WordPress Tips from Colin

Hello everyone!

Thanks so much for your patience as we have gotten things sorted out in WordPress.

I’d like to highlight a couple of things that may not be obvious to some of you, but can help with making your work in WordPress more enjoyable. Forgive me if Doug has already mentioned some of these.

Where to Post?

Make sure that you are on your own site before you post. Some of you have gotten distracted by the course hub and started posts there. The trouble is that you can’t publish posts there, you can only ‘Submit for Review’, which saves your post as ‘Pending’.

To make sure you are on your site, hover over ‘My Sites’ in the top, left corner, and choose your site from the dropdown list. Do not choose ‘Leadership 501’.

When you post, you should see a ‘Publish’ button on the right side of your page.

If you have a post that is ‘Pending’ or ‘Draft’ on the course hub, your best course of action is to copy the text from your post and paste it into a new post on your own site, add the proper categories, and publish there.

Use Hyperlinks!

The web is built on hyperlinks. They connect people to each other, ideas to each other, and are a great way of saying ‘Thanks for your work!’ In LDRS501, you are very regularly replying to your colleagues and their ideas, and this is good. The best way to do that on the web is to include a hyperlink to their post in your own post.

Here’s how it works

Presume you want to respond to the post pictured below.

Notice that I am on edenguessi’s site. The first thing to do is to copy the URL <https://create.twu.ca/edenguessi/2018/10/09/blog-2-1-by-clen-np/>.

Next, create a new post on your site (NOT the ldrs501 site), and paste the URL on its own line, like this, but without the “<” and “>” signs:

<https://create.twu.ca/edenguessi/2018/10/09/blog-2-1-by-clen-np/>

When you do that, you get a preview of the original post (in most themes) and a link to it in your own post, like this:

LDRS5O1/ POST 2.1 by CLEN-NP

When you publish your post with a link like this, the original post will show a comment called a ‘trackback’ with a link to your response to the post.

Check your Comments

In your Dashboard, you should see a ‘Comments’ link, and it might have a number beside it.

The number indicates that you have Comments waiting for moderation. Click the link to go to the comments page.

When you hover over a comment, you will see the options to ‘Approve’, ‘Reply’, … ‘Spam’ comments. If you see a comment from someone in your cohort, you should probably approve it. After you approve one comment from a user, they should be able to comment directly and you won’t have to approve any more.

If you see a comment that isn’t from someone in the cohort, or is selling something, please click ‘Spam’ to get rid of it.