 Yes, we're back for another session and this will be a brief introduction to What has been termed splots other folks have called them tiny teaching tools? They can be thought of as site templates which we'll discuss but in the end the term splot Which it's not very clear what it means has kind of won out. I think and what is this plot? Well, actually, it's it came from Canada This is the spot that see a website and According to Laura Brian lamb and Alan Levine working at Thompson River University. They actually We're talking about a way to make a site that is as easy as possible for folks to install And it's kind of pre-popular. It's a rather than seeing the hello world What you have is you have plugins installed theme set up and you can just get up and running that could be a writing tool that could be an image collecting tool that could be a Portfolio tool all these things so in fact they went about actually creating a whole series of different tools The splot box, which is kind of like a media collector splot point, which is kind of like a word I mean a PowerPoint Using WordPress a DS 106 assignment bank near and dear to my heart and then a kind of abstraction of that with the daily blank TRU collector, which is a tool we'll probably look at Sounder etc. So the writer is another one all of these tools though are built on top of WordPress And so one of the things we hear about from folks is that you've kind of conflated splots with WordPress and That's only because I think Alan who's developed most of these develops in WordPress. So that's why the splot has been kind of conflated with the idea of WordPress, but it may not be you can create a template on top of a Drupal on top of Omega on top of Scalar etc. Pretty much any application that is one click installer The difference between a splot and say a template though or a templated site is that a splot is Independent it has its own one-click installer and it's updated and managed independently from say a WordPress instance on your server So that's one thing to keep in mind all of these or at least several of these tools the TRU collector the Several portfolio sites as well as the TRU writer are actually now Independent Applications that can be installed using a one-click install. In fact, this is a good place Lauren for us to look at how that works in C battle All right, so we're back in my state UC panel account that I set up earlier today And I've just essentially gone to the all application section and you can see here that While there's a quite a few applications that I can install under this featured Applications space and by the way, we can add additional or take away different applications here So this list that you feature is customizable But you'll see a few here called a big picture dimensions highlights true collector true writer that should look a little familiar now after Jim's overview of spots because these are essentially custom installers that are built on top of WordPress that have Themes and plugins already installed and configured So I'm going to click install this application and I'm just going to install it on my main domain here Whereas the forehand for beginner users when installing WordPress for the first time you see that blank hello world page It's kind of hard to know where to start There's so many themes out there so many plugins and when you're just beginning you don't really know where to begin And so the beauty of these custom installers these spots or site templates that you all can create is you're essentially Showing them the potential of existing Pre-approved themes and plugins that already have site content generated inside of it So now when I go to Lauren Hanks dot state you dot org. I'm not going to see that blank hello world page I'm going to see a Theme that's already been set up that already has pictures and text involved so you can see exactly how that theme looks So for a user who's figuring out the basics and playing around with an application They're not going in saying. Where do I go to begin? They're going Okay, how do I change this image here? Where do I change this text and it keeps it sort of slingshots the thinking forward a bit into this space where You're not trying to figure out how to play with WordPress. You're trying to figure out how to customize an existing setup And so it's really quite quite quite special. I think for users. So this is just one example of a spot We also have a couple more as jim suggested So I just installed big picture, but there's also a dimensions calling card theme And if you see the screenshot here, it's going to look exactly like our state you landing page so I love that our state you landing page is a splot effectively You basically took the splot idea and created a landing page for communities So this is actually built on top of a splot on top of that dimension Uh, I think yeah the dimensions calling card theme where we essentially just customize it and add it in our own text So that's an example. Um, I know so we're going to kind of move into a space here shortly where we can all Um kind of build out our own site templates So that's probably a good distinction to make is that you can create these site templates for your users However, it's not going to look exactly the same. Uh, we've obviously worked with alan to to build out these custom installer packages Uh for what we're calling splots A site template is something that we can kind of do it ourselves. It's a diy version of a splot So you all as administrators administrators can create your own, but it's not going to look like a custom installer It will actually be You know available when the user goes to install an application So if I go to install wordpress here and I scroll down a bit It's going to give me an option to install I think install a blank version of wordpress or a templated version I don't have any template set up right now. So I'm going to show you where we go to do that All right. So now that we're in installatron. I'm going to click Create an application template And I'm going to search my application at the top here Um, so once you have it set up completely the way that you want So let's say this is the site that I've created on blog dot lauren hanks. That state you I'm ready to Make that a template for my community. I'm going to select it And click that star there that says template And I'm going to give it a name. So for now, we'll just go with lauren's template and this is for Folks from course 101 to give them a you know, so anyone who's in that core course Installing wordpress. They will now see this template. So it's essentially taking a copy of that site that I created And it's important to note here that while our custom installers are going to automatically update For everyone the template is really just a copy a duplicate of that site that I created So if you ever need to make updates To the site or you know change a theme or a plugin You actually will have to re-template it But it was very simple as you just saw to template it out So you could just delete that that um, you know previous template and then re-template it out The natural next question that comes is if I delete a template what's going to happen to all of those sites that people have installed Nothing, um, so once it someone has installed it in their account, they're fine You're just essentially changing and updating the template for anyone else new The only thing there lauren is that there won't be if you update the template Those updates won't be pushed to people who already have it installed. So keep that in mind Exactly. Yeah, so you're really just impacting those new users not existing users But now that I've created my template here, I'm going to go back and test this out So I'm going to go back to my cPanel account Um and do a little bit of a refresh here and I'm going to click wordpress I should see that space Where I can either get a clean wordpress install and install my own content or I can click that lauren's template there for course 101, which is exactly what we want So that is our diy version of a site template So it's not in a custom installer itself But it's actually embedded in the application that you're templating The nice part of it is that install try makes it possible For you to template out these sites. So one of the things we're going to work on now is we're going to have you all Get in there install some spots play around with whether it's tru collector Which is really fun or one of the portfolios And then we'll work with you to see if you can get some templates up of just maybe a basic omega a wordpress etc So you have a sense of what's possible for your community