Academic web pages tend to be a pain to administer. Researchers generally only get up the energy to update their personal or group pages every 3-5 years. For those trying to use them—such as the press and current and prospective collaborators, sponsors, and students—having old information can be as bad as (sometimes worse than) having no information at all.

The new sites are built on the WordPress platform and are intended to:

• Set up a custom site relatively quickly.
• Hack your own design if you want (very easily) or use built-in themes  we’ve designed.
• Share the burden of keeping the site up to date with others in your group.
• Add the most important data relevant to your group website—people, grants, publications, projects—very simply once, and relate those elements to each other so that they show up dynamically where they are needed (this is done at the bottom of the page where you enter the data in the first place).
• Add additional elements (including calendars, blogs, extra pages, extra web sections) or just the basics as you choose.

Getting started (see also Tips on Using WordPress for your site)

First thing is to set up your site:

• Make sure you’ve thought about what you would like your URL to be after http://wp.doc.ic.ac.uk/ (e.g. AESE or, for this site, gettingstarted). You can change the title later, but it’s not straightforward to change the URL (known as the site name) once the site is set up.
• Contact CSG at help@doc.ic.ac.uk and tell them that you want them to set up a new WordPress research site. Tell them what you want the name and title to be (the name is the last string of the URL).
• Once it’s set up, they’ll let you know. You’ll be an administrator and will have the ability change the look of the site (but don’t worry about this yet… see point 3 below) and add other people within the department/group with the level of permission appropriate to their skills. Specifically: administrators can add others and change the look and function of the site, editors can edit other people’s contributions and make them go live, authors can publish and edit their own material, and contributors can add material but not publish.
• When you log into your site, go into Appearance > Themes and make sure to choose one of the themes that includes both the words DoC and dev. There are currently two such themes and a third is coming soon. These are the themes that include the functionality we discuss here. If you don’t want to use the papers, grants, publications, projects structures, you may choose other themes (from the menu or from the web… but you’ll have to get CSG to install them for you).

Once this is set up, you should do two things concurrently:

1. Have your team start adding/compiling the information you will need for the site. This includes:

• Photos of each researcher (recommend you look for portrait—taller than wide—images, at least 300 pixels across: the exact size you use may be determined by your choice of theme, but bigger is better because you can always shrink or crop as necessary within WordPress…) Upload these with the biography (see below) and other personal details under People (click + New > Person on the top menu or click People > Add New on the side menu)
• Long/short biographies (see here) Upload these in relevant fields of the People records.
• Project descriptions (see here) Upload these and other personal details under Projects (click + New > Person on the top menu or click Projects > Add New on the side menu).
• Photos relevant to projects (again, bigger is better) Upload these as part of your project description.
• Publications We have an import tool that will allow you to pull in papers from a BibTeX file (note that it’s very easy to export from Symplectic to BibTeX: just click one of the Export links). Publications are best added at the end, after People, Grants, Projects, because that will make it easier to connect the papers with the other elements en masse. Please contact Sunny Bains if you have concerns about this. The import tool is under Publications > BibTeX importer. You can then connect Authors with their publications using the Publications > Author Connections tool. It’s not hard, but do read the instructions. Know also that there are still some glitches with the way the BibTeX parser works/displays, which we’re aware of. However, feel free to let us know if you notice any issues: there’s no harm in reporting it twice!
  
• Grants Upload these under Grants  (click + New > Grant on the top menu or click Grants > Add New on the side menu).
• Software, toolkits, etc. There are various ways you can deal with these. The simplest way is to consider a piece of software as a project and treat it accordingly. If it is part of a larger project, you should also link to it from there.
  
• Connections  So that everything appears where you want it you need to connect people to projects, grants to people, etc. You can administer these links via the Manage relationships” tool. This allows you to connect things to other things in bulk (like people to projects, grants to people, etc.). You can find this in the menus under People, Grants, Publications AND Projects. I think it’s fairly self explanatory, but feel free to let me know if you think I should add some instructions. (Note, this ONLY works on the Dev themes, not the default theme!)

Note that every data type we use (grants, people, projects, publications) can be linked to every other, as mentioned earlier, at the bottom of the data entry pages. This will mean that the right information is dynamically pulled into the relevant places on the website. You can add these relationships at this stage, or once you’ve chosen a theme (which may make it easier to see how these work) as you wish.

2. Write to Sunny Bains if you have any questions, if you think the instructions are poor (either here or on the data entry pages themselves), if you’d like advice that isn’t present on the site yet, or if you have special functionality you want to add. She will respond to you personally and either change the instructions or write up a blog post on the subject in question so that others who might have the same issue can benefit.