 Okay. So again, this is a beginner's guide to WordPress. Welcome to the workshop. I'm Dr. Anne Lydia McDivitt. I'm the Digital Humanities Librarian for the University Libraries at the University of Alabama. Let's talk about WordPress. First, what is WordPress? And WordPress is an open source platform. And some people might not know what that means. So open source means that copyright holder grants the users the right to use, change, distribute all the content, including the source code for any purpose. So this can all be edited and it's all free. It is a content management system, which means that it is software that's used to manage digital content. Pretty easy to figure out. It has a content management application backend, which I will call the dashboard, and a front end user interface, which is usually the website. It's really good for blogging. That's what it was primarily used for to begin with. But it's also customizable. So you can make it really anything that you want it to be. And so why WordPress? Why would you pick WordPress? And one, it is a free platform. So you don't have to pay anything to actually use WordPress as a platform itself. You do have to have a host for WordPress that you do usually have to pay for. I'll talk about that a bit. But WordPress itself is free. And it is open source with a robust support, as I mentioned. And that means that there are insane amounts of WordPress forums. You can go in with a question. I've had the most ridiculous questions answered for me. It's fantastic. As seen by my exclamation point, plugins are a good reason to use WordPress because plugins make it so customizable. You can do anything with WordPress that you can really think of via plugins. One of my favorites is that I have a Ph.D. in history. So I like to use footnotes a lot. And footnotes don't come native in WordPress. So you can just install a plugin that helps you do footnotes. And it will have native footnotes in your text. And finally, accessibility options. And I'll talk a little bit more about this down the line. But it is very accessible in terms of screen readers. And there's so much customization that can be done that makes it even more accessible. And it's not hard to make that happen. How to get started with WordPress? One option is me. I work with the Alabama Digital Humanities Center. And part of what I do is actually help people build projects. So the ADHC can actually host projects for faculty and graduate students. That way you don't actually have to pay for any kind of post service. So that's one way to get started. Another is Reclaim Hosting. And I will click on that and show you. Reclaim Hosting. And so Reclaim Hosting is actually, well, hold on to the screen sharing pause. Everybody can see this now. So this is Reclaim Hosting. And Reclaim is specifically meant for academics to use. And graduate students as well. So they have a very affordable scheme for hosting. It also has a domain that you can use with this. And they have one-click installs, which are fantastic. And I highly, highly, highly, highly, highly recommend if you are going to get a host elsewhere that you find a host that does the one-click installs. Because that will make your life so much easier. And it makes, it makes for a fantastic time with WordPress, because you can just get in immediately, essentially. I think that Reclaim Hosting is like $30 a year for the very basic plan. So it's not too terrible. But that is one of the things that I would recommend. So there are basic elements of WordPress. And those are posts, pages, plugins, themes, and customization. And we're going to talk about all of those today, which sounds like a lot, but I promise that it's manageable. But all of these are how you actually will build out your WordPress site. And so let's actually do a demo. And I have built out a clean dashboard. Can everyone see this? Just let me know real quick in like chat or something that you can see this. Okay, great. Awesome. So this is what your dashboard is pretty much always going to look like on WordPress.org installation. It's pretty basic at this point. Once you start customizing it, it obviously can get a lot more intense. But this is the current version that I have. This is a very, very clean installation. So very, very beginning. There's only one thing that I've added to this, but that's a surprise. So let's talk a little bit about what we've got here. As I mentioned, there's posts, there's media, there's pages, there's appearance, plugins, and then you have users, tools, settings. And so most of what WordPress is built on are these posts and these pages. And so if you click on pages, you'll see that there's a private policy and a sample page. You can do a home page if you'd like. And then posts are more of where like the blogging aspect of it might come in. But it can be used for quite a lot. So let's actually figure out what we're going to do with the posts. So let's add a post. Yes, I have a separate question. Yep. Can you host multiple different websites with the same WordPress installation or you have to have multiple installations to host different sites? Like, is there a verse proxy built in? So that's actually a really good question. There are versions of multi sites that you can do. But I personally don't recommend it. It makes things a little bit complicated when you're dealing with updates and trying to make sure that all your content is correct. I