Managing Program Umbrellas in Public Website WordPress

Before doing any work in WordPress, you will want to make sure you have the following ready to go:

• The intended title and URL of your Program Umbrella (following the BCIT standards for Page/Umbrella title and permalink)
• The list of programs that you want to include in the Program Umbrella
• Your content
• [Optional] The address/es for any YouTube videos you wish to include in your content
• [Optional] An image or Vimeo video to use for the Hero Banner

When you’re ready to begin, in WordPress, with your School’s Section selected:

1. Hover over Program Catalogue in the WordPress menu, then click Add New in the sub-menu that appears.
2. Enter the Program Umbrella title.
   Note: The permalink will be automatically generated from your title after a short delay. If you’d like it to be different than the automatically generated version, you can edit it before submitting it to your Publisher.
3. Select the appropriate sector/path in the Path Settings sidebar.
   Note: This will determine both the sector in your Program Umbrella’s breadcrumbs as well as the default Hero banner image (if you don’t overide the default by adding your own).
4. Add your list of Programs in the Related Programs Sidebar searching (by keyword or program code) and clicking on the ones you want.
   Note: Programs’ order in the list will be their order on the displayed page. You can reorder them by dragging and dropping them into the correct positions.
5. [Optional] Edit the Page Hero Options to change from the default Hero Banner Image.
6. [Optional] Add Pageblock content.
   Note: Pageblocks end up at the bottom of the rest of your content on mobile phones, so are not a good place for the most critical information on your page.
7. Enter and edit your content using the main WYSIWYG editor and any Panels you wish to add to properly display it.
8. Preview your Program Umbrella by clicking the Preview button in the Publish sidebar.
   
   Note: Don’t forget to check mobile and tablet views of your content, in addition to the desktop view.
9. When ready, click the Submit for Review button in the Publisher sidebar.

With the move to WordPress, there are options for adding content using Panels that didn’t exist in Marqui, and whether you’re updating a Program Umbrella that existed previously or creating a new one, you may wish to take advantage of this new functionality. All Panels that are available on Pages are also available on Program Umbrellas. Below are specific suggestions for using Panels, but there are many more options than just these.

Events Panel

If your programs have relatively frequent info sessions and you want to be able to display any that are applicable to any of the programs in your Program Umbrella, you can do this with the Events Panel. If you have long stretches in which there wouldn’t be info sessions to view, this might be worth doing only during high volume periods and removing otherwise.

Add an Events Panel to your Program Umbrella and choose Dynamic rather than manual. Then use Tags as your filter and enter all relevant program codes. The Panel will then display upcoming info sessions for any and all of the Programs, in calendar/date order.

RSS Feed Panel

Use an RSS Feed Panel to show news items about your Programs from the BCIT News site.

You can get an RSS feed link for any category or tag on the BCIT News site by navigating to the category or tag view, then adding “/feed/” to the end of the URL. For example, there’s a “Forensics” tag in use on the BCIT News site for any news items relating to BCIT’s Forensic Science programs. By clicking on the Forensics tag in any news article it appears in, you’ll find yourself on a page that shows all items with that tag, with a URL of “https://commons.bcit.ca/news/tag/forensics/”. Copying that URL into the RSS feed URL field in the RSS Feed Panel and adding “feed” at the end – “https://commons.bcit.ca/news/tag/forensics/feed/” – will result in the Panel displaying a always updated list of all recent news articles with that tag on the BCIT news site.

Accordion Panel

The Accordion Panel is the preferred method of displaying a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” and also can permit you to link directly to a specific answer to a question on the page.