Holding a Virtual Poster Session with WordPress
Countless events have been canceled or postponed indefinitely due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. But just because it isn’t possible to hold an in-person conference, professional meeting, or research symposium right now doesn’t necessarily mean you need to cancel your poster session. In fact, virtual poster sessions may actually offer unique advantages for event organizers, presenters, and attendees alike.
In deciding whether to transition your poster session to a virtual format, there are many important factors to consider. How long will you display the posters online? Will the poster session be publicly available, or will it require some sort of authentication? How many posters will be displayed? How will you ensure that your virtual poster session is digitally accessible? Do the poster authors hold the copyright to all of the material on their poster, or do permissions need to be obtained? Will you use a fully asynchronous model or will there be opportunities for live engagement using technologies like Zoom, Discord, or Google Meet? Will you accept alternative formats — like videos, slide decks, or plain text submissions — or require a more traditional poster?
In this tutorial, we will create a virtual poster session for free using WordPress, an open-source (and reasonably user-friendly) content management system. Originally a blogging platform, WordPress is now one of the most popular tools for creating and managing websites of all kinds. Our virtual poster session will display PDFs of posters and will allow presenters and attendees to interact asynchronously via a commenting system. This tutorial assumes that you have no experience with WordPress or computer programming.
First, we need to create an account on WordPress.com. Click on the blue “Start your website” button to get started.
You can create an account using your Google or Apple account, or make one from scratch by entering your email address, a username, and a password.
Enter the domain name (site address) you want. Once you type in the domain you want you’ll see a bunch of options, but we’re going to pick the free one that ends with “.wordpress.com” for now. (You can change the domain name later, or even use a domain you already own.)
WordPress wants us to “Pick a plan that’s right for you.” For now, let’s go with the “Start with a free site” option at the top.
Hooray, our site has been created! But we need to follow the steps in the Site Setup List before our site is ready to go live.
The first thing we are asked to do is give our site a name. Click on the pink “Start” button, then enter a Site Title, Site Tagline (optional), and a Site Icon (optional).
Be sure to click the pink “Save settings” button when you’re done. This will save your new site title and take you back to My Home, where you will be prompted to complete the next item on the Site Setup List.
Next, we need to update our homepage. Click on the pink “Update homepage” button and you will be taken to a new screen: the homepage block editor.
The default layout isn’t quite what I was envisioning for the homepage of our virtual poster session, so we’re going to select a different layout by clicking on the blue “Change Layout” button on the right. You’ll see a lot of different options — click on any of the tiles on the left side of the screen to see a preview of the layout.
Select a layout. For this demo, we’re going to select the “Brompton” layout for the homepage because it’s clean and simple. To confirm the selection, click the blue “Use Brompton layout” button in the top right corner.
Customize the homepage. Once we select a layout, we will be taken back to the block editor for our homepage. This isn’t where the posters will be displayed, but we can use the homepage to provide information about the virtual poster session.
The cover image of the café isn’t really relevant to our virtual poster session, so we’re going to change it to something more appropriate. (If you selected a layout other than Brompton, you may not have a cover image at all. That is fine! It’s just decorative.) Click on the image and you’ll see an option to “Replace” it.
Click on “Replace,” and two new options will appear: “Open Media Library” and “Upload.” We don’t have any relevant images in our Media Library yet, so we will want to select “Upload.”
I’m going to use a public domain image of a poster session that I found on Wikimedia Commons. We need to download the image, locate where we saved the image file, select it, then click “Open.”
After we click “Open” and wait a few moments, the cover image of the café will be replaced with our newly selected image of a poster session.
We can also change the way the cover image looks. If we click on the cover image, we’ll see a little blue ball appear on the bottom edge of the image. Drag the ball up and down to adjust the height of the cover.
If we scroll down on the menu on the right side of the page where we selected “Change Layout” earlier, we’ll see some more options for different ways to adjust the cover image in the section labeled “Media settings.” I adjusted the focal point to be a bit higher, selected a white overlay, and adjusted the background opacity to 60.
