Short guide for posting on Innovativeresearchmethods.org – Africa Today
The Innovative Research Methods (IRM) website offers a platform where students share the outcome of their research, discuss other publications and learn about techniques for creating multimedia publications.
It’s based on WordPress, an open source blogging platform that nowadays is used for millions of websites around the world, not just blogs. A free hosted WordPress blog can be created on WordPress.com, but for the purpose of this class we use a self-hosted version of WordPress. You will be publishing content in the form of WordPress posts.
Below is a simple manual explaining the basic steps towards uploading your content.
You will receive a unique login and password so that you can access the site.
1. login
Go to https://innovativeresearchmethods.org/wp-admin
Log in with your username and password (you can also change your password later).
2. overview of existing posts
After logging in, you are redirected to the WordPress Dashboard page.
In the menu in the left column you will find all the Posts and Pages on the site. For this course we will only use Posts.
Under Posts you can find your own posts (link: ‘Mine’) and also those of others.
Here’s an example of other student portfolios, for a different class:
https://innovativeresearchmethods.org/portfolios-2022-23/
There is already a post created under your name, that will be your Portfolio with an overview of everything you have posted. You can edit that post to add text and photos. Do not delete the box that will show your posts.
You can create a new post on the websute using the ‘Add new’ link at the top of the page (or the plus sign in the menu at the top).
Each post should at least have a title, a category (Africa Today (2022-23)), a featured image and text or other content.
3. the content of your post should be placed in the large white box directly below the ‘Add media’ button. If you copy content from Word or another website then all design (font etc.) will also be copied. If you do not want this, you can switch between ‘Visual’ and ‘Text’ mode.
Photos and other multimedia can be added with ‘Add media’. The best way to add videos is as a Youtube link.
Copy/paste the link into your post and it will be embedded automatically.
4. you must select a category for each of your posts under ‘Categories’, in this case ‘Africa Today (2022-23)’. Do not select ‘Africa Today (portfolio)’
5. under ‘Featured image’ you can upload an image, which will soon be visible on overview pages where this post is linked to.
6. in the text you can link to other pages. Just copy the URL you want to use, select the text to be clickable and click the ‘insert link’ icon in the toolbar above the text screen. Images can also be made clickable in this way.
7. Save as draft makes sure that your changes are saved, but only visible to you. If you publish (the ‘Publish’ button), the post is visible and will also appear in the overview on your Portfolio page.
8. You can now create a series of posts and link them together. For example, an article with an introduction page and table of contents, from which you link to your other posts. And on each post you could then link back to the ‘front page’. Example of an earlier student project:
https://innovativeresearchmethods.org/hashtag-activism/
9. Under the title bar, you will find the ‘edit with Kingcomposer’ button. Kingcomposer is a visual editor that gives you more options to customise your post, for example by creating multiple columns, adding special functionality like a pie chart, image gallery etc. Once you have worked in King Composer, it is not wise to switch back to the ‘classic mode’.