A few Wordpress pages should be created on theme activation, to create the main index of all things, another to house the form for adding a new thing,one for users to add an example of a response or a tutorial to a thing, and yet one more to set up a help system.
If the pages are not created for you on theme activation…
To repeat: You should always, always create your “things” via this form, even if you do not allow the public to do so. The form adds a number of post custom field values necessary to make everything work. You can always modify these later, in the editor (making sure you make Custom Fields visible via screen options).
Note that this page is never viewed directly on it’s own. It will be be linked from a single item page with additional paramaters to construct the full submission form.
This theme has a comprehensive set of options, available via the Assignment Bank Options from the main admin toolbar.
On theme activation several pages will be created for you, but to make sure they are all present, click Create Theme Specific Pages – it will generate ones needed that are not present. Two pages specifically are used for forms on your site, one for adding new “things” and the other for adding a response to the things. If no Page is found with the correct template, you will see a prompt to create one. If the Page is found (and there might even be more than one, you can select the one you want used for each special page.
Define the name of things in the bank- enter both singular and plural correct names.
If you allow users to submit new things to the site, you can set the default status for new things to Draft so you can moderate them. If the form will only be used by admins or if you allow new things to go directly to the site, set this option to Publish Immediately.
For other ways to organize your Things across types you can enable the use of categories. For example, in a Bank of Assignments where they are organized by Types of Media (e.g. the original ds106 Assignment Bank), you could create a categorization based on different classes / courses using the bank.
If you do want to use categories, you set them up first in the Dashboard under Things to Do -> Thing Categories. The Bank will recognize only one set of child categories is applied.
Use Categories for _____ by default is set to no– they will not be used at all on the site or visible, even if used in the past. The second option will present the categories on the public page when your site visitors create a new thing– they check the appropriate boxes for categories.
But there might be cases where you want to categorize only on the back end; e.g. do not let users self categorize but do it when you moderate / review things added. This is the second “yes” option.
And if you use Categories but want to call them something else, like Sections enter that in the setting for Label for Category. This will be used on the entry forms and any where the categories are displayed.
For some implementations, the display of a thing might not need examples, or tutorials or either listed. This new options allows you to set what is shown. If set to both they are displayed in two columns (default). If either is selected to display, it is shown as a single centered column, a bit wider. And by setting this option to Neither the listings of examples and tutorials is supressed.
Note that if not shown, you can still choose to have a form where either or both are added to the site.
Enable Allow Uploads for Responses to allow visitors to upload a file as a way of responding beyond entering a web address. You can limit to the file size of uploads.
The Number of Responses to Display at a Time is used if the Ajax Load More plugin us enabled, it will sequentially load this number of responses at a time.
By checking the first box, this section enables a web form for site visitors to submit their examples and support materials as response to a Thing (the form asks for name, email title, description, and a link). This page is only reached by following a link from a Thing, which passes it two variables to indicate the Thing, and whether it is an Example or a Tutorial.
If the expectation of the site is that users will be linking to their work as stored elsewhere (e.g. blogs or other user maintained site) check the option for Link to Form Submitted Examples to be No, links go to example URL.
On the other hand, setting this option to be Yes, links go to entry on the bank site sets the site up to house all submitted responses. A form will be presented with a rich text editor, that allows the users to preview and review their work before final submission. The rich text editor supports wordpress autoembeds.
As a new feature, you can add a set of instructions that will appear at the top of the example response submission form.
You can set whether a new example is published immediately or set to draft for moderation. All examples added to the site (by the form or via the syndication methods below) can be reviewed and edited via the dashboard menu for Examples Done. The most likely item to be edited is the URL for the example; it is stored in the Custom Field value for syndication_permalink.
Finally, the items added to the right side can be Resources, Tutorials, Extra links- and you can use Name for Support Things to define how they are labeled. The submission form for these offer a place for a title, URL, and a short description.
Set the width and height of thumbnail images on all index and archive pages.
