Introduction
See the NYU Web Publishing Documentation for general instructions on using WordPress at NYU.
To adapt this template for your own needs, you’ll need to edit the sample content:
- Site title & tagline (if not already done during site setup)
- Header image
- Footer
- About Me and About My Work pages
- Posts (portfolio items)
In addition to editing the existing content, you can add new pages and widgets, and delete ones you don’t need.
See below for instructions that are particular to this website template, as well as links to the relevant pages in the NYU Web Publishing Documentation.
Site Title & Tagline
Go to Settings / General. Edit the Site Title as needed. Edit or delete the optional Tagline.
Header image
To change (or delete) the banner image that appears at the top of each page, go to Appearance / Customize and select Header Image.
Info menu
The Info menu is not a WordPress menu per se; rather, it is an “off-canvas” sidebar whose content is stored in a widget area called Primary. This widget area can hold any number of widgets; this template starts out with four:
- Search widget (untitled)
- Pages widget, About (set to exclude this How To Manage page)
- Categories widget, Topics
- Recent Comments widget
You can add or delete whole widgets, or edit the existing widget content. For general information on working with widgets, see Adding Widgets.
Footer
Widget area. The upper footer content is stored in a single widget area. Each widget added to this widget area is automatically placed into one of three equal-width columns. (They are stacked full-width on mobile devices and other narrow viewports.)
- Footer
Text widget, Contact Info
Text widget, Quick Links
Meta widget, WordPress Info (this widget type can be retitled or deleted, but not otherwise edited)
You can add or delete whole widgets, or edit the existing widget content. For general information on working with widgets, see Adding Widgets.
Social media menu. Below the footer widget area is a row of social media links styled as clickable icons. To edit these, go to Appearance / Menus and select the social menu to edit. Edit or delete existing social media links, or use the Custom Links panel to add a new item. Each item consists of the URL to your social media page, plus a text label. The text label is not used in the footer display; rather, a specific icon is automatically applied to the link based on the URL pattern (e.g. the Twitter-bird icon for twitter.com URLs). If a URL pattern isn’t recognized by the theme, no link is displayed. To hide the social media menu completely, uncheck the Display location box in Menu Settings.
Homepage
The homepage content cannot be edited directly; it is an automatically generated index of blogposts (see Posts, below).
Posts (portfolio items)
On this website, we’re using the WordPress blog structure for the main portfolio items. The posts are categorized by topic (in our sample, Beverages, Flowers, etc.).
The index pages—the main index on the homepage, plus the category listings (Beverages, Flowers, etc.)—display brief excerpts from the posts, in reverse chronological order. Each excerpt is linked to a separate page that shows the individual post in full.
When there are a lot of posts, the index is paginated. (You can change the number of posts per page in Settings / Reading.)
By default, WordPress uses the post’s first 55 words as the excerpt on the index pages. You can override the automatically-generated excerpt with a manual excerpt (even a completely original summary, if you wish). Just pull up the post for editing and enter your own summary in the Excerpt field. “Read more” links are not displayed for manual excerpts, but you can still jump to the complete post by clicking the post title.
For general information on working with posts, see Creating and Editing Posts and Pages.