usually do a completely clean install for a new site. That's that's how I do it. So let's look at a post. So this is actually got the default theme. So it's this lovely shade of green. And this is what you're going to get when you start with a post. Like I said, this is more of the blogging style that you might run into with WordPress. Let's have a title and we can type in. So that looks kind of strange. It's just a title and some text. So how would you actually add to this to make it look like something? And that is this little plus sign here. They call it use of blocks. It's the Gutenberg editor. And so you can do things like a paragraph or you can add a heading, a list. You can do a pull quote or pull quote and then a regular quote. Tables, images, galleries. So really, there's a lot here that you could choose from. You could do media and text, which is kind of nice. Page breaks. It's really a matter of what you're actually trying to accomplish with this page. But say that we want an image, but I don't have an image yet. I haven't uploaded anything on here. So how would we upload an image? We could go to the media library and do that. We could do it from a URL. But I'm going to show you how to upload. And so we're going to upload. And where did it go? It's a delightful picture of my cat. That is the image that we're going to use. We can add a caption. So Maxwell is his name. And also you want to make sure that you use the alt text. So I was talking about accessibility earlier. And alt text is a good place to make sure that things are accessible. So say Maxwell. You don't really have to go very, very in depth with the alt text. But actually, you don't want to go extremely in depth with the alt text because then you're just going to get like a bombardedness of text. So try and think of something basic that just describes what you're looking at. You can choose the size of the image. So it's really a matter of what you're actually trying to pull off. If you want to do a actual custom version, you could do that. If you want to change your borders, you can do that. And so now we have my little picture of Maxwell here. And if we wanted to do another paragraph or something below that. Again, this is kind of a basic version. You can make some really interesting and great looking posts. This is not one of them. But it is an option. I also want to talk to you guys about the categories and the tags. Because those can kind of chirp people up sometimes. Categories tend to be general topics. So if this was a blog post about my cat, then you could say cat as the general topic. Tagging is more of the specifics about it. So if I'm talking about what Maxwell likes to play with, then you could tag it with cat toys, like cat playing, that kind of thing so that people know that that's the specific kind of thing you're using here. You can do add new category there. You can do add new tag there with commas. And so that is how you would do the categories of tags. And you would end up just publishing this. And this is going to look silly. But there's our post with Maxwell. So does all of that make sense in terms of how we're doing a post and how the blog editor works? Cool. You can also do categories here. You can just add new category. You can choose what slug you're going to use. And you can choose a parent category if needed. Give a description. That way you're able to categorize things ahead of time. You can also do the same thing with tags here that you can add tags that you're going to be using ahead of time. That's all under posts. And under this post menu, once again, there's an add new section here. And that's how you make a new one. I am recording it. So I'm going to try and make this available later. Because I know that this is a lot of information to throw at people at once. So I want to make sure that if there's something that somebody missed that they can come back and actually see, okay, this is what she was doing. Hope that helps. Okay. I was talking about the media library. That's here. And so we see that I have the picture of Maxwell that I uploaded earlier. If you wanted to add things ahead of time, you could add new. You can drop and put them in there or you can select files like I'm doing. Let's put another picture of Maxwell on because why not? This time he has Maxwell and cardboard Halloween. You can go ahead and do your default here. Your default captions or your descriptions. You can change the title if you'd like. So it's not just the generic whatever your iPhone said that it was going to be. But now this is going to be available if I go back into posts. And so I go back to this one. And I want to add another image of the media library this time. And now that picture is available to put in. And there he is. So and the old text is already in there. So all that's already set. So that's an easy way if you're going to do something ahead of time that especially has a lot of images. Then you can just put them all in the media library to begin with. And then you can insert them into the post. So let's talk now about pages. Unless somebody has any questions about posts. With the pages, we're going to once again add new. And it looks the exact same. So you have the title, you have the block editor. All of that is the exact same. The difference in pages and posts is that a page is more of a static content. Well, page. So when you go to a website, you normally have like a home