WordPress backend by clicking the Pages menu item and selecting one of these pages.
The Home, Faculty, and Seminar pages are all specialized enough that their layouts are specified in specifice PHP files in within the theme (all located at the root theme directory level). Below is a last of the specific file(s) which must be edited in order to change the page layout. Not that accompanying CSS changes may also be necessary, depending on the type of layout change desired.
- Home Page = index.php
- Faculty Page = page-faculty.php
- Seminar Pages
- Current/Upcoming Seminars = page-upcoming_seminars.php
- Past Seminars = archive-seminar.php
All theme updates should be managed through this GitHub repo, and tested on a separate instance of WordPress before being installed on the live site. Once the updates have been tested and approved, the updated theme directory can be uploaded via FTP:
- Navigate to the theme directory within WordPress:
/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/themes - Overwrite the contents of the
math-cs-upsdirectory with the updated theme files
Themes can also be updated via the WordPress backend, but the process is slightly complicated due to the fact that we're running WordPress in multisite mode. More info here about administration of themes and other elements for WordPress Multisite: http://codex.wordpress.org/Multisite_Network_Administration#Themes
We used the Bones Development Theme as a starting point for our theme. It provided a mobile-first and responsive "bare bones" starting point, which allowed us to focus fully on designing the site and avoid all the setup pieces required in creating a new WOrdPress theme.
This theme was developed for and tested on WordPress version 3.5.1. Any subsequent version updates should be tested on a separate instance of WordPress to ensure compatibility before making the update on the live site.
For a great introduction to the stucture of a WordPress theme, see this infographic by the fine folks at Yoast. This will give you a good idea of the basics.
Our theme goes a couple of steps further by using Custom Post Types to allow users to enter Faculty and Seminar data, and then using Custom Page Templates to display these custom posts in a particular way.
This theme can be installed in any instance of WordPress by copying the math-cs-ups theme directory and all its contents to the WordPress themes directory via FTP:
- Navigate to the theme directory within WordPress:
/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/themes - Copy (or overwrite if you're updating the theme) the
math-cs-upsdirectory and its contents here