I’m pleased to announce that yesterday we upgraded WordPress to its most recent version (5.3). One change you’ll notice immediately is the little blue eye in the password field of the login screen (screenshot below). This new icon allows you to view your password if you want to. It’s a small change and nothing to be leery…

1. Classic Editor vs. Block Editor If you started using WordPress before December 2018, then you’ll recognize the Classic Editor. For years, the Classic Editor was the default content editor in WordPress. It’s similar in appearance and functionality to word processors like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. In December of 2018, WordPress released a new…

1. What are Featurettes? Featurettes are the three pieces of content that appear horizontally across some website homepages between the menu and page content. By prominently featuring three pieces of visual content on your site’s homepage, Featurettes can help your visitors find your site’s most valuable content. 2. How can I add Featurettes to my…

A big thanks to everyone who made it out to our WordPress Community of Practice gathering on August 28th. For the second straight gathering, we fit 29 people into Pettengill’s second floor computer lab. We had great audience engagement, with shared questions and issues that we worked through as a group in realtime. If you…

Changes to WordPress? WordPress is ready with version 5.0: a major upgrade that changes the look and feel of features you’ve become accustomed to. Maybe you can’t wait to play with it. Or maybe, if you’re like most people, the prospect of yet another unsolicited WordPress upgrade is a bit bothersome! In next Thursday’s gathering,…

Hi Everyone, You’re receiving this email because you are able to edit part of Bates’ public website — www.bates.edu. I’m writing to let you know about a resource that can make your work easier. Bates’ public website is powered by a content management system called WordPress. The WordPress Community of Practice is a group of 376 campus web…

Hi All, Happy summer! One-on-one, in person WordPress support Whether you’re new to WordPress, need a refresher, or just want a second opinion on your website’s content, you’re in luck.BCO’s newest Digital Communications Assistant, Ted Burns ’19, can meet with you individually to provide instruction on the nuts and bolts of WordPress. To schedule time…

Parent Sites Included We’ve made an improvement to our site’s breadcrumb structure that allows site managers to articulate their site’s parent site. Previously, our breadcrumbs skipped from the root site (“Bates”) directly to the current site (in this case “African American Studies”). Old The shortcoming of this prior behavior is that parent sites weren’t included…

Today we are releasing two new enhancements to our image galleries as well as a couple of fixes. Optional Thumbnails You can now add clickable thumbnails to the bottom of a gallery by adding the attribute thumbnails=”true” to the gallery shortcode. If you are an advanced user, you can also customize the size of the…

Overview On Thursday, November 9th 2017, Dave Ernst, Bates’ Digital Content Specialist, hosted a Social Media Workshop as part of our Communications Community of Practice. Dave’s workshop was focused on benefits and mechanics of paid content promotions with Facebook and Instagram. Why pay to make content more visible? Dave started by explaining how organic reach…