The default thumbnail image is what is used for a thing if not specified via the submission form. The image can be uploaded here to or selected from the Wordpress media library. The image should be at least larger than the default thumbnail width.
Enter a default attribution for this image.
Activating Embed Media Icon will use an assignments example media as an icon on archive listings (instead of the thumbnail) if the example URL can be embedded (e.g. YouTube video, SoundCloud audio, a tweet). The default is “no” or off.
Use wordpress accounts for adding responses and/or items to the bank. provides a bank owner the ability to use Wordpress user accounts to track activity.
If you enable the second or third options, a Sign in button will appear at the end of the navigation bar:
After logging in, a user will be redirected back to the page they were using. The menu bar will now display they name adjacent to what is now a log out button, and the display name will link to their archive of contributions.
If the setting is for a user account required, on the buttons that link to the form from a Thing, the button is disabled and a sign in button is provided:
If the user account is optional, the alert offers a chance to sign in as an option:
A lesson learned the hard way; never allow self-registration on WordPress sites where accounts get authoring privileges- this is a spam account magnet. The theme has an option for you to label the button as you see fit, but also to provide a link where it should go- it could be a page on the site with information on how to get an account or link to a managed signup form. Putting # in the link field will disable the button and it provides a Javascript alert that registration is not available.
The setting for User names on submission forms creates a field for a user to enter a desired username to identify their shared content (if not logging in); previously this was a twitter account but it cold be any unique name a user chooses; it acts more like a tag,
Whether a WordPress username or a user defined one, we use the convention of @username when displayed (again this is not linked to twitter).
The default user name is a fall back if for some reason none was entered.
Creative commons licenses can be attached to all things on the site. Choose Apply one license to all challenges to place the same license on all things (a notice will be displayed on the submission form). The license uses can eb selected from the menu,
Setting the Creative Commons options to Enable users to choose license when submitting a challenge will put the menu on the submission form so users can choose a license (or set to All Rights Reserved). At this time, the only way to reduce the number of license options is to edit functions.php in the template directory. Look for the function function cc_license_select_options and comment out the lines containing license options to hide.
An indicator will show if the WP-Ratings plugin is installed for user ratings (see below).
Enable the Allow Author Difficulty Rating option to allow creators of new things to define their own rating of difficulty. This is completely separate from user popularity rating.
Enter email addresses (separated by commas) for notifcations of new Things submitted and/or Responses to things.
These settings allow a Tweet This button to appear on your bank, and offers a way to add your own hashtags to the tweets.
These settings offer a way to syndicate in examples that users post on their own blogs. If this feature is not desired, leave the default setting for No syndication.
There are two approaches to syndication, both require the Feed Wordpress plugin installed.
One is to turn the Assignment Bank site into its own syndication hub– using a local install of Feed Wordpress to aggregate examples to this site. This means that RSS feeds will have to be added directly to the local install of FeedWordpress in a bank site. The rest of the settings here can be ignored. For a local syndication, users will only need to provide one tag, e.g. Assignment12 to each of their posts for this site to be able to publish the examples directly to the Thing associated with it.
The second approach is like the setup used for ds106; the assignment bank will rely on another sitr that is managing the syndication of user content. The local install of Feed Wordpress is used to “re-syndicate” the content to the bank. In this case, you must specify a required tag users should use to indicate a post is in response to something in the bank; the second tag specifies the thing it should be associated with. Finally the name and the URL for the example are used in the instruction text for each Thing.
At this time, all RSS feeds must be added to your site via the screen for Feed Wordpress Syndication Sites. The add multiple button opens a field where you can enter in a list of sites or feeds.
For each feed, you will have to confirm or select the correct Feed URL (some sites offer several options of Feed format or the content it finds as an RSS feed.
