- Log in to Human Resources Development to register for the course. Only do this if you wish to have your participation confirmed.
- Watch video
- Read this course script WordPress introduction
- Registration on the sandbox practice website.
- Create and fill your own pages in the practice website:
- Page with your own name as title
- URL is her last name
- Text with at least 3 paragraphs (inserted e.g. from press release)
- Block side entry
- Set three links:
- Internal (your own contribution)
- Externally within the university
- External outside the university
- Image with alternative text and caption in medium size
- Article with keywords and categories
- Menu: Add your own page and a category
- Blocks
- Paragraph
- Side entry
- Heading
- Anchor navigation and anchor point
- Do you have any questions? Come to the next WordPress Forum!
- Only if you wish to have your participation confirmed:
- Send the URL of your practice pages to webmaster@uni-mainz.de.
- We take a look at the pages and inform Human Resources Development
- You will receive confirmation of participation from Human Resources Development.
- What’s the next step? If you need to rebuild a website, we recommend the video checklist for a new website if you want to build a complex site: Video study profile.
Non-employees such as students: If the login to the PE further training does not work, here are some instructions:
- JGU employees register with their university account.
- Graduate assistants register with their work account, not with their student account.
- only enter the login name in lower case, not the uni-mainz.de at the end!
Students are “external” participants
- Visiting scholars, students and all others cannot log in with their JGU account!
- You need your own Antrago account: Set up a proposal account (=”register”)
- Enter the student or visiting scholar e-mail address under “Business e-mail”.
- Keep the password for this extra Antrago account that is created when you register!
- This data record is used for all further registrations of the person.
- Fees will be requested and must be confirmed by you. “External” persons (students, guest researchers) do not normally take part in events of the PE continuing education program free of charge. However, we make an exception for the WordPress courses.
If you have any further questions about logging in to the course, please contact Human Resources Development.
WordPress subsite, website, blog, CMS: these terms mean in ZDV: a collection of web pages that have some things in common automatically:
- Domain address
- Menu
- Side head and foot
- Rights list: which editors have writing rights
Before registration can be successful, you need write access to the subsite. For this course, the Human Resources Development colleagues have entered you in the WordPress subsite sandbox if you have registered for this course in the Human Resources Development section of the Antrago course portal. Write permissions are only checked, so it is OK if you are not allowed to assign write permissions. Then you are not an administration of rights groups!
Practice class: Offer of appointment https://account.uni-mainz.de, switch to “User rights”. Examine whether you may be the administration of rights groups.
Tip: 💡As soon as you have the rights: Check your institution’s website to see if there are at least 3 administrators!
In general: Add /wp-admin to the web address of your website. Example:
ihrinstitut.uni-mainz.de/wp-admin/
cms.zdv.uni-mainz.de/fb-x-ihr-institut/wp-admin
Practice website: https://cms-stage.zdv.uni-mainz.de/sandkasten/wp-admin
If you do not require confirmation of participation, then log in to the exercise website and click on “Request rights”. Please be patient for one day. We have to register you and will contact you afterwards. Only then will the registration work!
Warning: ⚠️You share the sandbox with everyone else. Common elements of the website such as the header, menus and widgets will therefore change if you are working with someone else at the same time. The pages are not protected, be aware of this when testing!
By the way, there are two sandboxes, we also have one in the old blogs multisite. The rights list is identical, so you can access both sandboxes if you are registered in the rights list.
If you are new to working as an editor on the ALTEN Multisite blogs, you can start here in the
https://wordpress-schulung.zdv.uni-mainz.de/wp-admin practise.
Admin ribbon at the top for switching back and forth between the frontend (external view) and backend (the dashboard). Here you can quickly create new pages. Dashboard menu for the overall administration of the content.
At the top right you can select “Customize view” to control which setting options should be visible on the page.
Practice class: In the dashboard > pages > view, set that you want to view 100 instead of 20 entries per page. Try out whether you like the extended view better.
Find the contact page, either in the page list or switch via the admin bar in the visitor view at the bottom of the footer.
Practice class: Change the contact page by adding your name. Refresh the page.
Practice class: Find the Easy Language page and add your name to the page followed by a sentence about what is done in your institute / institution
works via Dashboard > Page > Create new page, or in the admin bar > Mouseover (do not click) + New > Page. The title becomes the last part of the page address. If you integrate the page into a menu, the title becomes the link text. You can change this afterwards in the menu.
In the title, write the words that people would search for to find your site. (Instead of “Welcome to our site”, write “Institute for x-Science”.
Practice class: Create a page with your name as the title. Publish the page! The visibility of the page should therefore be set to Public. Otherwise you will not be able to add it to the menu. The URL should be your surname, e.g. for
Mrs. Maier maier,
so that the complete URL is:
https://cms-stage.zdv.uni-mainz.de/sandkasten/maier
If you receive your texts from others, they should preferably not be formatted, as formatting is usually lost during transfer.
Practice class: Add the first three paragraphs of a press release to your page. Refresh the page
Write particularly briefly and simply on the web pages. Use the words that your target group also uses.
More about the WordPress block editor
The entire content of the web page should be accessible in one go. Since you cannot know which device the customer will use to access your page (smartphone, Braille display, screen reader) and long pages are also practical (printout on paper), structure your page and also the relationship to the other pages.
