Chapter 4 Guest Pieces Abstract also allows librarians to provide subject expertise via the Web. The authors’ greatest interest in preparing this text was Our WordPress installation was successfully com- to encourage a variety of voices with disparate experi- pleted thanks to the expertise of Joshua Dodson, who ences with WordPress to contribute to the overall story was then our technical services technician. A Web of using WordPress in library settings. A great number of committee was formed, and training sessions were guest authors met our call to participate in the publica- held for all librarians and staff. WordPress proved to tion by adding their stories in the form of reflective pieces, be all that we anticipated and more. best practices, technical walk-throughs, and how-tos. In The most innovative creation was the dynamic this chapter, librarians from public, school, and academic subject guides. Dodson was able to take the custom institutions, instructors in higher education, and an archi- post type functionality of WordPress and create a com- vist share their experiences with WordPress in libraries. ponent that updated our ability to add and control content in our WordPress installation. Over the past two years, WordPress enhanced its capabilities, which made providing this type of functionality easier. Creating DYNAMIC SUBJECT GUIDES A Subject Guide in WordPress By Laura Slavin and Joshua Dodson It is easy to create a subject guide using WordPress. April 2011 April Once you set up the subject guides as a custom post Slavin and Dodson walk through using WordPress for sub- type, there will be an additional area in your WordPress ject guides at the Lincoln Memorial University Carnegie- dashboard for you to add and edit subject guides and Vincent Library. the related taxonomies (subjects and subject tags). You can go into the Subject Guides screen to make modifica- Like most academic libraries, Carnegie-Vincent Library tions to the subject guide posts that you create. alatechsource.org (CVL) built webpages from the ground up. Over the When you add a new subject guide, you will want years, it became apparent that the current pages did to treat each one as a post that will be categorized not meet the needs of the students, faculty, staff, and within at least one subject. Your full subject guides community at large. The format and design of the web- will actually be displayed by subject when utiliz- site had become antiquated. The users of the pages ing the full potential of this system. It is best to add were inundated with a huge amount of information a title, a description within the post body area, the with poor navigational options. website address or linked Internet resource under the The librarians at CVL wanted the opportunity to Subject Guide Options screen, the subject categories be more involved with the website users by collaborat- and subcategories that this post will fall under, and Library Technology ReportsLibrary Technology ing with students when helping them with research the appropriate subject tags. The subject categories questions or information literacy. This involvement are hierarchical, so you will most likely need to select 34 Using WordPress as a Library Content Management System Kyle M. L. Jones and Polly-Alida Farrington Chapter x only one of the subcategories per parent category. Be WordPress will look for this file first to verify that sure to plan out the structure of your hierarchy before it is actually a regular theme or a child theme. We used you begin creating the subject guides. You will save the Template: twentyten declaration. WordPress yourself much time later on. Also, the subject tags are now knows that we are going to inherit the functional- much less structured and can provide additional places ity of the Twenty Ten theme, but add some pieces to to describe the content in a way that will not interfere it ourselves. Note that it is important that both this with the designated hierarchy. The tags are a good folder and the original Twenty Ten folder reside in place to add all of the extra metadata for which there your themes folder within the wp-content folder. is no clear place beforehand. At this point, it is not necessary to add anything When you need to add or edit the subject catego- else to the style sheet, but since we want to maintain ries, it will be very similar to the normal WordPress the look and feel of the original theme for our exam- post categories. One thing to note is that the descrip- ple, we will add a style import declaration. A few addi- tion added here will be displayed later on in the sub- tional files must be added to our new theme foldersg- ject guide template. Be sure to add an informative theme. We will add five additional files to thethemes description if you use this feature. The subject tags folder and one file to theplugins folder found inside are also very similar to the standard WordPress post of the wp-content folder. A plugin must be created tags. You can add and modify the tags by clicking Sub- that will enable the custom post types and provide the ject Tags on the left side of the WordPress dashboard core functionality. under Subject Guides. The A–Z subject list will display There is also an optional function that will create all the parent categories that have been created for the a redirection to take place under specific conditions. subject guides. When you click on a parent category, This function ultimately supplies our designated tem- the second-level categories, or subcategories, will be plates if the page that the user is viewing is one of the listed, with the descriptions and the posts under them. subject guide pages. The taxonomy-subject.php The subject guide index will list all the posts that example that we discuss below takes the place of the have been created. This list will include all of the last statement by using the inherent template hierar- posts, regardless of category. When you click on an chy structure of WordPress. individual post, the link will take you to the page for Now we are finished setting up how WordPress that item, which includes a description and the full will handle all of our subject guide custom post types list of categories and tags that have been assigned to and the metadata and other taxonomies that are asso- this item. The complete subject guide, when brought ciated with it. All that is left to do is to initiate the plu- together, includes the page title, category descriptions, gin. This task requires a few additional lines of code. subcate gories, and each post that has been added The plugin will do most of the heavy lifting for us beneath each subcategory. You can include additional on the admin side. Now we need to specify how we customizations as you see fit by using CSS and JavaS- are going to display the contents of our subject guide cript and by modifying the PHP and (X)HTML. custom posts. We will handle this task through our WordPress developers are constantly enhancing templates. Since we are using a child theme, Word- and improving functionality with the release of each Press will look at our custom folder first and display new upgrade; one example is custom post types. This the content that we specify for our templates. After it ReportsLibrary Technology enhancement is helpful for creating improved dynamic looks at our child theme folder, WordPress will look subject guides. for the rest of the functionality in the parent theme Before initiating the custom post types plugin, folder. Using the built-in WordPress theme structure, first create a child theme to preserve functionality and we will create a file calledtaxonomy-subject.php . maintain compatibility with the current WordPress We will use the categorization to display the subjects theme. The newest default theme at the time of this so that when one clicks on the category, all of the posts writing is Twenty Ten, which is HTML5-compatible classified as that subject and all of the subcategories and very flexible. We will use this as our base and cre- with their respective posts will be displayed in a hier- ate a child theme so that we can take advantage of its archical fashion. alatechsource.org rich structure and syntax. The subject guide template lists all of the subject Creating child themes has never been easier. First guide posts across all categories (subjects) and dis- create a folder called sg-theme (or name it anything plays the URL of the Internet resource next to it. When else you would like) and a style.css file within the the post title link is clicked on, it will take you to the folder. The style sheet requires a few lines. To see an single-page listing of the post resource. example, please refer to our online documentation. The Subject Guide A–Z List template and the Sub- 2011 April ject Guide Category template will take on very basic functionality from the standard Twenty Ten loop. We Subject Guide A–Z Documentation use our functions.php file to make some modifi- www.slideshare.net/ALATechSource/documents cations to provide additional functionality. Note that 35 Using WordPress as a Library Content Management System Kyle M. L. Jones and Polly-Alida Farrington Chapter x the Subject Guide A–Z List template takes on the page in business administration from Lincoln Memorial loop functionality, while the Subject Guide Category University. template uses the single post loop. To bring everything together, we will use a custom functions.php file.