In an earlier post, we shared a variety of websites where you can find royalty-free images for your website or blog. Before adding images to your website, make sure you have permission to use them. If you don’t take the photos yourself, the next best option is to find photographers and artists who are willing to share their images. Often all they ask for is attribution.
Faculty Websites now has a plugin you can activate that will allow you to search, download and embed photos directly from your WordPress website. It searches the Pixabay library and will download the images for you.
Activate the Pixabay Images plugin to get started
You will need to be an administrator on the website to be able to activate plugins.
Go to Plugins > All and look for Pixabay Images
Click the Activate button
How to add a Pixabay Image
Create or edit a Post or Page
If you are still using the Classic Editor, look for a Pixabay button next to Add Media.
If you using the Block Editor, you will need to use a Classic Block to search for and insert a Pixabay image.
Add a Classic Block
Click the AddMedia button. (It looks like a camera and musical note.)
In the Add Media screen, click Pixabay Images in the left section.
Type a search term and click Enter or click the magnifying glass.
The plugin will search Pixabay’s extensive library and return the results.
Find the photo you want to use and click on it to download.
Add in Alternative Text to make sure it is web-accessible!
Choose the size you want to use and click Insert Into Post.
The image will now appear on your page or post. The image will also be downloaded to your Media Library allowing you to re-use it on your website. Once downloaded you can use it on any block that uses images from your media library.
Faculty Websites has been upgraded to WordPress 6.0 “Arturo”.
It has nearly 1,000 enhancements and bug fixes and is the second major release in 2022.
Features and Improvements
Enhanced Writing Experience – You can now select text across multiple blocks. You can quickly add internal links by typing ‘[[‘. When you customize buttons, the new buttons will retain the style automatically.
Block Locking Controls – You can now lock your blocks. If you have a reusable block and don’t want it overwritten, you can now lock it.
Improved Performance – These enhancements cover a range of performance areas including improving the page and post-load speed, reducing the execution time of various query types, caching, navigation menus, and much more.
Improved Accessibility – WordPress 6.0 includes more than 50 updates specifically focused on enhancing the accessibility of the platform.
We have an optional plugin available called “A – Z Lists”. It’s an easy solution to add a large number of items in a filterable and searchable A – Z list. Create your list and the plugin will alphabetize the list for you.
Activate the A – Z Lists Plugin
Note: Only site administrators can activate plugins.
Go to Plugins > All Plugins
Find “A – Z Lists” and click the Activate button.
It’s now available on your site.
Add your list to a Page or Post
If you are using the Block Editor, you will need to use a “Classic Block” to be able to see and use the A-Z icon.
Click the A-Z icon in the editor. (If you are using the Block Editor, see the note above.)
Choose the type of list you want to use (ordered, unordered, none).
Choose the number of columns. The columns are the number of columns for each letter.
Check “Show menu with search bar and links to groups” if you want your readers to be able to filter the list based on letter and search the list.
Check “Show letter before start of each group” to display the letter automatically.
Click OK
Start typing your list. You don’t have to worry about alphabetizing the list, it will be sorted for you when you publish the content.
You can also link the list content. This could be a good index for your site, for example.
Example of an filterable and searchable, A – Z list.
We recently changed the search mechanism on the main website on Faculty Websites to search all publicly available websites hosted on the service.
Now, when you use the Search, which is available prominently on the header of each page, you will see results from all Faculty Websites that allow search engines. We’ve also added searching the Faculty Profile system to help viewers trying to find faculty based on search terms. The Faculty Profile system is a separate system run by the Office of Research.
How to enable or disable your Faculty Website being searched
By default, all new sites have search engine access disabled. This is intentional. We want to give you time to work on your site before making it searchable by Google and other search engines.
Ready to make your site searchable?
Change your Site Visibility settings. However, be aware it may take Google some time to find your site. The help page has some tips to speed things up.
As part of our Jetpack features series, learn how to configure widgets to only appear on certain posts or pages. By enabling this feature, you can show or hide widgets based on the criteria you choose.
Go to the Widgets panel and toggle ON “Enable widget visibility controls…”
Using Widget Visibility
What are some examples of when to use widget visibility?
You want to show an author bio, but only for posts by that author.
You want to show or hide a widget on the homepage.
You want a widget to show for a particular post category or tag.
You want to show a widget only for people who are logged into your site.
Visibility
Visibility is controlled by five things: page type, category (posts), tag (posts), date, and author. You can also hide widgets based on the same criteria. Each rule is handled separately.
How to use Widget Visibility
When adding or editing a widget, you should now see a button called “Visibility”.
Add or edit an existing widget using the Customizer so you can see the changes in real-time.
Click the Visibility button.
Toggle Show or Hide and choose your criteria.
For example, if I only want to show a widget on the home page (or front page), I would choose Show if Page is Front page.
This would only show the widget on the home page and hide it everywhere else.
You can add more criteria by clicking the plus icon.
When you are satisfied with the results, click the Publish button in the Customizer to save your settings.
There are a lot of variables. Try it out so you can display widgets in different parts of your website.
