In this post I’ll show how easy it is to install the Reclaim Hosting community site template. Then, I’ll demonstrate with a couple screenshots how simple it is to populate a community site with student and staff work.
Getting an empty community site installed is done in a flash. But first, folks will need to submit a support ticket to Reclaim Hosting to have the community template added to their WordPress Installation form. Once that is done, the rest is pretty automatic.
With the template added, you’ll see an additional option (actually a radio button) in the WordPress installer:
In my case, I want to start working on a development subdomain. Once I’m sure everything is ready, I can easily move it into a production spot. For me, that final spot will be community.bergbuilds.domains. But for now, I’ll be working at dev.community.bergbuilds.domains. If you need some guidance on setting up subdomains, please visit this handy guide from Reclaim Hosting’s support docs: https://support.reclaimhosting.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500013046121-Creating-and-Managing-Subdomains
As configured, anyone should be able to submit a website to the Community site through a form. These submissions will be moderated, and will need to be approved by an administrator. If you expect to have two or more administrators, my recommendation is to create multiple admin accounts within the WordPress Users feature. But if you have a single shared administrator user and password, this will be set, at least initially, here.
A quick finalization of the installer form, and I have a new, shiny Community Template site with one entry:
Once a Community Site is installed, we have the option of hiding that radio button field from the Installer form. You’ll need access to WHM. You’d remove the community site template like this:
Select the Installatron Applications Installer, click on Templates and use the check boxes to toggle which options are seen in the installer form. In the WordPress stanza, you will uncheck to hide, check to show.
I’ll work through the Gravity Forms configuration and administrative settings in a future post. But for now, just know there is a lot of flexibility, and the submission of a site (pending approval) to the community is super easy. The trickiest part is uploading a thumbnail of the homepage, which will require some sort of clipping software (we’ll look at using a headless browser called Puppeteer and a small NodeJS script to auto-generate thumbnails in a future post, as well).
Here’s the form that is set up by default once the template is installed:
Whether you work with Gravity Forms (again, reach out to Reclaim Hosting), or procure another form-building WordPress plugin, there are several options for bringing a form’s data into WordPress as a post. That is basically all that is necessary to leverage The Post Grid, it’s Isotope-provided core functionality, and all the sorting, searching, and pagination goodness that I’ll explore in the next post.
