Help

This page provides members of the CMU Graphics Lab with information about creating and editing site content. Feel free to edit this page whenever you discover some useful tidbit of information, or think something can be explained better!

TL;DR

Get the username/password from a group member and login at the bottom of any page.  From there you can add/edit content using the web interface.

Overview

All content on this site is user-editable from a web interface, based on WordPress.  There are two basic types of entities: posts and pages.  Roughly speaking, pages are used to organize content (e.g., a list of publications) whereas posts are used to specify the content itself (e.g., individual publications).  The vast majority of the time, you will want to add a post.  A few pages have special status in the user interface—for instance, content from the “About” page will appear in a box on the front page.  Details about each of the individual post and page categories are given below.

NOTE: Image captions will likely be ignored throughout.

Logging In

The blog username/password can be obtained from one of the lab members.  To login, click the “LOGIN” button at the bottom of any page and enter your credentials at the prompt.  After logging in you will be presented with the WordPress administrative interface; clicking the site title (upper-left) will toggle between this interface and the site itself.  Note that the default account has Editor privileges, which means that all existing pages and posts can be edited, deleted, etc.  (Please be careful not to accidentally delete any essential pages!)

Editing Existing Items

Once logged in, you can edit any page by clicking the “Edit Page” button in the toolbar.  For convenience, certain items (news, courses, etc.) will also display an “EDIT” button when logged in.  Further editing options are available from the WordPress administrative interface, which can be accessed by clicking on the site title in the toolbar (upper-left).

Adding News

News items will appear in reverse chronological order on the front page.  To add a news item, create a new post and click the “News” checkbox in the Category List (on the right).  Input the desired title and content.  News items can also include an image (uploaded via the “Add Media” button), which will automatically be positioned next to the text.  Note that any subsequent images will be ignored. You might have to play with the images size a bit, which you can do by editing the page in “Text” mode (rather than “Visual” mode). Try stripping out all the tags except for the image path and the width="xxx" and height="xxx" tags. Note: the post will appear (much!) differently on the main page than it does when you hit the “Preview Changes” button. So don’t worry if it looks lame in the preview. 😉

Adding Publications

Publications appear in both the index on the “Publications” page, as well as individual pages containing an abstract and bibliographic information.  To list a new publication, create a new post with the category “Publication.”  The title of the post should be the title of the publication.  The content of the post should be a BibTeX entry that includes (at very least) the fields author, title, year, journal, and abstract.  To give the author affiliations and links to their websites, you can include the fields affiliation and affiliationurl; each of these should have one item per author (in the same order).  Optionally, it can also contain a links field that specifies the URL of a project page or PDF.  Likewise, putting a URL in a video field will create a link to a video.  Finally, the first image found in the post will be used as a teaser image and an icon in the publications list.  (Subsequent images will be ignored.)

Uploading Paper PDFs/Videos

If you do not already have a place to host the PDF or video files associated with a paper, you can host them through the Graphics site.  Just edit the post associated with the publication, and click the “Add Media” button.  Click the “Upload Files” tab, click the “Select Files” button, and navigate to the file you want to upload.  Once uploaded, click “Insert into Page.”  You will see a hyperlink to the uploaded file, or the video itself in the case of a video. Note that these files will not yet show up on the publication post. To get them to show up, you need to add their URLs to the BibTeX entry. The easiest way to grab these URLs is to click on the “Text” tab in the editor. Copy the URL for the uploaded file, and paste it into a new line in the BibTeX entry of the form

links = {http://my.url.com/paper.pdf}

video = {http://my.url.com/video.mp4}

for papers and videos, respectively. (If you like, you can delete the link/video from the WordPress page; either way, it will not show up.)

 

Adding People

The “People” page displays all the current lab members, as well as alumni and former faculty.  To add a lab member, create a new post with the appropriate category (“Undergrad,” “Visitor,” etc.) from the list under “People.” You do not need to check the “People” category itself.  Use the person’s name as the title, and upload a headshot by clicking on the “Add Media” button.  This picture can then be linked to the person’s homepage by clicking on the image and then clicking on the “Insert/edit link” button (looks like a chain link).  People without a photo will be displayed using a default image.

To add/edit alumni, simply edit the “People” page itself.  Each alumnus is simply a list item, with optional hyperlinks to their current homepage and institution.

Adding Courses

The “Courses” page shows all past and current offerings, as well as a list of other relevant courses.  To add a new course, create a new post with the category “Course.”  The title should be the course number XX-XXX followed by the course title.  The body should include a course description and a teaser image.  It can also include a bulleted list of course pages, with the format “Term (Instructor)”.  The term and instructor should be linked to the relevant webpages.

About Box

The “About” page contains the short blurb shown on the front page.  Please keep this text short so that it does not overflow the header.

Other Pages

The remaining pages (“Software/Data”, “Sponsors,” etc.) do not have any special semantics and are displayed more or less exactly as shown in the editor.

The Navigation Bar

Every page on the site displays a navigation bar in the upper-left corner of the header.  To add an item to this list, create a new page (not a post) with the parent “Navigation.”  The order of these items is determined by the “Order” field of each page, increasing from left to right.

Note that the “Navigation” page itself is simply a dummy page for grouping all the navigation items; it is not displayed in the interface itself.

Still Not Working?

The easiest way to make sure your content is formatted correctly is to compare with a working example (note that you can view the HTML source for any page/post by clicking on the “Text” tab in the editor).  However, there are likely bugs to be ironed out and use cases that have been overlooked—please feel free to contact Keenan Crane should you have further questions.