VIU Campus

Create a Site

All VIU employees and students can create sites on VIUBlogs.

The following guidelines explain how we support VIUBlogs and the expectations for how employees and students will use this platform. If you have any questions about these guidelines or using VIUBlogs, please contact us at LearnSupport@viu.ca. 

User Guidelines 

  • All VIUBlogs users must abide by all local, provincial, and federal laws (including copyright and intellectual property law) as well as VIU’s Use of Information Technology Policy and all other relevant VIU policies. 
  • VIU students must also abide by the Student Academic Code of Conduct Policy, and Student Code of Conduct Policy
  • VIUBlogs sites may not be used for commercial purposes or for the benefit of organizations not directly affiliated with the University. 
  • Official, department, program and promotional content for VIU should be located on the VIU website rather than VIUBlogs. Please contact ithelp@viu.ca to request a VIU website.
  • Content that is found to violate laws or VIU policies may be removed or unpublished without notice.

Support

  • Staff in the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) provide basic orientation to using WordPress and technical support for accessing the platform and core functionality. To request support, email LearnSupport@viu.ca
  • CIEL will carry out annual site removals in accordance to the guidelines below to minimize the number of inactive or abandoned sites on the blogs network. 

Site Retention & Removal

  • It is the responsibility of site administrators to either transfer ownership of their site or export their site content and move it to a new host platform upon leaving the university. Steps for how to export your VIUBlogs site can be found on CIEL’s website.
  • VIUBlogs sites belonging to current employees or students will remain on VIUBlogs for as long as the site continues to be actively maintained. 
  • Sites that are not maintained and sites which do not have an active VIU employee or student listed as an administrator will be removed once each year in July. 
    • A site is considered no longer maintained if the site has not been updated in more than one year. Student-administered sites will be retained for at least one academic year after the last update to the site.

Themes and Plugins

  • VIUBlogs offers a limited number of themes and plugins for styling and adding functionality to your site. Themes and plugins that present security concerns or which are no longer maintained by their developer will be removed from VIUBlogs.
    • CIEL staff will attempt to contact administrators of blogs which will lose functionality or need to choose a new theme using the email address registered in VIUBlogs. If there is no administrator email attached to your site, you will not be notified of theme or plugin removal.

Create a VIUBlogs (Wordpress) Site

  1. Go to VIU Wordpress.

  2. Click the Create a new site. If you are not yet logged in, you will be prompted to login at this point. Log in with your VIU Computer Account credentials.

  3. Choose a name for your site (this will form your unique URL) and then enter a title for your site. URLs can only contain lowercase letters (a-z) and numbers. The URL is not something you can change later, but the title can be changed at any time.

  4. When creating your site, you will need to choose how accessible you wish to make your site. Your options include:
    • Allow search engines to index this site: Your site will be visible and accessible to anyone in the world who happens to find it. Your site may also appear as a result in Internet search engines such as Google Chrome. This option does not guarantee that your site will appear as a result in search engines. It is up to the search engines to honor this request.

      You can select this option by clicking the checkbox next to Yes underneath the Privacy: Allow search engines to index this site heading.

    • Discourse search engines from indexing this site: Your site will be visible and accessible to anyone in the world who happens to find it. However, Internet search engines such as Google Chrome will be discouraged from showing your site as a available result. This option does not completely prevent your site from appearing as a result in search engines. It is up to the search engines to honor this request.

      You can select this option by clicking the checkbox next to No underneath the Privacy: Allow search engines to index this site heading.

    • Visible to only registered users of this network: Your site will only be visible and accessible to VIU community members who have signed into VIUBlogs and who have the link to your site. Your site will not be publicly available and will not appear in search engines.  

    • Visible to only registered users of this site: Your site will only be visible and accessible to VIU community members who have been added as Users to your site. Your site will not be publicly available and will not appear in search engines.  

    • Visible only to administrators of this site: Your site will only be visible to you and any other administrators that have been added to your site. Your site will not be publicly available and will not appear in search engines.  
  5. Click the Create Site button.

  6. Congratulations, you have just created your site!