WordPress Set-Up

Please sign up for your own WordPress site managed by TWU. This  will give you a site at create.twu.ca/[your_title_goes_here], where you get to choose what goes between the square brackets. You will have access to a limited number of themes and plugins, but you will be able to request others. TWU will ensure that WordPress is up-to-date and that it is secure and backed-up and we will be able to provide significant support as you get set up.

Please scroll to the bottom of this page and click the green ‘Sign Up’ button to register for a site, then come back here and continue reading.

You will have a choice of four templates. The simplest option will be to choose the TWU blank site.

You will receive an email from WordPress to confirm your registration, but this email often gets caught by spam filters, so please check your spam/junk folder.

If the email hasn’t arrived within 5-10 minutes, please contact colin.madland[at]twu.ca.

How to set up your blog.

Once you have access to a WordPress blog, it’s time to get things set up.

The University of Mary Washington has published an excellent set of resources for customizing WordPress. To begin, view the videos covering the WordPress dashboard. Feel free to follow along on your own site and toggle back and forth between your own site and the video.

Once you have worked through the basics of the dashboard, take some time to choose a theme you like.

Set up a ‘Category’ for this course

Create a category called ‘TWU Online’ on your site (Tutorial). If you are reading this page in the context of a different course, you will likely be directed to create a taxonomy of categories specific to that course.

It is very important to understand that the category that you create will be used to syndicate your posts to the course hub. You will use a different category for each post in every course. For example, in this orientation course, you will add the category ‘TWU Online’ to every post, but for Leadership 500, you will use ‘LDRS500’.

Tell us the URL for your RSS feed

The final setup task for you is to tell us the URL for your RSS feed so that your posts will show up on the course hub. You posts will be syndicated from your site to the course hub through RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. The course hub will be subscribed to your ‘TWU Online’ category feed. Any time you post in that category, your post will show up in the feed on the course hub. The same will be true for all other participants in the course, so you only need to check one spot to be able to see what everyone is writing about.

When you click on the link to a post on the course hub, you will be taken to the site where the post was originally published.

Before you fill in the form at the bottom of this page, you will need to have completed the following tasks on your own site:

• create a site on your own URL (this was done when you registered for a site),
• create a category on your site called ‘TWU Online’ and copy the slug to your clipboard.
  • you can see the slug by hovering over ‘Posts’ in your dashboard and choosing ‘Categories’. The slug will be displayed in the list of categories.

Create a Post on your Blog

Once you have told us your RSS feed, create your first post and introduce yourself to others taking this course. Tell us a little bit about yourself, or tell us about your pets, or something else. Remember to be aware that your posts are public on the web, but that you can determine levels of privacy that make sense for you. Make sure that you add your post to the category ”TWU Online’ and a new category called ‘Hi’.