Site Help

This WordPress site has been configured with features to ease documenting student projects. The following guide may help you in formatting your posts.

Accounts

Students may log into the site using an Andrew ID and password. The account username will be an Andrew email address, but you may set your nickname to whatever you like. You may also prefer to set an avatar image which will appear on the Personnel List page and help identify you to your peers.

Privacy

The site allows setting the visibility of each post. While editing the post, enable or look for the ‘Content Permissions’ settings. By default, each post is world-readable. Selecting ‘Student’ or ‘Instructor’ will limit visibility of the post to the specified group.

Embedding Video

The preferred method for presenting a video in your post is as an embedded viewer so users can just watch it directly within the text. Videos can be added to your post either as an uploaded file or as a reference to a third-party site site such as YouTube or Vimeo. A detailed reference on this can be found in the WordPress documentation on embedding.

A few specific hints:

  1. Use ‘Standard’ for your Post Type. The ‘Video’ type doesn’t appear properly in this theme.
  2. WordPress can automatically create an embed for you from the URL if it properly recognizes the URL. If this fails, follow the examples below.

A typical YouTube embed looks like this when examined in the ‘Text’ view of of the post editor:

[embed width="123" height="456"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ[/embed]

A typical uploaded media file looks like this:

[video width="640" height="360" m4v="https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/16-455/s2018/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/IMG_9973-1.m4v"][/video]

Program Code

This site includes the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plug-in which provides a “code” shortcode for formatting program code. It is highly recommended that you use the plain-text mode of the post editor rather than the Visual mode to avoid having the editor mangle your code.

A sample of Arduino C++ program code:

void setup(void)
{
  // initialize digital pin 13 as an output.
  pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
}

This was produced using the following notation:

[code language="C"]
void setup(void)
{
  // initialize digital pin 13 as an output.
  pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
}
[/code]

A sample of Python program code:

import math
def distance(x,y):
    return math.sqrt(x**2+ y**2)

This was produced using the following notation:

[code language="python"]
import math
def distance(x,y):
    return math.sqrt(x**2+ y**2)
[/code]

Please keep in mind the overall document organization of a post; inline reading works fine for short code snippets with explanations, but lengthy code submissions are easier to browse when alone on a post, and full projects are best uploaded as attached files.

Math Notation

This site includes the MathJax-LaTeX plug-in, so math can be formatted using LaTeX notation.

A few equation examples:

\(E=mc^2\)
\(F=Ma\)
\(V=iR\)

These were produced using the following shortcodes and notation:

[latex]E=mc^2[/latex]
[latex]F=Ma[/latex]
[latex]V=iR[/latex]