Uploading & Linking to Documents in a WordPress Faculty site
Part I: Downloading to a local drive
This tutorial will explain how one uploads and links to PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other documents from within your WordPress site.
I am using an existing faculty website for this tutorial. The specific goal here is to transfer a large number of PDF and Word files from a live "FrontPage" (a site edited & published using FrontPage, SharePoint Designer or Expression Web) faculty web.
Part I involves downloading (from your present site ) a copy of the files you plan to upload to your new WordPress site.
Step 1. Download the files from your existing Web to a "local" location
We recommend downloading them to your dept. share but, you could download them to your desktop, C: drive or even a flash drive, provided the flash drive is large enough to hold your entire site. (Reason being, at some point, you may need to upload various other files –images, etc. and it would be best to keep everything offline in one place.)
1.1 Open FrontPage (or whichever Microsoft product you use to edit your existing site) and log in to your site. I am using FrontPage in this tutorial because most people use this to edit their Webs.
1.2 Once logged in, choose a destination to "Publish" (download) to by clicking on the "Remote website" button at the bottom of the FrontPage window:
1.3 Then, click on "Remote Web Site Properties" button:
1.4 When the "Remote Web Site Properties" pop-up appears, select the "File System" radio button, then click the "Browse" button:
1.4.1 Browse to the location on your computer to which you'd like to download all or part of your FrontPage (FP) faculty web. As mentioned above, we recommend that you set-up this location on your department share drive but it could be set-up anywhere "locally" –your desktop, your C: drive or a flash drive. For this tutorial, I am setting-up my local faculty folder on my desktop –in a folder I created by clicking on the "New folder" icon and then renaming it, "myfacultyweb":
1.4.2 Double-click on the new folder you created to open it, then select the "Open" button:
1.5 When the "Remote Web Site Properties" pop-up appears again, you will see the "path" to the remote site displayed in the location window. If you plan to publish (download) your entire site and have sub-webs inside your site, click on the "Publishing" tab, if not, just click the "OK" button.
1.5.1 If you do plan to publish entire site and do have subsites, once you've clicked on the"Publishing" tab, select the "Include subsites" check box, then go back to the Remote Web Site tab and click the "OK" button to create the remote website.
1.5.3 After clicking the "OK" button on the Remote Web Site Properties" pop-up, you will get the message/question pop-up pictured below. To continue, select, "Yes".
1.6 At this point, you should see, in the right-hand window, the remote website you chose. it will be empty, except for 2 folders that FrontPage creates when making it a website. If you plan to publish the entire site, click on the "Publish website" button:
1.7 If you only plan to publish a complete folder of files, then select the folder (do not open it) in the left "Local" window, then click on the blue, right-pointing arrow in the bar which separates the local and remote windows:
1.8 While the folder is being published (copied), you will see this window while the process is happening:
1.9 After the program is finished publishing, you should open the folder in both the left and right-hand windows to be sure they match and everything went through successfully If a file did not publish, it will have a blue arrow next to it (see 1.7 above).
NOTE:
FrontPage will automatically create the directory structure of the web it's publishing from. For example; if the folder you are publishing is nested inside another folder, such as is the case here, where the folder we're publishing, "pdfhandouts" is inside the folder, "Psychology", the same relationship will be created on the remote site.
Part II: Uploading files to your WordPress site
This tutorial will explain how one uploads and links to PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other documents from within your WordPress site.
I am using an existing faculty website for this tutorial. The specific goal here is to transfer a large number of PDF and Word files from a live "FrontPage" (a site edited & published using FrontPage, SharePoint Designer or Expression Web) faculty web.
Part II involves the steps one takes in order to upload files, then link to them in a page or a post.
Step 1:Upload all of the files you plan to link to or use in some way on your WordPress site.
1.1 Go to your WordPress faculty site and click on the "Log in" link under the "Meta" section in the right column:
1.2 Enter your CCRI user name and domain account password:
1.3 In your site's "Dashboard" click on the down-arrow next to "Media", if not already selected, and then click on the "Add New" link:
1.4 In the "Upload New Media" window, click the "Select Files" button:
1.5 Browse to the local location where you published/downloaded the files from your FrontPage faculty Web.
NOTE: I just happen to be using a different folder of downloaded PDF files for this part of the tutorial but it makes no difference –the same principles apply to any folder of files –as long as they are reachable from the computer you're using to edit your WordPress site.
1.6 Select the files you want to upload to your WordPress site, (on a PC, select all files by holding down the "ctrl" key + the "A" key), then click the "Open" button.
1.7 After files are uploaded, to view/edit the details of a given file, click on the "Show" link:
1.8 In this view, you can edit the files title, caption and description. You can also see the URL of the file. You may also preview the file by clicking on the icon at the top-left.
Step 2. Insert a link to the file on an existing page
2.1 Open the page on which you want to add a link to the file, then click the "Edit" link (you must be logged into your site in order to see the "Edit" link):
2.2 If the link is already on the page but it is linking to your FP site (which will be a common situation if you copied and pasted the content of the page into a new WordPress page) then click anywhere in the currently linked text, then click the "unlink" icon in the toolbar:
2.3 Then select the now unlinked text and click on the "Add Media" icon, which is the last one in the "Upload/Insert" tool bar :
2.4 In the "Add Media" pop-up window, select the "Media Library" link:
2.5 In the Media Library tab, type in a search term you know is in the file name you want to link to, then click "Search Media". When the file appears in the search results, click on the "Show" link:
2.6 In the "Show" view, make sure the "Title" field reads the way you want the link to read. If not, now is the time to edit it –because however the title reads, that is how your link will read. When it reads the way you want it to read, click on the "Insert into Post" button:
2.7 You should then see the link to the file on the page.
Step 3 Test
3.1 Preview the change by clicking on the "Preview Changes" button in the "Publish" panel:
3.2 Click on the new (or edited) link on the preview page. In the cases where you're updating a link which went to your old site, make sure the URL (web address) of the file the link opens is showing the file is on your new WordPress web's location –not still going to your old FrontPage site. If all is well, go back to the editing page (see above) and click the "Update" button –doing so will publish your changes to your live site.
