1. There is a “Password Protection” column in the Pages and Posts screens on the dashboard. Password protected pages now have an icon in this column. This column may be hidden by unchecking its checkbox using the “screen options” link in the upper right corner of this dashboard view.

2. When you edit a page or post, the “Visibility” options now only show Public and Private (Password option no longer appears here).

3. There is a new box in the right column for “Password Protect WordPress” where you will see the password that was previously set is now listed as “global” role with the password indicated.

To password protect a page:

1. Open the page for editing.

2. In the “Password Protect WordPress” box you’ll see “Password protected by 0 role” with an Edit button when the page is truly public.

3. On clicking “Edit” link, the default role is “global” and there’s a box to enter the desired password. Keep the “global” role as the setting for current expected functionality, no need to do this for other logged in roles.

NOTE: there is now a quick way to password protect a page from the dashboard, you can click “Protect” on a page in the pages or posts list and the system will set the page to require a password and will assign a random string of characters as the password. You must open the page editor to view the auto-generated password, so this feature is of limited value.

As the most popular web content management system (WCMS), WordPress is a regular target for cyber threats. UMS IT has seen an uptick in attempts to login to our WordPress environment, and while these attempts are unsuccessful, the volume of these incidents has an impact on the overall performance of our website.

If you are working off campus and have not already installed the University System VPN, you may do so by following .

If you need assistance setting up the VPN, you can contact the IT Help Desk at:

·¡³¾²¹¾±±ô:Ìýhelp@maine.edu
Phone: 1-800-696-4357
Live chat: 

If you have a Kaltura-hosted video that you wish to embed on a umaine.edu web page, you can always contact us at um.weboffice@maine.edu, provide the “iframe” code from Kaltura, and we will perform these steps so you can add the video to a page.

First: Obtain the embed code from Kaltura

1. Navigate to your video on video.maine.edu
2. Underneath the video, select the “Share” link which appears beside “Details” and “Attachments”
3. Select the “Embed” link from the sharing options
4. Copy the embed code from the text box (begins with <iframe id=”kaltura_player” )

Second: Paste this code into a text editor

You can use any text editor that has a search and replace function, simple text editors work best (for example, TextEdit on a Mac)
1. Replace all instances of [Ìý·É¾±³Ù³óÌý%5B
2. Replace all instances of ]Ìý·É¾±³Ù³óÌý%5D
3. Replace the <iframe text with [um-iframe
4. Replace the ></iframe> text with ]
5. OPTIONAL: replace the number 44739341Ìý·É¾±³Ù³óÌý44739281 to change the player skin

A note about “player skin”

Kaltura videos have a player “skin” (the controls superimposed over the video) to display a transcript underneath the video. If you do not want this version of the player, step 5 will change the player to a version that only displays the video with playback controls (similar to Youtube hosted videos).

Campus WordPress environment: This is our most common solution. Websites are set up on a WordPress multisite that has a single, branded theme that all sites work within. The WordPress theme has a unified global header and footer that our team maintains, and we support the theme and improve its usability as new features are needed. To request a new website in our campus WordPress environment, please fill out this form.

Faculty WordPress environment: This is our newest solution, that was implemented to provide the type of ad hoc website space that faculty would use for hosting content they want to make available professionally yet isn’t directly tied to a lab site or program. The websites are all hosted at faculty.umaine.edu and the site URL is the faculty member’s name. The advantage of the Faculty WordPress environment is it offers more flexibility in look and feel, has unlimited storage, and has reasonable limitations (no custom plugins, php code, etc allowed). Faculty interested in this new service should contact Mike Kirby.

For web content that is not a good fit for maintaining in WordPress, please contact us and we will be happy to brainstorm other options.

Requesting a website
The first step is usually to request a new website. We have a form on our website to kick off this process. Some points to keep in mind:

• Websites must use the umaine.edu address, for example umaine.edu/yoursite, and not yoursite.org
• It is a good idea to use keywords in your website address, for example umaine.edu/studentlife or umaine.edu/campusrecreation. This helps increase search ranking on words or phrases your visitors use (such as “student life” or “campus recreation”).
• We strongly recommend “subdirectory” site addresses instead of “subdomains.” A brand-new site with a subdirectory style site address (umaine.edu/sitename) will inherit the search presence of umaine.edu, while a subdomain style site address (sitename.umaine.edu) has no search advantage when it is launched.

Working on your new site
Once created, your website will have an address that begins with “new.umaine.edu.” This is our naming style for websites under construction, and will be a temporary web address for your site. Please do not promote your site at this address as it will change when your site launches.

