UBC CMS
UBC provides a free, content management system (CMS) on WordPress, to support your teaching, learning, research, communication, and marketing needs.
UBC CMS, created on WordPress, is a web authoring platform that is supported by Arts ISIT and centrally at no cost to faculty and staff. This makes it an ideal platform for hosting websites for units and programs, courses, research initiatives, events, conferences, and more.
Features
UBC CMS offers features and functions to support your website hosting needs.
- Available to all UBC faculty and staff with an active CWL account
- Website themes/templates are UBC branded
- Customizable menus and site navigation
- Plugins include functions for creating forms, events, tables, custom post feeds
- Digital payment tools can be installed to connect with forms on the website
Arts ISIT Resources
If you are considering creating a website or would like to submit a request for one on UBC CMS, visit our website services page to view options, examples and subdomain guidelines.
Once you have your UBC CMS website set, view Arts ISIT’s video tutorials below to get started.
Templates
Content Editors
You can set your website to edit content with either the Classic Editor (default) or Block Editor.
The new block editor allows you to create content visually, without any coding knowledge. You will be able to select from a library of features and functions and apply your own custom styling to them from a set of available menus.
For more information and guides see section “Additional Resources”.
- Go to your website Dashboard
- Go to Settings > Writing
- Under Enable Gutenberg on, select the following
- Posts
- Pages
- Patterns
- Click Save Changes
Arts ISIT’s video tutorials for the classic editor
To confirm whether or not your site is hosted on UBC CMS, login to your site (https://yourdomain.ubc.ca/wp-admin/) and see what the primary domain is when viewing the dashboard. If it ends with .sites.olt.ubc.ca, then your site is hosted on UBC CMS.
Additional Resource: Presentation slides (PDF)
By the end of the video, you will learn:
- About Content Management Systems (CMS) and WordPress platforms
- How WordPress is used at UBC
- The types of templates that are available to use for UBC WordPress websites in the Faculty of Arts
By the end of the video, you will learn:
- Who our target audience is for our websites
- Best practices for adding pages to menus
- How to make content on UBC CMS accessible to users
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basic principles and how they can help improve traffic to your website
- About available Resources on website best practices at UBC
By the end of this video, you will learn:
- How to access your UBC CMS website using the UBC CMS Dashboard and the "/wp-admin" method
- How to gain access to a UBC CMS website
By the end of the video, you will learn:
- About posts and how to organize them on your website
- How loop queries can be used to display a feed of posts based on a specified category
- How to add content and media files using the WordPress Rich Text Editor
- How to add Featured Images and Excerpts
- How to link users to external content using the "Page Links To" feature
By the end of the video, you will learn:
- How pages are used and organized on your website
- The difference between the side and top navigation menu
- How to organize pages in navigation menus
- How to add content and media files using the WordPress Rich Text Editor (Refer to video on Posts).
- How to link users to external content using the "Page Links To" feature (Refer to video on Posts).
By the end of the video, you will learn :
- How events are organized on your website
- How events are displayed through the Event Feed and Event Calendar
- How to add event details
- How to add reoccurring events
By the end of this video, you will learn:
- About the different use cases for Gravity Forms on UBC CMS and on AIR
*Note: This video is a general overview of Gravity Forms on UBC CMS; please refer to the Gravity Form tutorial section (coming soon) for an in-depth explanation on how to use this tool
By the end of the video, you will learn:
- Best practices for modifying Widgets, Theme Options, and Custom CSS
- How to edit key fields, like contact information, using the Theme Options
By the end of this video, you will learn:
- How to add a new user to your website and delete/change existing users
- About different user roles on UBC CMS
Additional Notes
- As administrator roles have full control over your website (including customizing look and feel as well as the ability to add new content), it is best to minimize the number of users added as administrator's to your website.
Additional Resources
Consultations
If you would like further support on UBC CMS, please connect with us to learn more about the tool and its capabilities.
