Customising your Blog
The first thing you’ll want to do is customise some aspects of your Blog. To do this, click on ‘Customise’ in the grey bar across the top of the screen. From here, you can change the name and tagline of your site under ‘Site Identity’, and various other elements of the site through the other headings.
Through the Customiser, you can also change the theme of your blog to one of those provided. Due to support and maintenance constraints, OCA cannot provide users of this service with access to all available WordPress themes, and by changing the theme of your blog, you are responsible for setting that theme up to your own preference.
Post Creation
There are two ways to Create posts using this template; the method you choose should be based upon how comfortable you feel with using WordPress and its ‘Gutenberg Editor’.
- The Simple Method: In the left hand column, under the ACTIONS heading, select ‘Create Post’ to be taken to the simple post creator form. Fill in the required fields, including the Categories under which you want the post to display, and then either use Create Post to immediately publish the post, or Save Draft, if you wish to work on it further before publishing it. Drafts can be re-located at a later date through your Dashboard link, in the same ACTIONS menu.
- Through the Gutenberg Editor: If you’re familiar with WordPress, and confident in using it, you should consider using the new editor provided through the standard WordPress Dashboard. The Gutenberg editor is based upon a content-block concept, and allows you to add various kinds of media in various layouts. When using this editor, just remember to only use Posts (not Pages) for your blog articles, and also don’t forget to categorise them according to where you want them to appear on the site. To make sure those posts appear in the correct locations, use the ‘Document’ > ‘Categories’ checkboxes in the right-hand column under the ‘Document’ heading. For full details of how to use the Gutenberg editor, please refer to the WordPress Editor Handbook page.
Whichever method you use to create your posts, editing the post will always take you to the Gutenberg editor. If you prefer to use the Simple editor to edit the post, you can do so through your Editor Dashboard in the Menu.
Gutenberg Benefits
One key benefit of using the Gutenberg editor, is that we have provided a simple Referencing and Citation tool through the editor, which uses The University for the Creative Arts’ own Harvard Referencing standard for creating the references and citations. For some books, websites and articles, the tool will also auto-populate several of the fields based upon either the website address (for websites) or the DOI or ISBN for books and journals, as shown in the video below (no audio). If the DOI or ISBN aren’t available or don’t work (or you have more information to add), then use the Add Manually option and fill in the required fields.
Editing site settings
As the Administrator of your site, you are able to make a number of changes to the way it has been setup. If you make a change which breaks the functionality of the site, OCA cannot provide support for remedying such incidents.
Backups
To reduce the impact of any break in service, or the corruption of data relating to your site, please take regular backups of your site through the Dashboard using the Export function through the Tools menu. A site can be largely restored using the exported file.