Checklist for starting a new year

☐ Create a new group for the year.
☐ Check the “Order” number of the group for the previous year, and assign a lower “Order” number to the new group for the current year.
☐ If necessary, create a new tag for any research topic which is new this year, e.g. “Stochastics.”
☐ Create entries for all new people.
☐ Assign each new or returning person to the group for the current year.
☐ Tag each new student with the “Student” tag, each new mentor with the “Mentor” tag, and each new member of faculty with the “Faculty” tag.
☐ Tag each new person with the topic of the research project with which they are involved, e.g. “Fractals.”

People

Under the “People” heading in the main menu of this website you will find organizers, mentors, and students. Each person belongs to one or more groups and bears one or more tags. Grouping and tagging determines where their information is displayed.

Adding a new person

To create an entry for a new person, go to the dashboard. In the menu on the left-hand side of the screen, click on (or simply mouse over) “People.” Then, in the same menu, click on “New Person.” You can now enter the name and other info of the new person and save it. You can edit this information later.

Editing a person

To edit a person, go to the dashboard and click on “People,” then click on the name of the person whose information you wish to edit.

Assigning a person to a group

While editing a person, you will find a list of groups on the right-hand side of the screen. Click the checkbox for a given group to add the person to that group.

Tagging a person

Underneath the list of groups is a search field where you can type in tags and assign them to the person you are editing.

Uploading a photo of a person

While editing a person, find the “Featured Image” interface at the bottom of the options on the right-hand side of the screen. Click on the text “Set featured image.” This will bring up an interface to either upload a new image file or select an image file which has already been uploaded in WordPress. The image you select here will be displayed next to the person’s name where they appear on this website.

Creating a new group of people

Go to the dashboard and click on “People” in the menu on the left-hand side of the screen. Then click on “Groups” in the same menu. This will bring up a page with a form to “Add a new group.” You can enter the information into this form and then submit by pressing the button at the bottom of the form. Note: the “Order” field in this form serves an important purpose and should not be left blank. A lower (more negative) order number means that this group will appear higher in any lists than a group with a higher number. This is important for the “Past Students” page, where students are displayed in reverse chronological order only because of the order numbers assigned to the groups for those years. Thus the 2018 group has a lower order number than the 2017 group, which has a lower order number than the 2016 group, etc. If you leave this field blank, the order number will be displayed as 0, but the group will not be placed correctly in the list as though you had entered an order number of 0. To avoid this confusing bug, never leave the order number blank.

Creating a new tag

Go to the dashboard and click on “People,” then click on “Tags.” You will now see a form that you can use to create a new tag.

What tagging and grouping accomplishes

Students who belong to the group for a given year will be displayed under that year on the “Past Students” page. This is the only purpose of groups. All other organization of people is accomplished using tags. For example, mentors are displayed in the list of mentors because they have the “Mentor” tag.

Home Page

Be careful about applying edits to the home page, i.e. the landing page at https://mathreu.uconn.edu. The formatting of this page is such that some mistakes made while editing this page may be very difficult to undo.

Adding a new photo to the slideshow

To add a new photo to the slideshow on the home page, go to the dashboard and click on “MetaSlider Pro” in the left-hand menu. In the middle of the screen, click on “⊕ Add Slide.” You can now either select an image from the library of images already uploaded to WordPress in the “Media Library” tab or, by switching to the “Upload Files” tab, upload a new image to add to the slideshow. Once you have selected the image you want to add, click the “Add to slideshow” button in the lower right-hand corner.