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Sample Page

This is an example page. This is put here as a place holder to help you get started with building your site. You can choose to either edit this page replacing it with content that you’d like displayed on your site, or you are free to delete this page altogether and create a new one.

You can control which page of your site is set as the site “home page”, or page that is displayed by default when someone types http://www.marshall.edu/yoururl in a web browser. This is defined by visiting “Settings>Reading” in your site administration menu, and then choosing “Front page displays a static page”. You’ll be presented with a list of pages that exist on your site. You can choose to make any of those pages your site home page.

Important Note About Site Search

As you are building your site, we try to prevent search engine robots or ‘crawlers’ from accessing your content until you are ready. In the same “Settings>Reading” section of your administrative menu, you’ll find the setting “Search Engine Visibility”. Notice that by default, when a new site is created, this setting is set to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.

While this is a great setting to leave turned on while you develop your site content, when you’re ready for your site to be available to the world, remember to uncheck this checkbox so that Googlebot and other crawlers will be able to access and index your web content.

And finally….some tips

Where is the Plugin and Theme Menu?

Because there are several hundred sites in our system that share a variety of elements of the codebase, shared settings like plugins and themes are disabled for individual site administrators. Don’t worry though, there are a lot of popular plugins already installed and available, and getting a new one added for your site usually just requires an email to the service desk asking that we turn it on for you.

Theme installation and switching is disabled because….well, that was really the point of implementing a content management system. It allows everyone to share common design elements so that there is some consistency throughout the MU website.


How do I add a new user/change my password/edit my user profile/access the Users menu/etc.?

The local account database is only used to match your username with the sites that you have access to. All user information, including who has access to edit your site, is controlled by membership in various Active Directory groups. All of our user authentication is also done via Active Directory, which is what enables you to access your site using your MUNET credentials.

Even if the “Users” menu were accessible, attempting to add users in this way would have no effect on their ability to access your site. Users who need administrative access to a content management system site do need to make sure that their user account is in the right Active Directory group. If you’re not sure how to get this change made, just email the IT Service Desk, and they can open a ticket to have any user membership changes you need done for you.


I really don’t like the way that this color/menu/button/font/etc. looks. Is there any way I can change it?

We do discourage individual sites from trying to develop their own “look”. While we understand each departments desire for a unique identity, our site template are designed with consistency for the end user in mind. In addition, things like colors, font sizes, background gradients, and line spacing have been developed in accordance with accessibility guidelines, and all of the pages that are created through our system are immediately smart phone and tablet capable. When you create a page, it will look similar regardless of the device a user is using to access it.

We offer full support for our official theme – if something goes wrong, we’ll make sure to fix it as quickly as possible. While we will try to work with requests for custom theme/template development, anything beyond basic modifications will require discussion with the department so that the project can be scoped, appropriate resources allocated, and budgeted.