Extending your site with Jetpack

Extending your site with Jetpack

As of September 26, 2022, Website tracker tools are no longer allowed on UCI Health and School of Medicine websites. If you are using Jetpack, Site Stats are ON by default. Learn how to Deactivate Jetpack Site Stats. Other features of Jetpack will still be available.

Jetpack is a powerful plugin created by Automattic and WordPress.com. It has some useful features and integrations with social media.

Things to Know

  • You will need a WordPress.com account to connect to the service. Accounts are free.
  • Your site needs to be available to the public or the JetPack connection will not work.
  • Use the free Jetpack option. The paid versions do not work on our system.

Included Features

Writing Settings

  • Carousel – Create full-screen carousel slideshows for the images in your posts and pages. Carousel galleries are mobile-friendly and encourage site visitors to interact with your photos.
  • Custom Content Types – Add testimonials or portfolios to your site.
  • Extra Widgets and Widget Visibility – Make extra widgets available and select which posts or pages they are displayed on. Extra widgets include integrations with Facebook and Twitter.
  • Post by Email – Post by email is a quick way to publish new posts by sending the content via email.

Discussion Settings

  • Comments – Enable Markdown use for comments.
  • Subscriptions – Let visitors subscribe to new posts and comments via email. (We use this on our blog.)

Sharing Settings

  • Publicize Connections – Connect your website to the social media networks you use and share your content across all your social accounts with a single click. When you publish a post, it will appear on all connected accounts.
  • Sharing Buttons – Add sharing buttons so visitors can share your posts and pages on social media with a couple of quick clicks.

Traffic Settings

  • Related Posts – Keep your visitors engaged with related content at the bottom of each post. 
  • Site Stats – Site Stats tells you how many visitors your site gets, and what posts and pages are most popular. 
  • WP.me Shortlinks – Generate shortened URLs for simpler sharing.
  • Site Verification – Verify site ownership with third-party services including Google.

We will share more about individual features in Jetpack in future posts. Subscribe to our mailing list to get new posts by email!

Creating Simple and Advanced Tables

Creating Simple and Advanced Tables

Displaying data in concise tables is a useful way to show comparisons or present statistics in a clear and legible format. Creating tables in WordPress used to be challenging if you didn’t know HTML. Thankfully it is now easier by using the built-in Table block or the Advanced Tables plugin.

Simple Tables with the Table Block

The Block editor has a built-in Table block. If you are not yet using the block editor, you can enable it by following our instructions.

To add a Table block, click on the Block Inserter icon (the plus sign at the top) and type ‘table’ in the search field. In the table block settings, choose the number of columns and rows you think you will need and click Create Table. You can always add more later. It’s that easy. Fill in your content and choose a style.

Table block initial settings
Example of the Table settings.

Example of a simple table using the Table Block

UC CampusEnrollmentYear Founded
Berkeley40,1731868
Davis37,3971905
Irvine33,4671965
Los Angeles44,9471919
Merced7,3362005
Riverside22,9901954
San Diego40,4731960
San Francisco4,857 (graduate only)1864
Santa Barbara24,3461909
Santa Cruz18,7831965
From Wikipedia

Advanced Tables with TablePress

We also have a Plugin called Advanced Tables by TablePress that allows you to create beautiful, sortable, and searchable tables easily. You can import and export your data from Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON files.

To activate Advanced Tables, go to Plugins > All Plugins, find Advanced Tables click the Activate button.

Advanced Tables Plugin

Once activated, you will have a new TablePress area in your Dashboard to create your tables. Add the tables anywhere you need them using the provided shortcode. Here is an example of the same data using TablePress. With this table, you can sort or search. This works very well for displaying a lot of data.

Example of a more advanced table using TablePress

UC CampusEnrollmentYear Founded
Berkeley40,1731868
Davis37,3971905
Irvine33,4671965
Los Angeles44,9471919
Merced7,3362005
Riverside22,9901954
San Diego40,4731960
San Francisco4,857 (graduate only)1864
Santa Barbara24,3461909
Santa Cruz18,7831965
From Wikipedia
Site Privacy Options

Site Privacy Options

Five Privacy Options

You now have more control over who can view the content on your website. We now have five privacy options available. Find out which one will work best for your website.

1. Make Your Site Public: “Allow Search Engines to Index This Site”

This setting will allow search engines like Google or Bing to crawl your site to add the information to their search results. It can take a few days to a few weeks for search engines to crawl your site. Learn more about how to make your site searchable.

