This post is only intended for advanced users — i.e. Blog Czars, Online Editors, and Developers. If that doesn’t include you, by all means, you’re still encouraged to read and learn. But keep in mind that these instructions are very specific to our installation of WordPress MU and will differ somewhat with regular WordPress.com and WordPress.org blogs (which are generally a little easier to get up and running).

Step 1: Gather all the info and graphics for your new blog

Just some of the elements you'll need to have on hand before starting

I have a simple punch list I use:

• Blog Header Graphic — This should be a 525 x 150 px JPG image, with the resolution set to 72 dpi. It should be saved with the same name as the blog path (e.g. rutgers.jpg)
• Blog Button Graphics – You’ll want to create two buttons, one large and one small. The large one is typically a 100 x 100 px GIF, set to 72 dpi; The small one is a 60 x 60 GIF, also set to 72 dpi
• Mug Shots of the Authors – The images are usually done at 75 px wide, saved as JPGs, and formatted with the author’s username (e.g. tmann.jpg)
• Blog Name
• Blog Tagline, or description — One or two sentences summarizing what the blog will cover
• Author email addresses — If they prefer non-Gannett emails, be sure to use whatever they like
• Author bios – Usually a couple sentences, written to go in the “About the Author” box
• Meta Tag information — A new piece of information we want to start collecting. This is just keyword information to help search engines better index the blogs
• List of desired sidebar elements – Do the authors want polls? Flickr feeds? Twitter tools? Etc.

Got all that. OK, now you’re ready to get the blog set up. The full list of instructions is after the break.

Step 2: Upload image files

You’ll need FTP acess to both the blog server and your website’s main server in order to complete this step. If you don’t already have access, please contact me or your local admin.

1. Upload the blog buttons to your site’s main server. The 60×60 should go to graphics/blogs/buttoms/small, and the 100×100 should go into graphics/blogs/buttoms/large. This is where the blog refers on the main sites (e.g. the homepage script that pulls the most recent entries) call the graphics from.
2. Upload the blog buttons to the blogs server. Typically I just put the 100×100 on here. Navigate to the folder for your site. Then go to /wp/images/buttons. This is where the root blog page calls the button graphics from. (It’s good to have them stored in multiple locations.)
3. Upload the header image to the blog server.  Remember, this file needs to have the same name as the blog path that you’ll be setting up in a few minutes. It should go into the folder /wp/images/headers
4. Upload the author mug shots to the blogs server. This one goes into /wp/images/mugs

Step 3: Add Your Authors

If you’re working with authors that are already on WordPress, you can skip ahead to Step 5. If not, you’ll want to register the author of the blog before configuring the blog itself. Remember, you need to be designated as a “Site Admin” in order to complete most of these steps.

1. Log into a blog — either the root blog or another one.
2. Click on SITE ADMIN –> USERS.
3. Scroll to the bottom, where it says “Add User”
4. The username is always first initial and last name (e.g. tmann). Add their preferred email address.
5. Click “Add User” button at the bottom.

Step 4: Configure the New Users

After adding a user, you’ll want to add some basic info to their user profile. The user can always go back and edit this information later.

To configure the user, go to SITE ADMIN –> USERS, and find the new user you just added (there may be a few pages of users you need to go through). Click on their login name.

Typically I do the following:

1. Fill out the following fields: first name, last name, website (I use the blog URL), and bio info (this is what populates the “About the Author” widget)
2. Reset the password (By default, WordPress generates a randomized password and emails it to the user, but I like to reset that to make it something a little easier to remember)
3. Save the info one, and then go back and change the “Display Name Publicly As” to be the full author name.

Step 5: Add the New Blog

1. Go to SITE ADMIN –> BLOGS. Here you’ll see a list of all the active blogs. This is where you’ll go if you ever need to deactivate or archive a blog. (Remember, never, ever delete a blog, though)
2. Scroll to the bottom, where it says, “Add Blog.”
3. Fill out the information. Ideally, the blog address, or path, should match the name of the blog. So if your blg name was Go Go Gadget, you should ideally make the path gogogadget as well. Sometimes the sheer length of the blog title makes this impossible. For example, for the “High Above Home Plate” blog, we made the path simply “phillies.”
4. Make sure to use the same email address that you just set up your new user as. If you’re using a user that was already on another blog, make sure to use the same email address that he or she already has in WordPress (which you get get off the SITE ADMIN –> USERS or BLOGS pages)

Step 6: Configure Plugins

Congratulations, your new blog is live. But now you need to act quickly to get it looking like other blogs on the site. You should not skip this step or save it until later. This should be done immediately after registering the new blog.