We can also add some text to the cover by clicking on “Write title…” which appears faintly in the middle of the image. We are going to use this text to welcome visitors to our poster session. Using the menu on the right, I made the text huge and changed the color to black so it shows up against the image.
Next, we’ll want to update the rest of the content on the homepage. When we scroll down past the cover image, we see a heading (“Build Your Small Business Website”) and some little paragraphs of text. (What you see will look different if you selected a layout other than Brompton.) On WordPress, each heading, section of text, image, etc. we see on a page is called a “block.” Click on any block of text to edit it.
Just like when we clicked on the cover image, some new options will appear above the block we clicked on and in the menu bar on the right side of the page. We can also highlight the text itself and start typing to replace it with information about our poster session. I updated the heading block to say “About the Poster Session” and added some placeholder text to the first paragraph text block.
We don’t need the second paragraph block (“To learn to set up your website…”) so we can click on the block, select the “…” (more options) button, and click “Remove Block.”
Now that our homepage is looking like we want it to, we can click the blue “Update” button up at the top of the page. Then, once we’re ready to go back to the Site Setup List, click on the WordPress “W” logo in the top left corner.
The next step on the Site Setup List is to confirm your email address, if you haven’t done so already. If you can’t find your confirmation email, click on the pink “Resend email” button.
Check your email and follow the instructions in the message.
Next, we need to create a site menu. A menu will help people navigate our virtual poster session website and will apparently improve our search engine rankings.
Click on the pink “Start with a tutorial” button to get started. This will bring up the WordPress “Site Menus” tutorial.
You can read the information in the tutorial, or just click on the pink button in the bottom right corner that says “Go to the Customizer.”
Once we click on the “Go to the Customizer” button, we will see a new view of our site that will allow us to change how our navigation menu appears on our page. (The Brompton theme has a built-in default/primary menu, but other themes may not.) By default, we have four navigation links in our menu: “Home,” “Blog,” “About,” and “Contact.” These navigation links appear to the right of our page title (“Virtual Poster Session Demo”).
On the left side of the page in the “Menus” section, we want to click on “Primary” to edit the menu we currently have on our page.
Some of the menu navigation links are fine as they are, but we want to change the text that says “Blog” to say “Posters” instead, since this is where we will ultimately display our posters. Click on “Blog” in the left side menu (not the navigation link that says “Blog” on our site menu!) to open it up for editing.
In the “Navigation Label” field, type in “Posters,” then click “Save Changes” above. You’ll notice that the navigation link near the upper right corner has changed from “Blog” to “Posters.” Collapse the menu again by clicking on “Posters” on the left side of the page.
Since our homepage contains information about our virtual poster session, having a separate “About” page seems somewhat redundant, so we are going to remove it from the navigation menu. We click on “About” in the left side menu and scroll down until we see an option to “Remove” in red text.
Click “Remove” and the “About” navigation link will disappear from the site menu on our page. Next, we click “Save Changes” above.
After following these steps, we should see just three navigation links in our site menu: “Home,” “Posters,” and “Contact.”
We are done customizing the site menu, so we can click on the “x” in the top left corner of the page to exit the customizer and return to My Home.
We’ll see that the next step on the Site Setup List is to launch our site.
We’re not quite ready to launch our virtual poster session site, however, so we’ll skip this step for now.
On the left side of the page, we’ll click on “Site” (next to an icon of a pencil) to expand the menu. Five menu options appear under “Site”: “Pages,” “Posts,” “Media,” “Comments,” and “Feedback.”
We will click on “Pages” to configure the pages on our site. By default, the Brompton theme we selected earlier comes with four pages: “Blog,” “Contact,” “About,” and “Home.” (If you selected a different theme, different pages may appear in this list.)
We renamed the “Blog” link to “Posters” and removed the “About” link from our site menu earlier, but those changes only apply to how navigation links appear in the the menu, not the pages themselves.
