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Quick Guide to your UCL blog

Choosing the theme

This blogging service comes with a number of different UCL themes based on our Corporate Identity layouts. You can select different colour schemes for these by:

  • Entering the WordPress admin interface. On the left hand menu, click on ‘Appearance‘, and then ‘Themes‘.
  • You’ll see a list of different colour schemes available. Simply click on the ‘Preview‘ or ‘Activate‘ links for the themes you’d like to use. If you click ‘Activate’, the new theme will immediately display on your site.

Inserting content into the left and right hand columns

  • In the WordPress admin interface, click on ‘Appearance‘, then ‘Widgets‘
  • You’ll then see a range of possible ‘widgets‘ that you can insert into the two ‘sidebar‘ boxes that appear on the right.
    Sidebar 1 will appear in the left hand menu; sidebar 2 will appear on the right.
  • Drag widgets into each of these sidebars. Once they’re moved, they’ll appear live on the blog.
  • To edit widget settings, click on the arrow by each one, and a small interface will appear.
  • For more information about widgets, please see the WordPress widgets documentation.

Inserting/Editing posts

Adding editors and authors to your blog

If you would like to add other users as editors and authors on the blog so they can access the back end please follow these instructions

  1. you must be an admin for the blog in order to add other users to the blog
  2. ask the user to log in to the blog, they will be prompted to provide their UCL details to log in – this is a key step, they must log in first
  3. once the user has informed you they have logged in, you now need to log to the back end and go to ‘users’ on the left hand side
  4. once you are on the ‘users’ page click on the ‘add new’ button
  5. search for the user by either their UCL username or email address
  6. assign the user a role from the drop down and then click the ‘add existing user’ button

Updating your editors’ and authors’ details

Before you and your colleagues begin posting on your blog, go to ‘Users’ -> ‘Your Profile’ and check the details are correct.
Scroll down to the field entitled ‘Display name publicly as’ and change it to your name (rather than your userid).

Using plugins

There are a number of plugins available to users of the blogging service, which can be activated by blog owners. To use these:

  • In the WordPress admin interface, click on ‘Plugins‘ on the left hand menu, and click ‘Installed‘
  • You’ll see a list of plugins. From here you can activate or deactivate them, as well as view documentation about them.