1. From the SITE ADMIN –> BLOGS page, click on the “Backend” of the new blog you just registered.
2. Once inside the backend of the new blog, click on PLUGINS (in the upper right)
3. Enable the following default plugins (by checking them off and then clicking “Activate”):

• Akismet — our SPAM filter (you’ll need a WordPress.com key for this to work — email me if you don’t have this already)
• Get Recent Comments — displays comment excerpts in sidebar
• ShareThis — adds social bookmarking links to bottom of posts
• WhoDatAuthor? — our only homegrown plugin, developed by Sanford Guerrero to allow us to generate the “About the Author” widget
• WidgetizeAnyHTML — allows for HTML-based sidebar widgets
• WP-Email — creates link to e-mail posts
• WP-Print — creates link to generate printer friendly view
• WP-Polls and WP-Polls Widget — allows the use of polling plugin
• Subscribe to Comments — allows users to get emailed any time there’s a new comment on a post they’ve commented on

There are plenty of other plugins you can enable, of course, but those are the key ones.

Step 7: Set up the Blog’s Settings

Click on SETTINGS in the upper right. You’re basically going to go down the line of each of the links on the second nav-bar row and do a little tweaking of each of these.

1. In “General” add the tagline, or description, for the blog. This will appear in the “About this Blog” widget
2. In “Writing,” check off the XML-RPC option if any of your bloggers are planning to post from their iPhone or some other publishing platform other than a web browser
3. In “Discussion,” uncheck “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” and save the settings.
4. In “Permalinks,” make sure the links are set to include “Day and name” and click “save.” (Note: failure to set the permalinks can sometimes prevent the wp-print and wp-email functions from working.)
5. Under “MetaTags,” add any meta tag keywords or other search-optimization phrases you have.
6. In “Recent Comments,” do two things: check off “Group comments by posting,” and then go to “MISC” and uncheck “cache the output.” Click “Update Options.”
7. Under “ShareThis,” make sure that both drop-downs are set to “No” — as in, No, do not automatically add ShareThis to my posts (this is because we manually placed the ShareThis button in a location other than where the plugin automatically puts it).
8. Under “Widgetize Any HTML,” enter how many HTML widgets you’d like available in the sidebar (these are in addition to all the other stock widgets).

Step 8: Enable the Blog’s Theme

This is a very simple, though crucial, step. Go to DESIGN and select the MangoTimes theme. You should get a preview of what the blog will look like, including the header. Click “Activate” in the upper right-hand corner of the preview.

If you don’t see the header, double-check to make sure you named the file with the same naming convention of the blog path. If you blog is at blogs.app.com/blogname, the header file should be named blogname.jpg.

Step 9: Widgetize the Sidebar

This is also a fairly simple step. Go to DESIGN –> WIDGETS. On this page, all you need to do is drag the widgets you want to use on the blog’s sidebar from the column on the left to the column on the right. You can then rearrage them by dragging them around the right-hand column, until you have a desirable order. Once they’re looking good, click “Save Changes” on the bottom right.

The widgets you use are entirely up to you and the blogger. By default, all our blogs have three fixed widgets in the upper right-hand corner: “Search” (which we’ll do away with once Planet Discover has incorporated the blogs into the main site search), “About this Blog,” and a poster ad. Everything below that is customizable. At the bottom of the sidebar is a list of the other blogs on your site. We may or may not do away with this down the road.

My advice would be to always include the following: WhoDatAuthor?, Recent Posts, Get Recent Comments, Links (or Grouped Links), Archives, Polls, and Meta.

Here’s one example of a basic mix of widgets I’ll added to a new blog:

Step 10: Check Out Your Handiwork

There are other things that you may want to eventually configure further (Reports, Polls, etc), but the above steps are all you need to get a blog up and running initially. Once you’ve finished setting up the sidebar, click on “Visit Site” at the top of the admin screen and double-check everything on the live blog. A few things to look out for:

1. Make sure the header graphic is showing up.
2. Double-check that the “About this blog” widget has no typos, and than the “about the author” widget is showing a mug shot and the right bio text.
3. If you added any custom widgets, make sure they’re rendering well in IE and Firefox.

You should also change the date of the dummy post that’s in the blog by default. You can just roll it back by a day, so that the blog doesn’t appear on the homepage.

Assuming everything checks out, email the author with his or her login info, as well as the URL and some tips on getting started.

Congrats, you just gave birth to a bouncing baby blog!