Since we won’t be using the “About” page, we can delete it. Click on “…” for the “About” page to open up the options, then select “Trash.”
After we click “Trash” and wait a moment or two, we’ll receive confirmation that the page has been successfully deleted (or “trashed”).
We need to configure the “Blog” page to display information about our posters. This is essential because each poster will reside on its own blog post. There are undoubtedly countless other (and more elegant) ways to display posters on a WordPress site, but the blogging functionality will allow us to use the commenting feature for free without worrying about additional plugins. Defining each poster as a blog post will also allow us to apply “categories” and “tags” which we can use to group similar posters together.
To begin editing our “Blog” page, we click on “…” and then select “Edit.”
Clicking on “Edit” will bring us back to the block editor, which we saw before when we updated our Homepage.
The first thing we want to do is update the text that says “Blog” at the top to say “Posters” instead. Update the text by highlighting and then typing in the new title.
Just like on the homepage, we can change the cover image and overlaid text to something more relevant. We do this by clicking on the default cover image, clicking “Replace,” and either selecting an image from your media library or uploading a new file. I’ve decided to use another public domain image of a poster session. Just like on the homepage, I changed the height of the cover image, adjusted the focal point, changed the background opacity, and added some text.
If we scroll down on the Posters page beneath the cover image, we will see several placeholder blog posts, all of which are named “Introduce Yourself (Example Post).” This is where the information about our posters will eventually show up.
When we click on the area that the example posts appear, we see options for editing the “blog posts” block. Changes we make here will affect how our posters will be displayed.
The first thing we want to do here is change the “Display Settings” for the blog posts block. We might want to display more than 10 posters (“items”) on this page, so we can drag the slider to the right or type in a number.
Next, we want to make sure that “Show Excerpt” is selected in the “Post Control Settings” section of the menu on the right. We will use this field to display the names of the poster authors.
We need to suppress the author and date fields in the “Post Meta Settings” section, as it isn’t necessary to display my username (“posterhost”) or the date at the bottom of each post. We can also decide whether we want to show the “category,” which we can use to organize the posters.
When we scroll down past the three example posts, we will see several additional blocks: a separator, a heading (“Follow My Blog”), a paragraph (“Get new content delivered directly to your inbox”), and a subscription form. We don’t need any of these blocks for our virtual poster session, so we can delete them all by clicking on each block, then selecting “…” and then “Remove Block.”
We are done configuring the Posters page, so we need to click the blue “Update” button at the top of the page to save our work. Then, we can click the WordPress “W” logo in the top left corner to go back to the Pages editor menu.
Now it’s time to add the posters to our website using the “Posts” functionality. Before we begin, we want to have the poster we plan to upload saved in two formats: as a PDF and as an image file (e.g., PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP). If you have your posters in PowerPoint (.ppt or .pptx) format, you will need to “export” the file twice: once as a PDF and in the image format of your choice. If you have your posters in PDF format already, you can “export” or “save as” an image file.
Click on “Posts” in the Site menu on the left side of the page to open up the posts for editing. We can see the three placeholder posts, which are all named “Introduce Yourself (Example Post)”.
We’re going to delete (or “trash”) two of the placeholder posts by clicking on “…” and then selecting “Trash” at the bottom of the menu that appears.
Be sure to keep one of the one of the posts — we’re going to edit it with information about our first poster.
To edit the remaining post, click on “…” and then “Edit” at the top of the menu. Selecting “Edit” will take us back to the block editor, where we can edit the content of our post.
Change the title of the post to the title of the poster you are going to upload. We want our virtual poster session attendees to be able to browse posters by title. The poster I am going to upload first is called “What First-Year Students Learn from One-Shot Information Literacy Sessions and What (They Think) They Already Know,” so that’s what I’m changing the title to.
