Digital Communications

WordPress

An open-source content management system that is used to host a wide range of websites and web applications.

UBC Blogs

UBC Blogs is built on top of WordPress. UBC provides a large collection of documentation to help faculty and students get started with using it as a tool for scholarly communications.

Additional Resources

Having just a basic familiarity with WordPress’ user interface, is often enough to meet the needs of most use cases. The following resources can provide more-in-depth walkthroughs of WordPress’ for leveraging its more advanced functionalities.

Alternative Hosting Options

Note on UBC CMS

Static Site Generators (SSG) / Web Publishing

As alternatives to WordPress, static site generators give up easy-to-use interfaces via a content management system and a range of other functionalities to create faster, more reliable, and more secure websites, where content is managed via a set of Markdown files. Additionally, these tools often have smaller sets of themes that users can install to customize the styling of their website, thus requiring a better understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to develop a more customized look and feel to a website.

Statically generated sites can be hosted nearly anywhere on the web, including:

Quarto

Developed by the same company working on RStudio, Quarto provides a powerful tool for publishing scientific and technical work in a range of formats and acts as a successor to R Markdown. Code in Python, R, Julia, and JavaScript can all be represented and rendered along with Pandoc-style Markdown. Interactive visualizations can also be embedded on supported formats using R Shiny, Observable JS, or Jupyter Widgets.

Note

If rendering and exporting HTML files in RStudio using Quarto, ensure you also export the quarto_files directory, which holds necessary CSS and JavaScript files.

R Markdown (R)

R Markdown provides an authoring framework that enables code to be rendered alongside Markdown and published in multiple formats. See Quarto for a successor to R Markdown.

Note

HTML files rendered via R Markdown use inline scripts and CSS, which can create sometimes unnecessarily large files, but they ensure that the file displays consistently without external files.

Jekyll (Ruby)

One of the most widely used static site generators. This SSG integrates smoothly with GitHub Pages to quickly render websites directly from a GitHub repository. Due to its wide adoption, it also includes a wide range of open-source themes that can be used to customize the style of a website.

Digital Exhibit Tools

Storing and presenting digital assets, like images, audio, and video files, can be easily managed via content management systems and static site generators that specialize in digital exhibits.

Omeka Classic & Omeka-S

Omeka Classic is targeted towards small, individually developed projects, while Omeka-S focuses on developing larger scale, institutional-wide repositories with multiple collections or projects. Both are considered web applications as they include content management systems that provide an easy-to-use interface for developing and managing digital exhibits.

Cloud Hosting

CollectionBuilder

Lacking a content management system, CollectionBuilder centers the development and management of digital exhibits around CSVs, which can be easily created and managed via a spreadsheet editor. Built as a theme around a static site generator (Jekyll), CollectionBuilder creates digital exhibits as easy-to-preserve websites. Paired with the Alliance’s Arbutus Object Storage, CollectionBuilder exhibits provide a fast and customizable method for publicly sharing a variety of media alongside a rich set of metadata. Additionally, CollectionBuilder automatically generates a Leaflet-based web map from any provided geospatial metadata.