Jetpack Carousel Galleries

Jetpack Carousel Galleries

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.

As part of our Jetpack features series, learn how to enable the carousel slideshow to launch a gorgeous, full-screen photo browsing experience using an image gallery.

Things to Know

You will need to activate and set up Jetpack to take advantage of this feature.

How to enable the Carousel Gallery

  1. Go to Jetpack > Settings
  2. In the Media section, turn ON “Display images in a full-screen carousel gallery”
  3. (Optional) “Show photo Exif metadata…”. This will show the camera details for the photo.
  4. (Optional) “Show comments area in carousel”
  5. Choose a color scheme (black or white)
  6. Click Save Settings (This should auto-save, but if it does not, click the Save Settings button.)
    Turn on image carousel

It’s that easy! When you add a gallery block, your readers will get to enjoy a beautiful carousel of photos. See the gallery below for some lovely photos of the flora and fauna on the UCI campus.

Example of a Carousel Gallery

(Click on any of the photos to open up the carousel.)

Flora and Fauna of UCI

Tiled Galleries

Bonus Tip! The Carousel Gallery adds another option to your Media settings. You can opt to show your galleries in a cool tiled, mosaic format. Go to Settings > Media and check “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.”

Image Carousel settings
CampusPress Hosting and Support

CampusPress Hosting and Support

As of December 2020, Faculty Websites is now hosted by CampusPress, a leading provider of WordPress for higher education. CampusPress also does our technical support and is available 24/7.

You may get an email from time to time from CampusPress (contact@CampusPress.com) related to your website. That is okay. It may look a little odd because you are used to getting support email directly from an @uci.edu account.

If you ever have any questions or concerns, contact us! We’re still managing the service and are always happy to help.

Sylvia Bass and Mike Huang

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.

Insert Table
Example of the Table block 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

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

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 Faculty Websites, 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.

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

This choice will require people to login 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. Login 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 Privacy Options