You can achieve structure through links within the page with anchor navigation and anchor points
The page begins with a page entry. This is a complex block that is particularly useful because of the breadcrumb function. The breadcrumb = crumb indicates which is the parent page of your page.
Practice class: In the page settings > Page attributes , set the People page as the parent page.
This also changes the URL:
https://cms-stage.zdv.uni-mainz.de/sandkasten/personen/maier
Practice class: Add a page entry > Red corner with breadcrumb to the top of your page.
Practice class: Add anchor navigation to your page after the page entry. Each of your three headings gets an anchor point.
The most important formatting is the heading, as these texts are given priority by search engines. Pay attention to the nesting: The page entry block always has the heading H1, which is the largest. This should only appear once on the page. All other headings should therefore have the size H2. Sub-items under the H2 heading are given the size H3 and so on.
Practice class: Insert a heading H2 for each of the three paragraphs
You can find more about: Anchor navigation, anchor points, page entry in the block list
Video: Web page entry and anchor navigation
When using links in running text, remember that the reader must always decide to continue reading. At the end of a text interspersed with links, there should never be anything that ALL readers should be able to grasp. It is therefore better to place links separately in a button list at the end of the text.
The link text should be meaningful; the headline of the linked target page is often favorable. The link text should only appear once on the page. Instead of “Click here”, it is better to use “Current news from Institute X”.
Select the text to be linked and then select the icon with the chain.
Practice class: set 3 links: 1. an internal link (to the contact page), 2. an external link (but within JGU, to the home page of your institution, 3. to an external page, e.g. www.uni-koeln.de. Refresh the page and note the “external link icon” around the 3rd link!
Lighten up the desert of text with a self-made photo.
Click on the plus sign where you want the image to appear and select Image / Image from the block list.
- If you have your own images: select Upload. The image will be displayed as wide as possible.
- Select how the image should be linked (file attachment display setting)
- Provide at least the alternative text, otherwise the image will be incomprehensible to all those who have to have web pages read aloud.
Practice class: Upload a freely available image, if you do not have one, use one from the items on the sandbox website. Enter alternative text if it is not a decorative image.
Observe copyrights and privacy protection.
More about the block image
For all time-related content, use the article instead of the page.
- Posts have the date in their address. For pages, the address can be freely assigned without a date
- You can display posts as a newsroom using the Post Listing block.
Practice class: Create a new post. Check whether it really appears in the newsroom of the sandbox.
The layout of the university is predefined. Nevertheless, you have a lot of freedom. Customize the practice website with your own footer menu entry.
Practice class: Use the dashboard > Design > Customizer > Menu > Footer Quicklinks to add your own page as a sub-item of the second level in the footer of the training blog
(There is no video for this yet, as the view of the customizer will change)
Assign categories to each post.
The advantage of this approach to building your web pages: You don’t have to worry much about the structure at the beginning. It grows with your content as required!
Practice class: Create a post with categories. Take a look at the post. Add the Single Footer block. Try out the categories in the box below your post.
As soon as you have published your page(drafts cannot be assigned to a menu), add the page to the navigation menus.
Practice class: Assigning pages to the menu
Open Dashboard → Design → Customizer → Menus → Main menu → Add entries
Click on the page you want to appear in your menu. It will now appear at the bottom of the menu list.
Use the mouse to drag the menu item under the top item People.
Known bug: Categories and keywords are not displayed in the menu.
Changes are only applied to the website when you click on Published ). (NOT Design – Menus, because every change is immediately active, very bad if you accidentally delete a menu).
- You have received an e-mail with a link to the BBB conference.
- You have
- a browser in the current version,
- a quiet working environment and, if possible
- a headset (smartphone headphones are a good substitute!). Why? Only use normal microphones and loudspeakers in an emergency, as this feeds the sound you hear from the loudspeaker back into the microphone. This creates unpleasant echoes, especially for your listeners).
- Your Internet connection is fast and secure
- Click on the conference link to start the event.
- The microphone is muted by default. Switch it on and greet anyone who arrives before you 🙂
- mute your microphone as long as you don’t want to ask anything. This way, neither breathing noises nor accidental sounds/voices entering the room can unintentionally disturb the audio channel for everyone.
- Depending on your working environment, you have several audio inputs and outputs. Use the tick on the microphone icon to select the correct microphone or headphones.
After you have received the participation certificate or if you do not need one, at the end of the practice class, you are very welcome to delete it. Consider whether the content can be viewed worldwide without hesitation.
If you don’t delete anything, your content will remain in the sandbox website!
There is much more to know than just the operation:
- Data protection: what am I allowed to publish? What consent do I need to obtain in order to store personal data? How long can I store it? Copyright, image rights, GDPR, protection of personal data. Why is the IdM interface MUCH more useful for you than filling out the contact cards manually?
- Writing web pages: Change of perspective to the target group, listen to and use user language (what is googled?)
- Search engine optimization: I am not or hardly found. (Links from third parties, search terms in the short headings.
- Image editing: how large do the images need to be?
- Design: what look & feel should the website have: colorful, black & white, graphics, moodboard
- Accessibility: Technics Department only does part of the job!
- Accessible items (especially PDFs)