If you are using an external syndication site, you only need to add one feed- the one that corresponds to the tag entered in the Required Tag Assignment Bank option. If your required tag is bank106, than you want to bring in to this site only the posts on the syndication site that have this tag, for example:
http://www.mycoolcourse.org/webhub/tag/bank106/feed
Test the feed first to make sure it is pulling in data and the correctly tagged content.
Spam is a sad fact of the internet. Enabling this option will put a Google reCaptcha on all submission forms. Site and secret keys are needed to use the captcha and can be obtained from the Google Recpatcha site
These settings let you enter a name to represent the name for how you organize your things (they could be “Types”, “Modules”, etc), as well as the order and sorting for they way they appear on the front of the site.
Here is where you can create and edit the categories or types of things in your collection. You can add any number of new things by listing them one per line in the Names for new types field.
After clicking Save Changes, each type will now have its own editing field. They will be listed in the same display order you set in the General Settings.
The title can always be edited, and you can add/edit the short description. Then, use the build in interface to the Wordpress media library, upload a thumbnail image– it should be larger then the default place holder image, but does not have to be the exact size. Wordpress will handle the image sizing for you.
Checking a type for deletion will remove it permanently upon saving.
The structure of the sites navigation is left to the owner; use the built in Wordpress menu editor to activate a top menu the footer menu seems to not be formatted in the parent theme, and has been removed from the assignment bank footer.php template). Be sure to open the Screen Options so you can and more kinds of items to menus (like Thing Types, Thing Categories).
This means you can create any structure you like, including archives for the types of things. Below is the structure of the demo site:
A few special URLs are available, for say a site set up on /bank.yourdomain.org (the slug assignments is unfortunately basked in)
http://bank.yourdomain.org/assignments an archive of all thingshttp://bank.yourdomain.org/assignments/?srt=random a random thinghttp://bank.yourdomain.org/examples an archive of all examples added to the siteUnder Things to Do you can add a category taxonomy that work like regular blog posts (Thing Categories); this allows another way to organize the things in your bank. If you do not create any categories, they will never be seen. But once you add a few, the will show up as selectable items on the Thing creation form.
These shortcodes can be used in any page, post, widget:
[thingcount] generates a count of all “things” in the bank such as 34 challenges
[examplecount] generates a count of all “examples” in the bank such as 112 examples
[feedroll] If Feed Wordpress is installed, this shortcode generates a list of all subscribed blogs, useful as a sidebar widget. If feeds have different tags to segment them, a specific list can be produced by [feedroll tag="section5"]
These codes can be used in posts or widgets to list the most active participants (if the option is enabled to track submissions by twitter name)
List all respondents in order of most active to least
[bankleaders]List the top 10 respondents
[bankleaders number="10"]List the top 10 respondents and exclude the ones identified in the hashtag taxonomy as ids 8 and 10
[bankleaders number="10" exclude="8,10"]List all the twitter names that have contributed new Things via the submission form
[bankleaders type="contributors"]Install the WP-PostRatings plugin to activate the user thing popularity rating feature. Not installing the plugin (or de-activating it) removes the feature from the site. the purpose here is to allow visitors to rate Things, and provide sorting of things based on said ratings.
A few settings for the plugin are necessary (found in the new Ratings option in the Admin Sidebar).
On the Post Rating Options choose the graphic style for the ratings- the suggestion is one of the stars settings with a max ratings of 5 but any setting is viable. The suggested set up mode is to use the ratings as a measure of popularity, so the default 1 Star, 2 Stars, etc can be used. On the other hand, the original DS106 Assignment Bank was a crowd sourced measured of difficulty, so the labels could be customized as follows
Create any labels for your scale (these are used on the form to submit new Things). Set the “Allow to Rate” option to Registered Users and Guests to allow any site visitor to cast a vote.
Set the Post Ratings Templates to customize the text displayed to show the ratings- the first two templates are used. Ratings Vote Text: designates how the ratings are shows; Ratings Voted Text: is shown as feedback and adds an indicated if a visitor has already voted; Ratings None: is shown for an item that has not been rated yet.
