Customizing your site / adding plugins

Contact Digital Communications for more information on any of these available features.

Website features and Widgets
Our WordPress templates offer a variety of out-of-the-box features via media galleries and widgets. In WordPress, a widget is a tool to add content to the sidebar of your website, outside of the normal page editor.

Media galleries
Image galleries are a great way to share groups of pictures on your site. The Create Gallery feature allows you to add a simple image gallery to pages or posts. The images are displayed in a grid format as thumbnails (with or without captions), which can link to larger copies for viewing.

Custom Menus
By default, your sidebar menu displays all pages at the top level of your site. If you need more control over what appears in your menu, such as linking to another site, we recommend building a custom menu.

RSS
The University of Maine’s News team publishes content multiple times a week on a wide variety of subjects. The RSS widget offers the ability to embed links to news items on topics specific to your area.

If you want to publish your own content via RSS, contact Digital Communications for best practice guidance and tips to set your site up for this feature.

 

Adding Plugins

Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a full-featured contact form plugin that includes a drag-and-drop interface, advanced notification routing, lead capture, conditional logic fields, multipage forms and more. If you need to build a contact form, survey, online poll or quiz, contact Digital Communications.

While Gravity Forms is easy to use, Digital Communications offers training for building your first forms.

Print Friendly and PDF
PrintFriendly cleans and formats web pages for a sophisticated print experience. This plugin offers an interactive print preview, allowing users to selectively remove unwanted images and text before printing, or easily save for later as a PDF.

Twitter feed
Do you tweet? Leverage your social media presence on your website with the twitter feed widget. This addition to your site places a twitter feed in your sidebar showing a number of tweets in a scrollable window, and offers visitors the option of tweeting to you or following your account on Twitter.

Slidedeck2
If you have a handful of images you want to display on a page, our first recommendation is the built-in media gallery feature in WordPress (see above). For image-rich websites, or when a slideshow experience is needed, we offer Slidedeck2, an easy-to-use image slider.

And many more
Digital Communications maintains a large number of plugins to meet the needs of over 400 individual websites on our campus — too many to list on this page. If you have a specific need that you are struggling to meet with your site, contact us via email to find out if we can augment your site’s functionality with a new plugin.