April 6, 2015 - How to

Creating a new sub-site on InsideLaw takes a few minutes, but unfortunately has a few peculiarities that must be worked through.

Considerations

  • Only Super Admins can create new sites.
  • InsideLaw only supports sub-folder sites, not sub-domains or other domains. Use the LawWP farm for other domain names.
    • Sub-folder = insidelaw.gsu.edu/sitename/
    • Sub-domain = sitename.law.gsu.edu/
  • Insure that there is not already a page or redirect for the sub-folder name

Steps to create a sub-site

  1. From "Network Admin / Sites" click "New Site"
  2. Enter the sub-folder sitename - all lower case, no punctuation
  3. Enter a descriptive title - this will show in the admin toolbar under "My Sites"
  4. Enter the email address of an existing user, preferably *not* a Campus ID log-in, but a local log in.
  5. Click "Add Site"
  6. Go to "Network Admin / Sites" "Edit" for the new site, "Settings" tab, change "http://insidelaw..." to "https://insidelaw...." in both "Siteurl" and "Home"
  7. Go to the site dashboard "Settings" / "Discussion" and uncheck the three boxes under "Default article settings" {grrr these should default to not-checked}.  I also usually uncheck the "Show Avatars" box as well.
  8. Under "Settings" / "Permalinks" select "Post name" for the cleanest URLs. Other settings will work
  9. Any existing pages/posts ("Sample Page" and "Hello world!") will need to be deleted or edited to uncheck the "Allow comments" and "Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page" checkboxes.
  10. Create at least one redirection entry in "Tools" / "Redirection" to fix a table creation bug. The redirect entry can be deleted afterwards.
  11. Go to "Appearance" / "Themes" and activate the "CoL WordPress Bootstrap" child theme. Go into "Customize" and set teh "Static Front Page" and remove any unwanted widgets.
  12. Go to the main InsideLaw site dashboard, "Content Blocks" and enter the editor for the "footer" entry. Copy this content and paste it into a new Content Block names "footer" in the new sub-site. Go to "Appearance" / "Widgets" and expand the "Footer 1" widget area. Drag a "Content Block" widget into "Footer 1" and select the just-created "footer" Content Block. Check the "Do not apply content filters" option.
  13. Go into "Appearance" / "Menus" and create a "main" menu and select "Theme Locations" "The Main Menu". The CoL logo always links to the main law.gsu.edu site. It is usually appropriate to add an "InsideLaw Home" Link as the first menu item.

That should have your basic site up and running. Add content and set up menus, etc.

Also check the Troubleshooting and Fixes page for any applicable details.

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