What Do I Need to Know About the UBC Learning Commons Site?

The UBC Learning Commons website is actually a blog. A big, remixed, somewhat complex blog—but a blog nonetheless. It is like other blogs in that it allows for people to comment and interact with the authors online. It’s unlike other blogs in that the content is mainly authored in pages, not posts.  The only posts on the Learning Commons are on the homepage under the Features section. This is where content changes most often. Posts in WordPress (WP) are more mobile and time-dependent. Pages, on the other hand, are more static and not as frequently updated.

At any one time, the Learning Commons may include up to 15 or so authors, so it’s important that you do your part to follow the processes and guidelines on this blog—to help us all keep it together and make sure it’s a great resource for UBC students, faculty and staff.

What Will I Learn From This Blog?

We hope we have included all the resources you need here to help you learn how to:

• Create a post for a feature article on the homepage.
• Create a page of content.
• Use custom fields to publish page author, contact and license information unique to each page.
• Use custom fields and Delicious tags to publish related links on content pages.
• Add searchable tags for content (posts and pages).
• Create and publish a poll on the home page.
• Use Flickr’s advanced search to find photos for the site and add them to pages and posts.

How Do I Get Started?

1) Sign up with your CWL on sites.olt.ubc.ca. This will activate your account on WordPress.

2) Send an email to Michael or Cindy and ask them to set you up as an editor on the Learning Commons site. They will confirm once they are done this.

3) Then, and each time you need to edit on the Learning Commons or respond to comments, you will need to login to the Learning Commons admin. You will want to bookmark this page for easy access. Once you are logged in to sites, the Learning Commons admin link should take you directly to the Dashboard.

Here’s a screencast to help you get familiar with the WordPress Dashboard. This is the interface you will see when making any changes to the Learning Commons site.

Note: You may want to have this site open in your browser for reference when you are working on the Learning Commons site.