QUB Blogs

We have added the SurveyMe plugin that allows you to create surveys and collect the responses into a database table or by email.

To get started activate the SurveyMe plug-in in the ‘Plugins’ menu of your ‘Dashboard’.

Creating a new form.

1. Visit ‘Settings->SurveyMe->Forms’ in your admin panel.
2. You create new survey forms based on an existing form (as a template) so select the form on which you wish to base your new form by using the radio buttons in the first column.
3. Enter a unique name in the ‘New Forms’ field at the bottom. It is advisable to avoid special characters and to also keep the name short.
4. Click Apply.

Adding the form to your site.

1. Create a post or page as normal.
2. Insert the text from the ‘BBCode’ column into the page where you want the form to appear, for example
   
3. Save the page as normal.

Adding new fields to your form

1. Select the ‘Field Definitions’ link next to the form you wish to edit.
2. At the bottom of the list of fields there is a blank field of type ‘New Field’
3. Set this to the type you want and fill in its details, example:
   
4. Apply the changes.
5. Add more as required.
6. Click ‘Data Collection’ beside the form name to set how you would like the responses processed.
   

Closing the form

1. Click the ‘General’ Link next to the form you wish to close.
2. Change the status of the form to anything apart from open. Both pending and close will close the form but display different responses.

You probably don’t want to have to create two different websites for your desktop users and your smart phone users. To enable your existing blog for mobile phone users visit the ‘Plugins’ screen in your Dashboard and enable the WPTouch plugin.

Without WPTouch the QUB Blogs website looks like this on an Android mobile:

With WPTouch the QUB Blogs website looks like this on an Android mobile:

We have added a plugin to assist in displaying content from flickr. To make use of this plugin first enable it  in the Plugins section of your dashboard then on the page where you want the galleries placed type the following shortcodes. Obviously you will need to change the names/numbers:

Usage

• [flickr-gallery] – Creates a generic gallery for the user you specified in your settings page.
• [flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancoulter/2619594365/[/flickr] – Inserts the given image. You can also just put the photo ID in there (the numeric string at the end of the link).

Other options:

• [flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157605870230826"] – Displays all of the photos from the given Flickr photoset.
• [flickr-gallery mode="tag" tags="foo" tag_mode="all"] – Shows photos from your photostream with the specified tags (comma separated). If you leave off the tag_mode option, it defaults to “any”.
• [flickr-gallery mode="recent"] – Shows recent photos from your photostream
• [flickr-gallery mode="interesting"] – Shows interesting photos from your photostream
• [flickr-gallery mode="search" tags="foo" group_id="46862018@N00"] – The search mode supports any arbitrary sort using the options listed here: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.search.html
• [flickr size="small" float="left"]http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancoulter/2619594365/[/flickr] – Sets the size of the inserted image to “small” (defaults to “medium”) and makes the next paragraph of text wrap around to the right of the image (you can specify “right” for the float parameter as well, which defaults to “none”)
• [flickr height="300" width="400"]http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancoulter/2422361554/[/flickr] – This one is a video. It’ll automatically embed the flash movie for you. If you want to change its size, you can use the width and height options.

Advanced options:

• If you want to disable pagination, just include pagination=0 in your shortcode.

For more information see the Flickr plugin page.

We have added the Prettify GC Syntax Highlighter plugin which can highlight syntax and number lines of program code. You should Activate the plugin in your dashboard and then use as follows:

Usage

<pre class=”prettyprint”> // Put your code here. </pre>

Making Code HTML Safe

The plugin automatically makes highlighted code html-safe:

<pre class=”prettyprint”> Anything that goes here will be quoted to appear on the page as-is. For example: <head></head><body></body> </pre>

To avoid quoting your code, add dontquote as the first class:

<pre class=”dontquote prettyprint”> Remember to quote manually. For example: &lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;/body&gt; </pre>

Line numbering

Line numbdering can be enabled as follows:

<pre class=”prettyprint linenums”> // Put your code here. </pre>

If you want to start with a line number 42, you can do the following:

<pre> // Put your code here. </pre>

Specifying Language

Most of the time the highlighter will do a good job guessing how to highlight the code. However, to achieve the best result, you should specify the language:

<pre class=”prettyprint lang-YOURLANG”> // Put your code here. </pre>

Adding a poll to your blog takes just a few minutes. To do so you should:

• Enable the poll WP-Polls plugin by visiting the Plugins section of your Dashboard. Click the ‘Activate’ link.
• You will notice a new Polls menu on your Dashboard menu. Click ‘Add Poll’
• Type your poll question and answers. (Optional: You can customise the plugin further by clicking ‘Poll Options’)
• Click Appearance > Widgets in your Dashboard menu
• Drag the ‘Polls’ widget from the ‘Available Widgets’ section to ‘Sidebar 1′ (Optional: You can customise the title and poll to display on this page)
• Check your website and vote!

Note: If you visit the ‘Widgets’ screen and receive an error message it is probable that your current theme does not make use of widgets. Contact us to see if we can make your theme widget-enabled.

If you use Firefix or Google Chrome for web browsing you can add the ScribeFire plugin which can make publishing to your blog even easier.

After installing the ScribeFire plugin in your browser, you can open the ScribeFire window in your browser using any of the following methods:

• Press F8
• Click on the icon in the status bar:
• Select ScribeFire from the Tools menu:

The first time you open ScribeFire, an account wizard will appear to help you connect ScribeFire to your blog. (Here is a list of the blogging services that are compatible with ScribeFire.) Simply fill in the information it asks for, and when you finish, your blog will be listed in the right-hand pane. If you have any difficulties getting this to work contact us at webmaster [@] qub.ac.uk

ScribeFire Screenshot inside Firefox Web Browser

To post to your blog, type some text in the main editor panel of ScribeFire, give it a title…

…and click the Publish button:

That’s all there is to it! ScribeFire will post the entry to your blog, and it will appear in the list of entries in the right sidebar so that you can edit or delete it later if you want.

Users with a QUB blog can add an image gallery following the instructions in this post. You may need to activate the Lightbox plugin for your blog if you also want that functionality. Take care when uploading images, ensuring that the width of the images is less than 600 pixels. To resize images I would recommend using Gimp (windows version here), from the Gimp menu choose Image -> Scale Image…

If you need more web space to upload your images let us know at webmaster [@] qub . ac . uk