We will be offering another introductory workshop on WordPress for anyone interested in creating a new WordPress site or just learning more about the platform.

• 3-4 pm, Thurs, Dec 8th, Library 105, Introduction to WordPress (sign up)

If you are a faculty person using WordPress for one or more course sites and would like assistance setting up your site, come to one of our Curricular Technologies work sessions:

• 3-4 pm, Tues, Dec 13th, Library 105, Curricular Technologies Work Session (sign up)
• 2-3 pm, Wed, Dec 14th, Library 105, Curricular Technologies Work Session (sign up)

Finally if you are currently using WordPress for your course sites but are interested in trying out Moodle as an alternative or additional platform for your course, consider attending a Moodle workshop:

• 2-3 pm, Thurs, Dec 8th, Library 105, Introduction to Moodle (sign up)

We’ve just installed Jetpack on blogs.middlebury.edu.  This plugin replaces the WordPress.com stats plugin that many use to keep track of how many people are viewing their sites.

If you own or are an administrator on a site that used the WordPress.com stats plugin, we encourage you to update to JetPack.  For more information, see:
Plugins > Jetpack

Update: We have had reports that updating from WordPress.com Stats plugin to Jetpack may prevent access to historical site statistics.  If such statistics are important to you, we recommend not updating to Jetpack until these issues are resolved.

JetPack also has a number of other features including a Twitter widget, support for LaTex markup and a spelling, grammar and style checker.  For more information, see:
http://jetpack.me/ 

Here’s a 3 1/2 minute screencast that gives a quick overview of some of the new features introduced in WordPress v3.

[middmedia E966CA341E9D26A5EA67ECDE36E4C402 achapin wordpress-update-version3-02.mp4 width:480 height:300]

WordPress @ Middlebury was updated to v3.0.1 in late August.  This new version of WordPress introduces a number of key features that make WordPress useful for more than just blogging.   In particular, we think that these new features make WordPress a suitable platform for basic course sites (see: Using WordPress for Course Sites).  Here’s an overview of some of the new features and why they are so important:

Top Navigation Bar

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 WordPress 3.0 introduces a top navigation bar.  By default, this navigation bar contains links to all the pages in your site and for any pages that are the “children” of other pages (i.e. they specify another page as their parent and so are sub-pages of that parent page), they will appear in a drop-down sub-menu (see the navigation bar on this site to see how this works).

Click on image to enlarge

Custom Menus

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WordPress v3 introduces “custom menus” (see: Dashboard > Appearance > Menus).  Custom menus allow site owners to create their own menus of pages, categories or links.  Once a custom menu is created, it can be used in the top navigation bar (see:  Menus > Theme Locations > Primary Navigation) or in sidebars (see: Appearance > Widgets > Custom Menu).

Click on image to enlarge

The Menus user interface (UI) works the same way as the Widgets UI, allow users to drag menu items up or down to change their order or to the right to make them sub-menu items.

New Theme Options

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Middlebury blog themes have been updated to take advantage of many of the new features of WordPress v3.  Most themes now support both custom header images and custom background colors and images (see: Appearance > Background and Header).  We’ve also added some sample headers that you can chose from.