Right underneath the title of the poster, we want to include the names of the poster authors. We update the first “paragraph” block to contain the author names — in this case, myself (Emma Brennan-Wydra) and Tori Culler.
Next, we want to create a block that will allow us to display an image of the poster. We need to add a new block just below the author names. We do that by clicking on the author name paragraph block, clicking “…” to see more options, and then selecting “Insert After.”
A new block has been created, but now we need to choose the “type” of block we want it to be. We do this by clicking on the “+” icon on the right side of the block, then selecting “Image.”
Once we tell WordPress that we want our new block to be an image, it prompts us to select an image by uploading a file, selecting an image from the media library, or inserting an image from a URL.
I have an image of the poster saved on my computer, so we are going to click on the blue “Upload” button and locate the file on my computer. Again, we need to have the poster saved in two formats: as a PDF and as an image file. For this step, we will use the image file — in this case, a PNG.
Locate the image file on your computer, then click “Open.”
After waiting a few moments, the image file of the poster should now appear underneath the title and author names.
Next, we need to add another new block underneath the image block we just modified. This is where we will put a PDF of the poster for viewing and download. Unlike the image file we just put on the page, the PDF will allow viewers to zoom in easily and/or use a screen reader to read the text.
To add a new block beneath the image block, click on the image block, click “…” to open the menu, and select “Insert After” to add a new block.
Our new block is going to be a “file” block. We can expand the list of “Common Blocks” and find “File,” or simply type in “file” in the field that says “Search for a block” at the top.
Click “File” in the “Common Blocks” list to set the type of the newly added block.
Next, we need to select a file for the new file block, just as we did with the image block. We have two options: upload a new file from the computer, or select a file that has already been uploaded to the media library. We are going to select the blue “Upload” button to upload a new file.
This time, we are going to select the PDF version of our poster. The file block will actually allow us to upload any type of file, but we want to use a PDF because it is more screen-reader friendly. Locate the file, then click “Open.”
Once the file uploads, we see that the file block now displays the name of the file (“information-literacy”) and a button that reads “Download.”
We don’t want to display the file name, so we can update the text to something more helpful, such as “View Poster (PDF)” by highlighting the old text and typing over it, just like you do in a paragraph or heading block. Alternatively, we could type in the title of the poster, or the names of the authors.
If our poster authors wanted to display supplemental materials alongside their poster — such as a Word document, video, image, or audio recording — we could insert more file blocks to link to these additional documents.
We can delete the extra paragraph blocks that appear below the file block. To delete the placeholder text, we can click on each block, then click “…” to open the menu, then select “Remove Block” at the bottom.
Alternatively, we could use one or more of these text blocks to display additional information, such as an abstract, author biographies, preferred citation, or author contact information. But for the purposes of this tutorial, we are just going to delete them all.
We have now added all of the content to our post representing the first poster, but we need to do a little bit more work to make sure it displays properly on our Posters page. At the top of the menu on the right side of the page, we select “Document” (rather than “Block”) to open up the document properties and settings.
First, click on the Permalink tab to set the URL stub for this poster. The URL stub is the last part of the URL, which WordPress automatically generates from the title of the post. We can change it to whatever we want — I chose something short describing the topic of the poster (“information-literacy”) but you could fill in author names or another identifier instead, or just leave the default slug.
Next, we can define a category for the post in the Categories tab. How we define your categories will depend on the specifics of the poster session. Since this demo will include several different posters I’ve worked on over the years, I have decided to categorize them by institution. I made this poster while I was a student at the University of Michigan School of Information (Go Blue!) so we select “Add New Category” and type in the name of the school. When we’re finished, we can click the white and blue “Add New Category” button underneath.
Our poster will now be associated with the newly created category. The poster is no longer “Uncategorized” so we can uncheck that box.
Tags offer another way of organizing or grouping your posters. Again, how we assign tags will depend on the specifics of the virtual poster session. Are there posters with common themes or topics? How might the poster session attendees want to group or sort the posters?
