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Web page information for Faculty, Staff, & Graduate Students
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Faculty and staff members may have a individual home pages at Baylor using WordPress MU, a blogging technology, or through their individual BearSpace accounts. For those who have limited time to develop a site and want to take advantage of interactive features such as RSS feeds, blogging, and multimedia, we recommend WordPress. However, if you enjoy "getting under the hood" and writing your own HTML code, then BearSpace is for you.

About using WordPress MU

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Getting a WordPress MU Web site at Baylor is easy. When you visit http://homepages.baylor.edu, click the "Login To Your Site" link--on the following page, login with your Bear_ID and password, and an account will automatically be created for you. WordPress MU features the following:
  • Offers the benefits of a content management system. Powered by PHP and MySQL, WordPress auto-archives all of your content for easy access to you and your site's visitors.
  • Browser-based authoring. Using WordPress MU (Multi-User) allows you to manage your site from any computer with an internet connection. The form-based interface of WordPress makes it easy to post content and create pages very quickly. With WordPress, you won't need any additional software other than a browser.
  • Modern look and feel. You can also choose from 40 different templates to customize the look of your site.
  • Great for blogging or traditional web pages. Although WordPress was made for blogging, it contains many features that enable you to have static pages like traditional-looking Web sites.
  • Interactive features. WordPress plugins allow you to easily embed multimedia files into your content. In addition, template widgets allow you to capture RSS feeds from other sites, and syndicating your own content via RSS is easily done.

WordPress MU ("Multi-User") is very similar to the regular WordPress blogging application--in fact, it has been announced that both products will merge together in a single application at some point in the future. As such, the documentation for ordinary WordPress works just as well for explaining most of the essential features of WordPress MU. A great place to start teaching yourself how to use WordPress is the "WordPress for Beginners" section at http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress#WordPress_for_Beginners.

In order to make the most of your experience with WordPress MU, you should at least review the following topics:

For additional assistance with WordPress, contact Lance Grigsby, academic consultant, at 710-4553.

About using BearSpace

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Baylor provides students, faculty, and staff with one gigabyte of file storage space through http://bearspace.baylor.edu. In every BearSpace account, there is a "www" directory where you may host your Web site. The default page of any site in BearSpace must be named "index.htm." Here's what you can do with BearSpace:
  • Write your own code. If you like to write you own HTML and CSS code, then BearSpace is perfect for you. Keep in mind, however, that BearSpace does not support any kind of server-side scripting language such as PHP, ASP, or CGI.
  • Convenient browser interface. Like WordPress, you can access BearSpace on any computer with an Internet connection and a browser.
  • WebDAV enabled. You can access and synchronize your BearSpace account through applications like Dreamweaver or with simple Web folders through Internet Explorer for PC or through both Windows and the Mac OSX operating systems. Web folders make it easy to drag and drop large numbers of files into BearSpace. For more information, see this brief tutorial about connecting to BearSpace using Dreamweaver CS3 (PDF). NOTE: BearSpace cannot be accessed via FTP.
  • Use it with WordPress. If your primary Web site is in WordPress, you can always link to content you prefer to store in BearSpace such as video files, PDFs, podcasts, etc.
If you need help with your Web site, please call the Baylor help desk at (254)710-HELP.