Adding Slides to a CAS Department website

Purpose

This article is to guide editors and administrators of the CAS Department Theme in UO Blogs through the process of creating a slide on the home page of their department website.

Slides are customized posts that consist of an image and an associated post tagged to the image's caption that is displayed on the designated homepage for the site. Follow the process below to create a slide.

Requirements

This process is specifically for CAS Department Theme users.

The theme is available for any campus entity to use but it is not freely available in the Themes menu option. If you are interested in using the theme, submit your UO Blogs URL by clicking the Request Support button on the Web Development & Hosting Support service page and it will be applied.

For those who would like to see the theme and its features before proceeding, check out the CAS Design Toolkit here.

How to have slides work properly

Slides are customized posts that must have three elements in order to work properly:

1. A title for the slide.
2. A Featured image of 890x400 pixels (in order to fit the slide space precisely)
3. A Custom field with a URL value (in order for the caption box to show up)
   • The URL of a post/page/external link must be placed in the Custom Field box (below the Excerpt section; see below)

Another option is suggested in order to keep the caption box at a reasonable size:

• A summary of the post body content in the Excerpt field.

Process

The image below shows the different components of a slide post.

• Required elements (in the solid rectangles above):
  • Title: This will be in a larger heading in the Slide caption than the Body or Excerpt.
  • Body: Text of the caption. Try not to exceed two sentences.
  • Custom Field: Add the URL type name and address of the reference post. The caption will not show up otherwise.
    • Note: The reference URL may also be the slide itself or another post/page within the site.
  • Featured Image: must be 890x400 pixels in order to fit precisely.
    • Note: If the image is in the Body section instead, the slide will appear as a broken image or solid gray.
• Optional element (in the dashed rectangle above):
  • Excerpt: Text of the caption. Usually, a summary of the image reference will override the Body section. It is useful when the Body section becomes large--more than two sentences (optional).

Click Publish to save the slide and publish it to the site.

The example below will show how all of the pieces are then put together:

Additional Considerations

Any updates to slides may take up to five minutes to fully appear on your site due to the refresh rate of the UO Blogs service.

Since slides act like posts, they are subject to the same behavior as posts regarding visibility on the site. Slides however will only show up above or below the site header on the home page of your site. Slides can be saved and published either as Draft or Private status if desired--just change the status of the slide either in the Slides menu, then selecting Publish or in the All Slides view.