ds106bank | Wordpress Theme to create a site

A few Wordpress pages should be created on theme activation, to create the main index of all things, another to house the form for adding a new thing,one for users to add an example of a response or a tutorial to a thing, and yet one more to set up a help system. If the pages are not created for you on theme activation... To repeat: You should always, always create your "things" via this form, even if you do not allow the public to do so. The form adds a number of post custom field values necessary to make everything work. You can always modify these later, in the editor (making sure you make Custom Fields visible via screen options). Note that this page is never viewed directly on it's own. It will be be linked from a single item page with additional paramaters to construct the full submission form.
Create a new page for a Main Menu. This generates the index of all types of things; they will be listed in the order specified by your theme options. The title and content of the page (which you edit) is displayed above a grid of types of things. To enable the functionality, set the page template to Assignment Menu If you wish this page to be the front of the site, use the Wordpress Reading Settings to set the Front Page as a static page (if you plan to use the blog, create a blank page that you can use for a Posts page).
Create a new page to Submit New Things You will need this even if you do not allow visitors to add them so you can add them yourself (the page can be unlinked or have a password set on it). The title and content of the page is displayed above the input form. To enable the functionality, set the page template to Submit Thing Form.
Create a new page to Submit Examples. This form is used to allow visitors to add examples or tutorial for things via a web form. The title and content of the page is displayed above the input form. To enable the functionality, set the page template to Submit Example/Tutorial Form
Create a new page to manage the Help pages for submission forms (this one must have a permalink/slug of help). The title and content of the page is displayed above the help content (specific for the type of content being created).
Install the WP-PostRatings plugin to activate the user thing popularity rating feature. Not installing the plugin (or de-activating it) removes the feature from the site. the purpose here is to allow visitors to rate Things, and provide sorting of things based on said ratings. A few settings for the plugin are necessary (found in the new Ratings option in the Admin Sidebar). On the Post Rating Options choose the graphic style for the ratings- the suggestion is one of the stars settings with a max ratings of 5 but any setting is viable. The suggested set up mode is to use the ratings as a measure of popularity, so the default 1 Star, 2 Stars, etc can be used. On the other hand, the original DS106 Assignment Bank was a crowd sourced measured of difficulty, so the labels could be customized as follows. Create any labels for your scale (these are used on the form to submit new Things). Set the "Allow to Rate" option to Registered Users and Guests to allow any site visitor to cast a vote. Set the Post Ratings Templates to customize the text displayed to show the ratings- the first two templates are used. Ratings Vote Text: designates how the ratings are shows; Ratings Voted Text: is shown as feedback and adds an indicated if a visitor has already voted; Ratings None: is shown for an item that has not been rated yet.
ratings_score is the total cumulative votes submitted (in the above example, 7)
ratings_users is the number of people who voted (in the above example, 2)
ratings_average is the value that will be displayed (in the above example, 3.5)
Install the Feed Wordpress plugin if you wish to syndicate in responses to "things" as examples. This means that you can add blog feeds to the bank (it does the feed aggregation) or you can syndicate in from another site that is aggregating feeds (the ds 106 model). If this is not a desired feature, the plugin is not needed. You can still allow visitors to submit their examples via a web form. A few settings must be made in Feed Wordpress to work correctly with the Assignment Bank Theme. Under Updates Scheduling in the Feed and Updates option under Syndication Settings set the dropdown menu to set to automatically check for updates after pages load to generate the process of feed checking. This is the easiest approach that is triggered by site activity- if you understand cron scripts you can set that up as an alternative. At the bottom of the Posts and Links page of the Syndication Settings in the section for Custom Post Types (advanced database settings), set the option for Custom Post Types to Responses. What this does is to associate all syndicated posts with the content type that defines the examples. To the RSS feeds that Feed Wordpress syndicates, any tags or categories in an incoming feed are actually associated as categories in the RSS structure. In the Feed Categories & Tags section of the Syndication Settings check the options for Match feed categories and Match inline tags to include Thing Tags and Tutorial Tags. This will match all incoming tags to be associated with the taxonomy that organize the examples into the proper Thing types. If you have no use for other tags in posts, under Unmatched Categories check the option for Don't create any matching terms. This keeps the database from being filled by un-used user tags/categories. If you have any use to mark all of the syndicated posts, the options at the bottom of this screen allow you to add Wordpress tags or categories to them (e.g. add a "syndicated" tag).