Website-Building Overview
Sites at Northeastern allows you to create your own WordPress website which is hosted by CampusPress. Your site uses a WordPress theme developed by CampusPress called “Flex” which has been slightly customized by Northeastern University.
During the site creation process you will choose one of several templates as a starting point. Once your website has been created, you will have full administrative control over the editing experience within WordPress. This includes content, layouts and imagery.
To build out your site, you won’t need to use any code. Instead, the page-editing process in WordPress is based on visual “blocks” which is a modern approach to building websites in a content management system. You will have access to all WordPress blocks as well as additional blocks provided by the Coblocks plugin.
Northeastern has also introduced pre-designed block patterns, shown in the Theme Pattern Library, which are included on all Sites at Northeastern templates. These patterns were used to build the layouts and content on all Sites at Northeastern templates and were designed to help users spend less time building custom layouts and focus on content.
Templates
The term “template” in CampusPress simply refers to a website representation of the Flex theme to use as model for creating your own website. Before creating your site, we would recommend previewing one of the several template offerings on Sites at Northeastern.
Though each template option has a slightly different appearance, each one uses Flex as its theme. For example, the Business Unit and Lab templates don’t look exactly the same, but they both use Flex. Once you select a template and create your site, you will see that your new site looks the same as the template you selected.
Block Editor
Your new WordPress site uses the block editor to create and manage content. With the exception of the Northeastern-branded header and footer which are embedded as part of the theme, you have editing control over the content, layouts, navigation menu, and imagery on your site.
Each page on your site is made up of individual elements called blocks. Through the editor, there are blocks for Paragraphs, Images, Headings, Columns, and many more. For a full list of WordPress blocks to choose from, please visit the WordPress block list page. For more detail on using the block editor, please visit the WordPress block editor page.
In addition to WordPress blocks, CampusPress has, by default, activated a plugin on all sites called Coblocks which adds over 20 additional blocks to choose from in the block editor.
Northeastern Block Patterns
To help you get started building your website, Northeastern has created block patterns which are included on every Sites at Northeastern WordPress site.
In WordPress, a block pattern is a reusable collection of blocks arranged together into a saved layout that can be included as a section on any given page or post. The template pages on Sites at Northeastern were built primarily using these patterns which are described in the Theme Pattern Library.
These patterns are in their own repository on your WordPress site and can be added to any page or post. You can also create your own patterns.
When a block pattern is added to a page, it can be edited like any other piece of content. You can edit the pattern on the page and it only affects that page without affecting the original saved pattern.