UVic’s Online Academic Community and the Divi Theme
In this exercise, we will get you started on the first steps with what we consider to be the secret weapon of UVic’s Online Academic Community (OAC) installation of Wordpress: The Divi Theme. If you have any questions or get stuck as you work through this, please ask your instructor for assistance. Have fun!
- Get to the OAC
- First, if you have not done so already, create a page through the OAC by going to https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/ and logging in using your NetlinkID.
- Once you’ve logged in, click on Online Academic Community in the upper left corner, which will take you back to the OAC’s main home page.
- On the main OAC home page, in the upper right corner, click on Get Started. There will be a Create a Site button in the mid-right of this page. Click on this to bring you to the site creation form.
- Fill out the form to create your page:
- The Site Name is where you add your custom part of the OAC web address. For example, our Digital Scholarship Commons website address is onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/dsc and has a shortened form of oac.uvic.ca/dsc (both URLs will bring people to our website). The “dsc” part is what belongs to us as our OAC name and address, as long as we have an OAC site. Choose one that helps identify you that is not already in use by someone else at UVic. (Note: For the purposes of this workshop, you can quickly choose a fun disposable name, because you can have an unlimited number of OAC sites and can just have a practice site for now and worry about a serious name later.)
- The Site Title can be edited at any time. You can fill in something like “my new website” here.
- Privacy: It’s a good idea to keep your site private until you are ready to launch it. These settings can be changed later in the Settings > Reading menu.
- A beginner template is fine. Again, this setting will be changed later when you set up a Theme.
- Click the very wide Create Site button.
- You will be redirected to a confirmation page.
- Jump to the Dashboard
- You can find your list of OAC sites now in the upper left corner in a dropdown menu under My Sites, listed by the site titles you gave them.
- If you mouse over one of the sites in the list, another dropdown will appear, giving you the option to choose to visit the Dashboard, create a New Post, Visit Site on the front end, etc.
- Click on Dashboard to start working on the site.
- Activate the Divi Theme
- In the left sidebar menu click on Appearance and then click on Themes to see all the themes available for OAC users.
- Look for the theme called Divi. Mousing over it will bring up the Activate button. Click on Activate to apply this theme to your site. Once it’s active, it will move to the first position in the list of themes and show as Active.
- Authenticate Divi
- A recent change with the Divi process requires that the LTSI tech department manually authenticate every site that wants to use the Divi theme’s templates
- To do this, email the URL of your site to ltsisupport@uvic.ca and let them know you would like to use the Divi templates on your OAC site
- Once your site is authenticated, you can start using the templates available in the Divi theme
- We are currently building an additional workshop for the Divi theme specifically, but in the meantime, there are many tutorials that can be found here: https://www.elegantthemes.com/documentation/divi/
Congratulations! Divi is now installed on your site.