In addition to the all of the other changes to Blackboard now that we have upgraded to Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 10, there is a change to the ‘My Courses’ module that may cause alarm for a few students. Before the upgrade, courses that a student had enrolled in but had not been made available by the instructor would show up in the My Courses module as unavailable when the student logged in to Blackboard. Blackboard has removed that particular configuration option in Service Pack 10. Now, when a student has enrolled in a course and the instructor has not made the course available, the...

Now that the Palomar College WordPress system has been updated to version 3.5, this would be a good time to write about some of the changes you can expect to see when managing your sites. Here’s a rundown of the most important new stuff: All New Media Uploader The biggest change in version 3.5 of WordPress is the new media manager. Adding images or documents to a post or page is now easier. The new Insert Media screen, seen below, is much more streamlined. This is very helpful when uploading multiple files or creating image galleries.   Embedding Media A feature that many do not know about...

Links to webpages and files are a basic part of the web. In fact, without them it wouldn’t be much of a ‘web’. The WordPress content editor makes it easy to insert new links and edit existing ones. There are three types of links that will commonly be inserted: Internal pages or posts – These are links to pages or posts within your own WordPress site. WordPress makes it really easy to choose which existing page or post to link to. External websites or files – Anything that is outside of your WordPress site is an an external link. WordPress allows you to specify a URL for...

One of the most frequently asked questions about using WordPress for managing a website is: How do I disable the comments on a page or post? While the comment system in WordPress works really well and can be a great way to get feedback, there are many instances when comments from site visitors are not necessary or appropriate. By default, the option for a site visitor to leave a comment is on. It is not obvious how to turn comments off when creating or editing a page because the option is initially hidden. The following short video shows how to disable comments on a page or post and how to change the...

Managing navigation menus on a website is usually a difficult task. WordPress takes way most of the difficulty of creating menus and, some would say, even makes it fun. In fact, on many WordPress sites the menu will automatically be configured as you create each new page. Page settings such as the ‘Parent Page’ and ‘Order’ allow you to control where in the menu the page will be listed. There are, however, many cases where the menu needs to be customized. For example, if you need to add a link to a third-party webpage or add a post category. The following video, part of the...