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Website management

This page provides supplemental  information about the website.

Images

There are three types of images displayed on this site: News images, People page images, and the home page carousel images.

News images

  • Must be 500px wide by 404px high.
  • Note that they will appear in a centered, squared image in the actual news item, so you should try to center the main content in the 500×404 version so that the autocropped version will look OK.

People page images

  • must be 300 x 300 pixels.
  • Just show head and shoulders.  Head should fill roughly 1/2 the image.
  • Background should be light color and uniform.

Home page carousel images

  • must be 1040 x 300.
  • Set “transition” to “slide from right”.
  • Layer 1: Content: H3 all caps, transition: offset: 800, styles: top: 180px, left 100px, color: #ffffff
  • Layer 2: Content: H1 upper/lower, transition: offset: 1400, color: #ffffff

Videos

Our web designer made the following helpful videos about the site.

General overview

Editing the People Page

Updating WordPress

There are two approaches to update WordPress, automatic and manual. The automatic approach is immensely easier and likely deprecates the manual approach. Both are documented hereafter.

Automatic Update

Make sure that the http://wordpress.org/plugins/ssh-sftp-updater-support/ plugin is installed and activated (you can check the list of plugins in the last navigation bar of the WordPress Dashboard). By default, WordPress does come with an FTP updater to update versions. However, this does not work as it does not support secure FTP (sFTP). This plugin conveniently replaces that updater.

If a new version of WordPress is available, there will be notification in the WordPress Dashboard (a message with a link toward the top, a clickable button below near the “At a glance” area).  Click the link/button and enter the information:

Hostname: webedit.its.hawaii.edu
FTP/SSH Username: <your UH Username>
FTP/SSH Password: <your UH password>
Connection Type: SSH2

You will not need the key part, or any need to specify the path in the credentials. The path part will be determined by the WordPress installation on its own. Note that for your credentials to be valid you must have been granted management access by ITS (this can be requested via an e-mail to web-support-l@lists.hawaii.edu).

And voila. You should see several messages about downloading/unpacking/verifying/installing the new version, and a confirmation message letting you know that the update was successful.

Manual Update

Here is the procedure that Philip used to manually update WordPress:

1.  Install Transmit, a visual sFTP client, if you don’t have something similar. It costs ~$30, but the drag-and-drop capability really simplifies the process (for me).

2. Download the new version of WordPress from http://wordpress.org/download. Unzip it on your desktop or someplace easily accessible.

3. Login to http://www.ics.hawaii.edu, and go to the Dashboard.

4. Bring up Transmit, and display your download of the new version of WordPress in one window and the remote directory /vhosts/www.ics.hawaii.edu in the other window:

ftp-wordpress2

You’ll need permission to login to webedit.its.hawaii.edu.

5.  Take a deep breath.  Now drag all of the new WordPress files (shown on the left side) to the remote directory (shown on the right side) except for the wp-content/ directory. This contains the plugins and themes for the site, and you need to update those separately.

If you, by mistake, copy over the wp-content directory, you will have just done two bad things: (1)  you will have clobbered our custom theme, and (2) you will have clobbered the correct permissions for this directory. The site will no longer work.  Contact Chad Omiya at web-support-l@lists.hawaii.edu and ask that the site be restored from backups.

6. Go back to your browser displaying the dashboard, and hit “refresh”.  WordPress might display a page telling you it needs to update the database.   Allow it to do so.  In less than 10 seconds, everything should be updated and you’re finished.

7.  Access to updates to our theme is by our site designer, Aaron Lee.  Contact him if we need a theme update.