These templates are generally not used by Bank sites but certainly could be used: Ratings No Permission Text:, Highest Rated:, and Most Rated:
For a setup as a popularity voting, the Ratings Vote Text template might be:
Popularity: %RATINGS_IMAGES_VOTE% (**%RATINGS_USERS%** votes, average:
**%RATINGS_AVERAGE%** out of **%RATINGS_MAX%**)
<br />%RATINGS_TEXT%For Ratings Voted Text:
Popularity: %RATINGS_IMAGES% (<em>**%RATINGS_USERS%** votes, average:
**%RATINGS_AVERAGE%** out of **%RATINGS_MAX%**;
you have rated this</em>)Finally, for Ratings None:
Popularity: %RATINGS_IMAGES_VOTE% (No Ratings Yet)<br />%RATINGS_TEXT%FYI the data for ratings are stored in three custom fields on all Things; they can be edited to adjust any rating if you can sort out the arithmetic:
If you feel the vote of 5 by one person is too high, you might change the values to be ratings_score=2, ratings_users and ratings_average=2 to reduce the rating to 2. Changing votes is your decision.
Found under Appearance/Assignment Bank Options, enable this option to allow creators of new things to define their own rating of difficulty. This is completely separate from user popularity rating.
Install the Feed Wordpress plugin if you wish to syndicate in responses to “things” as examples. This means that you can add blog feeds to the bank (it does the feed aggregation) or you can syndicate in from another site that is aggregating feeds (the ds 106 model).
If this is not a desired feature, the plugin is not needed. You can still allow visitors to submit their examples via a web form.
A few settings must be made in Feed Wordpress to work correctly with the Assignment Bank Theme.
Under Updates Scheduling in the Feed and Updates option under Syndication Settings set the dropdown menu to set to automatically check for updates after pages load to generate the process of feed checking. This is the easiest approach that is triggered by site activity- if you understand cron scripts you can set that up as an alternative.
At the bottom of the Posts and Links page of the Syndication Settings in the section for Custom Post Types (advanced database settings), set the option for Custom Post Types to Responses. What this does is to associate all syndicated posts with the content type that defines the examples.
To the RSS feeds that Feed Wordpress syndicates, any tags or categories in an incoming feed are actually associated as categories in the RSS structure.
In the Feed Categories & Tags section of the Syndication Settings check the options for Match feed categories and Match inline tags to include Thing Tags and Tutorial Tags. This will match all incoming tags to be associated with the taxonomy that organize the examples into the proper Thing types.
If you have no use for other tags in posts, under Unmatched Categories check the option for Don’t create any matching terms. This keeps the database from being filled by un-used user tags/categories.
If you have any use to mark all of the syndicated posts, the options at the bottom of this screen allow you to add Wordpress tags or categories to them (e.g. add a “syndicated” tag).
The WordPress Customizer used used to manage the appearance of your site as well as to edit the labels and prompts on your forms. This theme creates it’s own special section, plus others you can use.
Open the “Thing Bank” panel to find two panels for customizing the forms on your site.
This panel lets you modify form labels and prompts for your own site, some examples to see how it works. The forms will change in real time as you change the text on the left. It helps if you first navigate to the form, and then open the Customizer.
In similar way, you can edit the form visitors to your site use to enter their response to things/assignments as well as contributing resources/tutorials. It helps if you first navigate to the form, and then open the Customizer. Note that the same prompts are used for both adding a response and adding a resource (if they are activated on your site).
You can upload a header image via the Wordpress Customizer. The size is relatively short (60px) since it is fixed with the scroll of the navbar. But it’s room to fit a small logo that links to the home page. It will work best if the image is 970px wide and 60px high. A background transparent PNG will really look nice!
This is best done on the Customizrr too.
The following plugins are useful for a bank.
header.php and remove or comment out this line<input type="hidden" name="post_type" value="assignments" />