page or an about page. Some kind of static page like that. That's what this is. So you could do an about page. You have about text. You can enter images again like you could anything else because it's the exact same Gutenberg. You want to do like a media and text. You could do that. You can pick from the media library and put him here. And then you can So then you can have like a side by side. But this is all going to show up as a static page. Whereas the other is more of the blogging format. You can still do elements such as like having a featured image. And also, I guess I should have mentioned that you can make things public or private. And you can also schedule things, which is great for when you're writing posts ahead of time. But if we were to publish this about page. Now we have this. So the pages make sense. So let's talk about plugins. As I was saying, plugins are how you customize your WordPress installation. And this was my secret thing that I've already done. I've already added one plugin in here so I can auto update things. But ultimately, it's going to have your Hello, Dolly, and it's going to have your XMET anti-spam. Those are the two that it always comes with. You can activate those if you want. I think that XMET is good. Date selection option, like, yes. Okay, so I will show you that. Let's say that we are doing And so we want to do instead of the publish immediately, say we want to publish it later today at 10 p.m. And so then you just click and it will say here. Now it's going to 20 p.m. There we go. So to publish later, and then you would just hit schedule instead of publish. And it will just automatically go up once you've done that schedule. No problem. So plugins. This one is good. I really like having XMET anti-spam. Anti-spam is a good thing to have. The Hello, Dolly is more of a thing that WordPress does. I usually delete it, but that's totally up to you. So let's add a plugin. And so we have the add new here. And you can see there's some of the ones that people usually use. One that is very, very popular with folks that I work with tends to be Elementor. And so this is a website builder. It's basically a drag and drop to make things the way that you want them to look. There is a paid version, but there's also a pretty robust free version. So it can make your website look pretty nice. So we see Elementor. We see that it's last updated a week ago. It's compatible with my version of WordPress. It has a ton of active installations. It's well-liked. So yes, we want that one. Install now. Install. Activate. Now, if we look in our plugin section here, we have Elementor that is active, and we also have a new Elementor menu in our dashboard. So that can change how it would actually look if you go to the front end, then you can actually just drag and drop and play with Elementor. It's a pretty good plugin. I like it quite a bit. So that is how you would add in a plugin. There are tons and tons of plugins. I've actually, I tend to work with humanities folks, but I have recently expanded into other fields. And I figured out how to use plugins to do more of a markdown text, which is nice. So there's just basically anything you could think of. That's where you want to go. And that's how you really make this WordPress site, your WordPress site, and make it do what you want it to do. Because it's not going to do everything you want straight out of the box. But that's what plugins are for. Does all that make sense? Okay. So I mentioned earlier that themes are how we're going to change the look of our site. If we actually look at our site right now, it is very green, has some things that we've done now. But this is essentially the generic initial theme that you would get with WordPress, which is fine. But you could do a lot more that I think would look better. So one thing I want to show you first is that if you go to WordPress.org and you click on themes, they have a bunch of themes here that you can choose from. And there is this thing called feature filter. And you can click accessibility ready and apply that filter. And it shows you a bunch of themes that are out of the box. Accessible screen reader can read them fine. This is really great for us in education because we don't really have to worry about having to do accessibility checks because all of these are already built in accessible. I still recommend doing accessibility checks. But this is a good way to start. There's tons of different themes. You can really figure out what you want it to look like and make it look like that. So just check and see, like, okay, well, I like this one. I'm going to try and install that one. So what you would do is go to appearance and themes. And right now, this is our generic one that we have active. But we want to add new. And one that I use often is called Minava. And you would just hit install, activate. Now it looks very different. It still is not perfect, but it's different. So we have a new theme. One thing you can also do is add another theme. You can preview a theme ahead of time and see what it actually looks like before you install it. And that's pretty cool. And then when you install, activate, and we can see, okay, that's what this one looks like. Also a little different. But it's a usable site. We have a menu. We have a title. We have a subtitle. We have an image here that we can put in. And then we have pages and posts and things like that that are all