2. Block Search Engines: “Discourage Search Engines from Indexing Your Site”

When you created your site on UCI Sites, your site was initially blocked from search engines. This is the default setting for new sites. This is intentional because we want to give you time to set up your site and create your content before showing it to the world. You can still access the site directly from the URL. When you discourage search engines, your site will not show up on our public directory and it should not show up in search results. Please note, that it is up to search engines to honor this request.

Note: The following options only restrict the content in Posts and Pages behind a login or password. Any media files you upload are shared via a CDN link. If someone has the direct link to the media file, they do not have to log in to see it. Do not use UCI Sites for protected content. P1 is acceptable. P3 – P4 levels are not. See Protection Levels on the UCI Information Security website for more details.

3. Anyone with a UCInetID: “Visitors must have a login – anyone that is registered user…”

This choice will require people to log in with a UCInetID to gain access to the content. You do not have to add them individually. However, anyone with a UCInetID can log in to see your site, so if you need to restrict it more, consider the “Only registered users” option where you can choose who has access.

4. Log in to See the Content: “Only registered users of this site can have access…”

If you want to restrict your site to people you invite, choose this option. You will need to add new users. They will need to have a UCInetID so they can log in to view the content.

If you only want them to read the content on the site, choose the Subscriber role. This will allow them to log in to view the site, but they cannot do anything else. If you want them to write content or manage the site, choose a higher role. Learn more about roles. This private option does not work with custom domains.

5. Password Protect the Site: “Anyone that visits must first provide this password”

You can also password protect your site. Anyone visiting the website will be prompted for the password before being able to see the content. With this option, you don’t need to create accounts and you can share the password with people outside of UCI. However, be aware that anyone who has this password will be able to see the content, so be careful who you share it with. If you need a more secure option, use the “Only registered users” one mentioned above.

Choose the option that works for you.

All of these settings are available from Settings > Reading. Choose the option that works best for your needs. Make sure to Save Changes!

Site Visibility options

Custom CSS Plugin

Custom CSS Plugin

The theme you choose for your website controls the design and “look and feel”. We have more than 100 themes to choose from allowing you to find one that should meet your needs. However, there may be times when you want to edit the theme or make some visual adjustments. While you cannot edit the themes directly as they are shared across the network, you can make some CSS adjustments on your own site by using custom CSS.

What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is the language used to style Web pages. Each WordPress theme has CSS that controls the styles. By using the Custom CSS plugin, you can override the theme’s styles and make adjustments to suit your needs. This is a more advanced skill requiring you to know how to edit and write CSS.

Activate the Custom CSS Plugin

The first step is to activate the Custom CSS plugin. You will need to be an administrator on the site to both activate the plugin and edit CSS.

  1. Go to Plugins from the Dashboard.
  2. Browse or search for Custom CSS.
  3. Click the Activate button.

Use the Custom CSS Plugin

Once activated, Custom CSS will be available from the Appearance menu.

  1. Go to Appearance > Custom CSS
  2. Add CSS to override your theme’s styles.
  3. Click Save Changes

Read more about the Custom CSS Plugin.

CSS Resources

Here are some resources to help you with writing CSS.

Udemy Courses

UCI currently has a campus-wide license for Udemy Courses. Here are some CSS courses:

Invite People to Join Your Site

Invite People to Join Your Site

Don’t want to work on your site alone? Your site can have multiple administrators, editors, authors, and contributors. You can invite others to help manage your site and the content. The only requirement is that they need a UCInetID and password to log in.

Add an Existing User

Since moving to CampusPress, the method of adding new users has changed slightly. If a person already has an account on sites.uci.edu, you can quickly add them using the Add Existing User method. You can try this method first. If they don’t have an account, you will see a message letting you know “The requested user does not exist.”

Add a New User

If they don’t have an account, there are two ways to add them.

1. Ask them to login to create an account

Ask the person or people you want to add to login to UCI Sites. They can use the Login link at the top and log in with their UCInetID and password. This will create an account for them, but they will not yet be a member of any site. Once they have an account, simply use the Add an Existing User method. If their account was created, it will be easy to add them.

2. Invite Them

You may also use the Invite Users option under the Users admin menu. From here you can create a link that you can send to the people you want to invite. This method is more simple if you have multiple people you want to add with a specific role.

We have documented all of this in our Help Center in more detail.