Composing and Editing
Instructions for creating a course with lessons
- Go to Dashboard. On the left hand side menu, hover over over Courses and click on Add New.
- You should be taken to a new page to enter your course. Under the Edit Course label, enter the course title and, in the upper right hand corner, click Save Draft.
- Copy the course title.
- On the left hand side menu, hover over over Lessons and click on Add New.
- Add Lesson title.
- Then scroll all the way to the bottom of the window, and paste (or type) the exact course title in the Course Name field.
- Enter some content into the large field in your Lesson’s entry view, below the Add Media button and text editing tools.
- Then, in the upper right hand corner, click the Publish button.
- In the upper right hand corner of the window, click Save Draft.
- On the left hand side menu, hover over over Courses and click on All Courses.
- When you see a list of courses, then hover just under your course’s title and click on the Edit link.
- Enter some introductory content for your course.
- Then, in the upper right hand corner, click the Publish button.
- To view the course as a student or other reader, click on the link to the right of “Permalink:” beneath the title.
Editing your a course and lessons
As a Corsbook author, you can go back and edit your courses and lessons at any time. Just go to the Courselist or Lessons list, and click Edit beneath the content item title. Remember save your work by clicking the relevant button, which might be Save Draft, Update, or Publish, all in the upper right hand corner in the Publish pane.
Suggestion: first create a list of your planned lessons. The create the lessons in reverse order of the order for them to be read. They will then appear in your desired order for readers. If you ever need to change the order, please contact the Corsbook administrator.
Caveat: if you change your course title, you will need to change it in each of the lessons for that course.
Accessibility
To maximize the impact of your content, you should make it accessible to a range of users with diverse abilities, backgrounds and devices. Further, some organizations require content to be accessible per various standards. For further information, see Accessibility and Universal Design.
Short Codes
Corsbook is built on top of the WordPress open source software. It is possible to add additional functionality in WordPress using small snippets of code called shortcodes. Short codes are enclosed in “[…]” and “[/…]” punctuation. An example which will hide enclosed contents is:
LaTeX
You can insert LaTeX by using the following short codes:
Tips & Troubleshooting
- Embed videos in the following short codes: [iframe class="noprint" src="your source"]] and [[/iframe]. The “scr” refers to the URL of the video, and “class” tells the video not to appear in the print version (which would show up as a blank space).
Advanced Styling
To add advanced styling, please see Special CSS Styling.
General Information
Excerpts below taken from WordPress.org.
Descriptions of Post Fields
Title/Headline Box
The title of your post. You can use any phrases, words or characters. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hyphens/dashes and other typical symbols in the post like “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”. WordPress will then clean it up to generate a user-friendly and URL-valid name of the post (also called the “post slug”) to compose the permalink for the post.
Body Copy Box
The blank box where you enter your writing, links, links to images, and any information you want to display on your site. You can use either the Visual or the Text view to compose your posts. For more on the Text view, see the section below, Visual Versus Text View.
Preview button
Allows you to view the post before officially publishing it.
Publish box
Contains buttons that control the state of your post. The main states are Published, Pending Review and Draft. A Published status means the post has been published live on your blog for all to see. Pending Review means the draft is waiting for review by an editor prior to publication. Draft means the post has not been published and remains a draft for you. If you select a specific publish status and click the update post or “Publish” button, that status is applied to the post. For example, to save a post in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. To schedule a post for publication on a future time or date, click “Edit” in the Publish area next to the words “Publish immediately”. You can also change the publish date to a date in the past to back-date posts. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also hit the “Publish” button when you have completed the post to publish at the desired time and date.
Publish box
Visibility – This determines how your post appears to the world. Public posts will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected posts are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the post content. Private posts are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site)
Save
Allows you to save your post as a draft / pending review rather than immediately publishing it. To return to your drafts later, visit Posts – Edit in the menu bar, then select your post from the list.
Publish
Publishes your post on the site. You can edit the time when the post is published by clicking the Edit link above the “Publish” button and specifying the time you want the post to be published. By default, at the time the post is first auto-saved, that will be the date and time of the post within the database.
Course
This designates the course. It is primarily for the purpose of exclusively connecting lessons associated with a particular course.
Custom Fields
Custom_Fields offer a way to add information to your content. Use this feature to associate courses with lessons. The is the primary association means.
Post Author
A list of all blog authors you can select from to attribute as the post author. This section only shows if there are multiple users with authoring rights.
Visual Versus Text Editor
When writing your post, you have the option of using the Visual or Text mode of the editor. The visual mode lets you see your post as is, while the Text mode shows you the code and replaces the WYSIWYG editor buttons with quicktags. These quicktags are explained as follows.
- b – <strong></strong> HTML tag for strong emphasis of text (i.e. bold).
- i – <em></em> HTML tag for emphasis of text (i.e. italicize).
- b-quote – <blockquote></blockquote> HTML tag to distinguish quoted or cited text.
- del – <del></del> HTML tag to label text considered deleted from a post. Most browsers display as striked through text.
- link – <a href=”http://example.com”></a> HTML tag to create a hyperlink.
- ins – <ins></ins> HTML tag to label text considered inserted into a post. Most browsers display as underlined text.
- ul – <ul></ul> HTML tag will insert an unordered list, or wrap the selected text in same. An unordered list will typically be a bulleted list of items.
- ol – <ol></ol> HTML tag will insert a numbered list, or wrap the selected text in same. Each item in an ordered list is typically numbered.
- li – <li></li> HTML tag will insert or make the selected text a list item. Used in conjunction with the ul or ol tag.
- code – <code></code> HTML tag for preformatted styling of text. Generally sets text in a monospaced font, such as Courier.
- more – <!–more–> WordPress tag that breaks a post into “teaser” and content sections. Type a few paragraphs, insert this tag, then compose the rest of your post. On your blog’s home page you’ll see only those first paragraphs with a hyperlink ((more…)), which when followed displays the rest of the post’s content.
- page – <!–nextpage–> WordPress tag similar to the more tag, except it can be used any number of times in a post, and each insert will “break” and paginate the post at that location. Hyperlinks to the paginated sections of the post are then generated in combination with the wp_link_pages() or link_pages() template tag.
- lookup – Opens a JavaScript dialogue box that prompts for a word to search for through the online dictionary at answers.com. You can use this to check spelling on individual words.
- Close Tags – Closes any open HTML tags left open–but pay attention to the closing tags. WordPress is not a mind reader (!), so make sure the tags enclose what you want, and in the proper way.
Workflow Note – With Quicktag buttons that insert HTML tags, you can for example click i to insert the opening <em> tag, type the text to be enclosed, and click /i or Close Tags to insert the closing tag. However, you can eliminate the need for this ‘close’ step by changing your workflow a bit: type your text, select the portion to be emphasized (that is, italicized), then click i and your highlighted text will be wrapped in the opening and closing tags.