here. Again, it is not the prettiest thing because there are other things that you can do with these themes. And that can always be found in this little customize section. And I want to show you that customize is in a few places. You can find customize here in the theme section. You can find customize underneath themes in the appearance section. And when you're on the main page and logged in, you can find customize up here. So they really want you to know that customize is something that's available. So if we click on customize, then we have a little menu here that gives us options on what we're doing. So we want to look at theme options. Here we can change colors. We can change typography. We can change our layout. So if you want to do a box instead of a full width page, you can do that. We have the site identity. This is the one thing that I really, really, really, really always emphasize when I teach students. Every single WordPress site comes with this just another WordPress site subtitle. Please get rid of it. You can put whatever tagline you want on there. If you don't even want a title, you can get rid of that there. But please just get rid of it. Just another WordPress site because if you don't, then everybody's going to know, okay, well, you just use the generic thing. You didn't bother to even delete that. So now we have that gone. That is gone. That makes everybody feel better. You can add in logos here if you'd like with this one. This particular one has header media that you can change. You can do background images, colors. Home page settings is going to be on every single theme. And you can always use latest posts, which is more the blog format or a static page. So if you wanted to have a static home page or say we're going to do a static page, this our about page, then now our about page is our landing page. And then our post page, you know, we could choose whatever that's going to be. And then the post would show up there. So you have an option here on what you're actually going to come into when you come into the site. But the home page settings is always going to be in customize. And that's where you change that. Is all that makes sense? You want to get really fancy. You can also play with some widgets and some CSS. One of the great things about how customize works is that it gives you these little pencils here. And say you don't want the recent comments to show up. You can click on the pencil and it'll pull it up in the sidebar. And you can just get rid of things that you don't want. So let's remove block. Let's remove our archives block. So now we have like a recent post categories of search. And so it looks a little bit cleaner. Or if you wanted to put the pencil down here and change your your footer credits. That's something that you can do. You can put in some imagery. I usually do a ADHD footer, but that does take a little bit of coding. So you'd have to look and see how to do that. But it is possible. So this is going to help you a lot in terms of making the website look the way that you wanted to. Instead of just being the generic theme that comes straight out of the box. Once again, Elementor can also be used to make a really nice looking home page on any of the themes that you pick. But I'm not going to show you how to do that. That one can get a little messy. Also menus. There are two different places that you can find menus. So once again in the dashboard, we have menus here. And so we have menu settings. Also in customize, we have menus. So if you want to have specific pages show up, then you need to make sure that it's in your menu. One of the things that I like to do is just to create the menu here. And one will do primary menu. And then I usually click this automatically add new top level pages to this menu. So whenever I create a new page that I want to go on there, it's going to pop in immediately on the menu. Unless it's private, in which case it's not going to. But that's really helpful because sometimes you can forget to add in the new pages to the menu. So this will do it automatically for you. And we can also add some items. We could do home, do about, add our sample page. If you wanted to do a category page, you could do that. So if you had one particular category of teaching, then you could put a category for teaching and make only things that are categorized as teaching show up here. If we publish now, so now we have a workable menu. And if I were to add a new page, you were to refresh this. Now we have our new page. It's automatically going to show up here. Does that make sense? Cool. So that's an easy way to make sure that you're actually making sure the content that you build is showing up because you don't really want to build out this great new page of content that you've built and then no one's able to see it. But you can always make things private so that they don't show up except for in your dashboard menu. And that's helpful when you're actually just building something but you're not ready for people to see it yet. Just make it private. No one can see it but you and it makes it a little bit easier to have some confidence that you're going to be able to make something that's great, that's helpful. And then when you're ready, you can just hit publish. It'll show up. Just some other quick notes. With users, if you needed to add other users, that's where you would do it. If you need to change a password, that's where you would do