Other Media (WordPress) + Quiz

DUE Wednesday, Mar 28 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)

For this assignment we will be covering a number of different pieces related to working with WordPress, a case study and some practical tutorials.

  • Audio: Harvard Gazette Case Study (0:00-7:50, 13:49-17:58, 34:27-40:23) This is an audio recording of a presentation given at WordCamp NYC in November 2009. The presenters, Perry Hewitt and Lin Chen, discuss the process involved in moving Harvard Gazette from static HTML files to WordPress. The whole presentation is interesting, but the questions will come from the three time segments listed above. Download MP3 (46.8 MB)

    You may find it helpful to refer to the Harvard Gazette site (view site) and to these notes that an attendee took during the event (view notes) while you listen.

    Download MP3 (46.8 MB)

  • Videos from WordPress.tv These are some short video tutorials about working with WordPress content and themes

  • Article: Creating Custom WordPress Pages This tutorial describes how to create a WordPress custom page template, something that is essential for using WordPress to drive a non-blog site.

Once you have read or watched these materials, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you full credit.) All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author / speaker / presenter … ”:

  1. T/F? The Harvard Gazette is the university’s official newspaper.
  2. T/F? The Harvard Gazette has been online since 1926.
  3. T/F? The Harvard Gazette switched to WordPress from an expensive, proprietary content management system.
  4. T/F? Perry Hewitt describes how they were able to feature a piece of evergreen content, an interview with entomologist E. O. Wilson from a couple years before Perry Hewitt’s talk, after moving to WordPress.
  5. T/F? The Harvard Gazette hosts videos on YouTube.
  6. T/F? Perry Hewitt indicated that the right navigational question to ask site visitors on the multimedia is if they want to see a “Slideshow” or a “Video.”
  7. T/F? Lin Chen describes keeping up with WordPress releases as “effortless.”
  8. T/F? The dominant belief had Harvard was that WordPress was insecure because Harvard had a WordPress breach many years before Perry Hewitt’s talk.
  9. T/F? You can create a WordPress theme file with the category ID — something like category-3.php — to change the way the list of posts in that category is displayed.
  10. T/F? Perry Hewitt said that they have no plans to enable user comments on the site.
  11. T/F? Perry Hewitt said the Harvard Gazette has 100,000 pageviews a month.
  12. T/F? The editors of the Harvard Gazette found WordPress’s interface too technical for them to grasp.
  13. T/F? The developers for the Harvard Gazette miss pasting content into flat HTML files.
  14. T/F? The lead photographer of the Harvard Gazette team had more photos of the 2009 Nobel Prize picked up than in prior years, in part because they showed up in Google Alerts or on Google News more quickly after the WordPress implementation.
  15. T/F? Perry Hewitt said the WordPress implementation was part of a larger strategy to give the university a “net presence” and not just a “web site.”
  16. T/F? You can set the front page of your WordPress web site to be a static Page instead of a list of blog posts on the Settings > Reading pane.
  17. T/F? You only change the front page of your WordPress web site to be a static Page instead a list of blog posts if you want to eliminate the blog entirely.
  18. T/F? Michael Pick (the British WordPress.tv guy) says that categories are like the sections of a menu or a newspaper.
  19. T/F? Michael Pick (the British WordPress.tv guy) says that tags are like a piece of thread running through related pieces of content.
  20. T/F? When a site visitor navigates to a page that cannot be found, a 302 error is returned to the browser and WordPress uses the 302.php file.
  21. T/F? Files like header.php, footer.php, and sidebar.php are not standalone files; they are typically incorporated into other WordPress theme files like the index.php file.
  22. T/F? When a site visitor navigates to a particular post, WordPress uses the post.php file.
  23. T/F? Most WordPress themes have tag.php and category.php files.
  24. T/F? The “template hierarchy” determines which file in the theme WordPress uses to display a particular web address.
  25. T/F? To create a custom page template, you first create a copy of the default page template (page.php) and add a special piece of code to the top of it.

DUE Wednesday, Mar 28 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)