Staking a Claim

About SPLOTpoint

This Wordpress Theme that works as both a presentation tool and an information resource.

It powers a site that can be used to deliver presentations on the web, without any residue of commercial slideware. Your presentations not only look good, they also become the reference resource (e.g. additional links and info).

The front splash screen, colors, button styles are set in the Wordpress Customizer. Each "slide" is a post which is topped by a full screen image (with the title over top) that is defined by the post's featured image (and it can also be an animated GIF).

The content can include any content you can put in a Wordpress Post- text, titles, embedded videos, heck even bullet points. The order of the "slides" is defined by a Post Attribute. And a built in short code can be used anywhere (front page, widget) to generate a linked list to slides.

Examples in the Real World

This theme was developed relatively recently but a few people have already put it to use.

• Content With Content - Alan Levine, Thompson Rivers University (where I bragged about making this SPLOT), March 2017
• GIFs, Memes, and Cool Web Stuff - Alan Levine, a presentation at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, Feb 2016
• CNIE: Worst Learning Designs
• Open Ed Tech Cooperativism, BC Open Ed Tech Co-Production, OER 17, April 2017
• Picture This: Finding, Taking, and Using Photographs - Alan Levine, Ontario Extend Summer Institute, August, 2017
• SPLOT The OER Tools - JR Dingwall, University of Saskatchewan

Take a Ride Before You Try to Tame That Web Horse

We have a demo site that was created the same way here on StateU as you can or will do. And it's western! The Good, The Web, And The Powerpoint is the classic spaghetti slide deck.

Install Your Own SPLOTpoint

Are you ready to install a SPLOTpoint? The instructions below are available (at least for now) only via the StateU site. Anyone can create an account there to try this pre-built theme. If you want to try this on your own domain, you can get the theme and instructions from GitHub. It will take a few more steps there.

Like you did when setting up your first Wordpress blog, start at your StateU dashboard and under Applications click Wordpress.

Click the Install This Application button. Mr. Rebeg could put his new site as a subdirectory named showtime so the site will show up at the url http://rebeg.statu.org/showtime:

The next section is called Versions. Under the Content heading you will see a few options for the template to use; choose Dimension to install a version of Wordpress with all of its functionality built into your new site.

Note: If these versions are not listed, just continue and install a plain Wordpress site; see the next section for how to install an Instant Site version.

Now scroll past a few sections until you get to Wordpress Settings. You can edit your own admin user name and password, but it's not necessary-- you can log into your directly from this interface later. So you can leave the random generated values for now.

We suggest leaving all options in this screen as they are. That makes it EASY.

That's it! Now click the Install button in the bottom right, and just watch the progress bar slide across the screen. It will take a few minutes at most to bake your site.

When it's done, you can try the first link to peek at your new site, which will look like a copy of the screenshot shown above. This person decided to put their site in a subdirectory of their domain named showtime

The second link from the installer (it ends in wp-admin allows you to log in as the admin user of the site, so you can start customizing and editing your site. It will land you inside the Wordpress Dashboard..

You know you are logged in as an admin user of your site when you see the black menu bar at the top of your screen, it will be there too when you visit your site. Get to how to navigate between the Dashboard view and the Site view (and back, the animation below is for a different site, but it works this way on all Wordpress sites).

Installing By Importing an Instant Package Version

If the Wordpress installer did not offer this theme as an option, we have another way to get your site set up. This will also work on an version of Wordpress installed on a domain you manage, not just here on StateU.

• Download the Instant Package for the SPLOTpoint theme. Expand the zip to see a file ending in .wpress
• Install a Plugin. Log in to your site's admin area. In your new site's Dashboard, go to Plugins and search for, install, and activate the All-in-One WP Migration plugin.
• Import the Package. Once the plugin is installed, look for it listed in the left side of your Wordpress dashboard- select the option below it for Import. Drag and drop the .wpress file you dowloaded above onto the importer. Wait for it to simmer/upload. You will be asked to confirm overwriting an existing site. Agree.

You will now have an exact copy of the same starter site you would have gotten from the StateU installer above. You will have to return to your Apps listed in your StateU cpanel, and log in again as an admin. You can now continue with the directions below to customize your site.

Customizing Your SPLOTpoint

Log in to your site via the admin link (see above). Switch now to the public view of your site, and in the top admin bar, click Customize -- this opens an interface for changing much of your site and being able to preview it as you make changes.

You can safely experiment with the various settings, nothing is changed on your site until you click the Save button.

First, look under Site Identity to change the title of your presentation and the tag line that appears below.

Next look under SPLOTpoint Prettify where you can upload a new image to appear behind the title, as well as change the fill color of the title and the color of the tagline text.

Lower in the SPLOTpoint Prettify is where you can change the color of the buttons and the text labels on navigation buttons (scroll down the preview page to see the green button that comes by default). You can also use the slider to experiment with the roundness of the buttons. Because you must have nice buttons!

Plus you can change the text that appears in the footer.

Changing the Front Content

Everything below the image with the title on the front of your site comes from the content of a Wordpress Page that comes with your site. Navigate back to your Wordpress Dashboard, and on the left side follow the link for... big surprises.... Pages.

Two items are listed (the About Page is not used, but you could edit it later and link from your menus. Click the second page title that reads You Will Never Present the Same Again — Front Page. Now you are in the Wordpress editor for this content.

The text of the title is what appears on the black bar on the front of your site. The rest of the page can be filled with whatever content you want displayed. This demo version shows how to use two Wordpress "shortcodes" which provide special functionality when the page is published.

• [slidelist] will display a linked list of all your slides, so when you add, deleter, or re-arranged them, you always get the current structure. That only is worth the price of admission, right?
• [startbutton title="Start the Show"] inserts a Big Button that is always linked to the first slide. You can change the label by editing the value of title=""

So the content on this page produced:

Editing Slides

All "slides" are just Wordpress blog posts. While viewing any slide in your starter SPLOTpoint deck, you can change it by clicking the Edit link in the top black Wordpress admin bar. This puts you into the post editor.

It's pretty obvious, the title of the post is the title of the slide, and whatever you put in the body appears below the top image.

The image shown at the top is controled by changing or adding a Featured Image (look for box on the right side). It's better to use larger images than small ones- if its very arge, Wordpress will make a smaller sized copy, but if its tiny, you will see a distorted image.

And yes, you can use animated GIFs too in the top background image.

The box labeled Slide Attributes allows you to control the order of the slides.

The higher the number, the later in the deck it occurs. They need not be sequential, so you can use larger numbers to leave room to insert others. If two slides have the same number, the order will be decided next by the title.

You can see everything in yor deck by clicking Slides on the left side of your Wordpress Dashboard. They will always be listed in Slide Order:

You can add a new slide at any time by using the New -> Post menu item from your Wordpress Admin bar.

Now go load up your own SPLOTpoint, try it out on your friends, family, and colleagues, and soon you will be showing them how it's done!