When your website is ready to launch
After you have completed work on your new website, send an email to um.weboffice@maine.edu and our team will review its content and schedule it for launch. Some items our review looks for:

• Web accessibility compliance: we will look at the published web pages to identify any changes needed to abide by web accessibility requirements, such as text alternatives for all images, descriptive link text, and use of images and text together.
• Published page audit: we review every published page on the new website, because every published page is submitted to search engines and will appear in site search. If there are any pages that are empty of content, these should be set to draft status even if they are not linked up.

Most site reviews can be completed within 2-3 days. Once reviewed and approved, we will schedule your website to launch during an upcoming maintenance window. These windows are on Wednesday and Sunday mornings, so please plan ahead and request your site review/launch at least one and a half weeks before you plan to promote it.

What happens after launch
Once your website is launched, the site address will change from a new.umaine.edu address to a umaine.edu address. This means your site login will also change, simply append “wp-admin” to the end of your published website address and the login screen will appear.

As part of site launch, we will submit your new website’s “site map” to public search engines (Google and Bing). This is a specially-formatted XML file that all umaine.edu websites create to assist search engines in a full index of your website content.

If you are comfortable editing web page code in the “text” view of the WordPress editor, these instructions will help you add these buttons today. Please let us know that you have added these buttons to your website (email us at um.weboffice@maine.edu), and when we make an improved button, we will be in touch to update your site.

Step one: Download the icon graphics

The two graphical icons used in these buttons are contained in this .zip file archive. You will need to download this file, unzip the contents, and upload the individual icons into your Media Library. Appropriate alt text for the images:

• Apply-now-icon.png – 91¸£Àû Black Bear head icon
• Request-info-icon.png – Clipboard with form icon

Step two: Insert an icon into the page

Using the Add Media feature, select the button you want to use (Apply-now-icon.png or Request-info-icon.png). If you did not already specify alt text, please add that now, and click the “Insert into page” or “Insert into post” button.

Step three: Resize the icon to 125 pixels wide

The buttons are larger to allow for best display at different screen resolutions, and the default size will be larger as a result. Select the image and click the “Edit” button in the pop-up toolbar (see below):

In the edit screen that appears, you will want to select a custom size, and enter 125 into the width field (see below):

Step four: switch to text view to add HTML around this image

When you switch to text view, you should see code similar to this:

<img class="alignnone wp-image-972" src="/sitename/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2019/01/Apply-now-icon-300x290.png" alt="91¸£Àû Black Bear head icon" width="125" height="121" />

For the APPLY NOW button

Type this HTML code immediately before the beginning of the code (the <img… part):

<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="none"><span class="button">

Type this HTML code immediately after the end of the code (the /> part):

<br/>APPLY NOW</span></a></div>

For the REQUEST INFO button

Type this HTML code immediately before the beginning of the code (the <img… part):

<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="none"><span class="button">

Type this HTML code immediately after the end of the code (the /> part):

<br/>REQUEST INFO</span></a></div>

Step five: Save your work and preview your page

If this worked as it should, you will see buttons similar to what is at the top of this page. Each button is centered within the content area. If you need to display buttons beside content, we recommend using the Rich Text content blocks to control placement of the buttons alongside other content. You should also use content blocks in this manner if you want to display these buttons beside one another.

When this happens, you may notice that the “View page” or “View post” link in the toolbar will say “View resource” instead. This is because the content database loaded a resource for your site instead of the content you intended to edit.

The workaround for this is simple: refresh your web browser window using F5 or the “reload” button in the browser. When refreshed, WordPress will instead show the content you originally intended to edit.

Why this happens

If a picture has larger dimensions than you need (for example, 1800 x 2600), in both the new and old WordPress sites the system creates smaller versions for use on the page— but the sizes of those smaller images are different in the new theme, and so the page is looking for a resized version that no longer exists.

On the old site, the “Medium” size was 167 x 250 pixels.

On the new site, a “Medium” size is 201 x 300 pixels.

Because of this, pages which used resized images will need to be checked, and when broken images are found, the process to fix them is as follows:

• Open the page for editing
• Click on one of the broken image icons in the page
• Click the “Edit” icon (a pencil)
• On the “Image Details” dialog box which appears, you’ll see a broken image icon to the right. There is a Size drop-down within “Display Settings”. Click that drop-down and select a different size… then click to re-select the size you had originally (Medium in this case).
• The image to the right should re-appear, indicating the system has found the correct image once again.
• Click “Update”

Note— this is a GREAT time to revisit the alternative text on images. While you are reviewing the Image Details, look at the text you see for “Alternative text” and ask yourself “will this be a good description of the image if it is read to someone using a screen reader?” If the text is the file name of the image, the answer is usually no.

Good alternative text should be descriptive of the image, for example “Photo of Susan J. Hunter” instead of “DCS005”.

As a bonus, good alternative text will help more people find your website, because Google’s Image Search feature will better characterize your images for people using search, allowing them to find your web pages.