WordPress Help Guide

If you are adding a Five College user to your site, be sure to grant access to their Mount Holyoke guest account (email address ending in @mtholyoke.edu). Students get a guest account automatically upon registering for courses. Faculty can get one by filling out the affiliate form, here: https://offices.mtholyoke.edu/sites/default/files/hr/docs/affiliate.docx

1. To add a Mount Holyoke user account, first have the individual login to https://commons.mtholyoke.edu. 
2. After they have logged in at least once, click on “Users” from your site dashboard.
3. Click on "Add Existing" and then enter their full @mtholyoke.edu email address into the email/username field.
4. Select the role that the individual should hold, then click add existing user. That person will be sent an email asking them to confirm the invite. They will do this by clicking on the link in the confirmation email, which appears after the text, "Please click the following link to confirm the invite:"
5. After this, when this individual logs into Commons and clicks “my sites” in the top left corner of their landing page, they should now see your site listed.

If you are an instructor using WordPress for a student project, talk to the Educational Technology team about whether it would be helpful to have a WordPress administrator add students to the site, which they can do while skipping the confirmation email step. 

Privacy settings in WordPress can be found in the Dashboard, under Settings > Reading.

Wordpress allows you to choose between five privacy settings, as seen in the image above.

The first two options make your site available to the general public.

• "Allow search engines to index this site" is the option to use if you'd like your site to show up in search engine rankings. The WordPress support team is not able to provide further search engine optimization for sites on Commons at this time.
• "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" will leave your site publicly accessible but instruct search engines to ignore it. (Note that not all search engines honor this request.) Many Commons users who want a site to be public use this setting. 

The remaining three settings limit visibility to members of the MHC and Five Colleges community by requiring viewers to log in to commons before viewing.

• "Visible only to registered users of this network" will let anyone with a Five College login view your site.
• "Visible only to registered users of this site" will restrict visibility to only individuals you specifically add as site users. This setting is commonly used when building and adding content to a site, before making it more public.
• The "Visible only to administrators of this site" setting is the most restrictive of all, and you will need to specify Administrators for your site, so that they can see it.