it. You can also change, like my role as administrator, if you need to change somebody else's roles, you can do that here. And then another quick note that is a minor thing, doesn't matter a whole lot, is this permalink section under settings. You can choose how your permalinks are going to look. So I like to do post name so that it'll say, you know, the URL slash workshop slash whatever that page is called or that post is called. And that way it's not just like a gobbledygook of numbers. It's something that actually is meaningful and it's somewhat easy to find and you just save those changes. It's a very, very minor note. A lot of people don't care a whole lot about that but it does make things a little bit easier to find. So that is the basics of this that I had ready for you today. I think that in terms of my, that is it in terms of my plan demo. So I can take questions if you want to play around and like ask me to do things here. Just let me know what you want me to try out and I can show you if you need me to cover something again. Let me know. Otherwise, you guys are free. Yes. So I'm a computer science major and I focus on the security side of things and from my understanding WordPress tends to be pretty insecure. You know what it makes it insecure? Is it the plugins? Is it themes? Like how, you know what I mean? How can you avoid that? Yeah. Okay. So the best way to avoid having issues with WordPress is keeping everything updated constantly. So if you remember, I told you guys at the very beginning that I have this infinite WP client installed. That was the only thing that I cheated on by having the something set up already which my updates are due on Friday. Keep your plugins updated. Keep your themes updated. Keep your WordPress updated. You should be fine. That's typically what I recommend. Also you can disable comments which is nice because those can get spammy. But yeah, that's my recommendation is update, update, update, update, always update. You can even set things to auto update which is great and unless you're dealing with something that's a little bit testy because then it might break stuff. Sure. Another question is and I don't know if you covered this but most of the UA systems websites are those all WordPress with like a custom theme that somebody at UA made? Yeah. So a lot of the UA pages are built in WordPress and there is a specific UA template that I think Stratcom has made that you have to contact them to get. Sure. But yeah, most of them are WordPress. Okay. And then I'm assuming that they all use like the drag and drop builder inside of here like saying, you know, same as everybody else or do you guys use like Elementor or? I mean, I'm not sure how they do it. How I do things tends to depend on what kind of project I'm building. Okay. Some of them you can just use a basic theme and customize it enough that it looks fine. Like the ADHC's website is that. Okay. But Elementor is nice when you're trying to bring in a little bit more of a snazzy look. Okay. Sure. Thank you. And sure. The anti-spam. There are, there's this plugin here that you can activate. There are other plugins that you can use. As I mentioned, Disabling Comments also is a good way to prevent the spam because that does happen. But if you are wanting to build a site that people can actually interact with and you don't want to disable comments, you might actually just want to make it so that only like verified WordPress users that are logged in can comment. So that's what I would recommend. Okay. Does UA have any consultation for WordPress? Like if I want to make my very own account and blogging site and WordPress, can you refer me to someone or some site video? I can help. I'm more than happy to help people figure out how to get started with a WordPress site. Where's my contact information? There you go. That's my contact information. I am more than happy to set up a consultation to get people started. They don't actually have to use our server if they don't want to. If you want to use a reclaim server, but then still talk to me about like, how do I actually get going with this? More than happy to help you. I'm sure there are other resources on campus and I'm sure that there are great tutorials online, but that's what I can tell you right now is that I can also help. In terms of doing it in other languages, interesting. I've never really tried that, but it might be, how would we figure that out? Site language. There we go. So you can choose what language your site is going to be available in. So I think that would be able to to fix that problem. Did I have the one that you are looking for? I'm not sure. But yes, site language is in the settings in general. Are there any other questions or anything else you want me to try out or show? Oh, yeah, it does have your language. Fantastic. So that's how you do it is go to settings and then general and change the site language. Well, if there's nothing else, like said, here's my contact information. You guys can also find me through the ADHC. You can send a consultation request if you'd like. Thank you guys for coming. I hope that this was very helpful and I'm hoping to do more of these in the future. And I'm going to figure out how to share this video as well. So if you have anything that you missed that you'd be able to catch up on it. So thank you guys. And I appreciate your time. And we have now learned some of the basics of WordPress.