For the purposes of this demo, I will tag the posters with author names. That way, it will be easy to find all of the posters that have a particular author. Because this poster has two authors, I added two tags: “Emma Brennan-Wydra” and “Tori Culler.” Type the tags into the field, separating different tags with commas or the Enter key.
Finally, we want to fill in the Excerpt field with the names of the authors. Whatever we write in the excerpt field will appear below the poster title on the Posters page. We want that space to display the names of the authors.
Finally, we want to ensure that comments are enabled. Expand the Discussion tab and make sure that “Allow comments” is selected. This is the functionality that will allow people to leave comments on the posters.
Our first poster is now configured properly, so we can click the blue “Update” button at the top of the page to save our work. After we update our post, we can click the WordPress “W” logo in the top left corner to exit the post editor.
Most poster sessions contain more than one poster. Fortunately, each additional poster we add will be much easier and faster than the first one because we have the option to make copies of our first post. Copying our first post will retain all of the custom blocks and settings we defined over the last several steps, saving us a lot of time on subsequent posters.
Click on “…” on your first post, then select “Copy post.”
This will take us back to the post editor, where we will see a nearly exact duplicate of the post we just created. A couple of details are different — for example, the URL slug is different, because it must be unique for each post — but otherwise it looks just like our first post.
We need to update this newly copied post with information about our second poster. That means we need to repeat the following steps:
- Write the title of the poster in the title block.
- Write the names of the authors in the paragraph block immediately below the title.
- Replace the image in the image block by uploading the image of the second poster.
- Replace the file in the file block by uploading the PDF of the second poster in the file block.
- [Optional] Upload any supplemental materials or information by adding and editing additional paragraph, file, or image blocks.
- Set the URL slug.
- Add and/or apply one or more categories to the poster.
- Add one or more tags to the poster.
- Update the excerpt to reflect the author names.
- Ensure that comments are enabled.
Since all of the blocks are already in the right places, this process will be much faster than it was for the first poster.
When we are satisfied with our second poster, we can click the blue “Publish” button at the top of the screen. WordPress may prompt you to double-check your settings, and then click “Publish” again.
When we are finished publishing the post, we can click the WordPress logo in the top left corner to exit the post editor. We should now see two posts in the list: one for each poster we have uploaded so far.
We need to repeat the process of copying the post and filling in information for the next poster until all of the posters have been uploaded. It doesn’t matter which post you “copy” to begin the next post, but I tend to use the most recent one. I uploaded three more posters to the demo site, resulting in a total of five posts. Your virtual poster session may have many more.
The last thing we want to do before we publish our virtual poster session is update the Contact page. This page will allow visitors to contact us (the virtual poster session organizer) with comments or questions. You aren’t required to have a Contact page on your virtual poster session site, but it’s probably a good idea.
To update the Contact page, first click on the “Pages” tab in the menu on the left side, then click “…” for the Contact page, then select “Edit” at the top of the menu that appears. (If you don’t want to have a Contact page on your site, select “Trash” at the bottom of the menu instead!)
Clicking on “Edit” will take us to the block editor for the Contact page.
As usual, we can customize the blocks on this page by clicking on them. I edited my Contact page by removing the two-column layout, updating the text at the top, and entering an email address for messages sent using the form to go to.
When we are finished updating the Contact page, we can click on the blue “Update” button at the top of the page to save our work, then click on the WordPress logo in the top left corner to exit the block editor.
Let’s check our work so far by previewing our site. Return to the list of Pages using the left side menu, click on “…” next to any page, then select “View page.”
Clicking on “View page” will display a preview of the page we selected within our current window. We can check out how our site looks this way, or we can click on the pink “Visit site” button to open up a preview of the site in a new tab. Be sure to test out the different navigation links and visit the Posters page to make sure the poster titles and excerpts are displaying properly.
If you see anything you don’t like, you should see an “Edit” button and pencil icon at the bottom of each page. Click on “Edit” to be taken back to the block editor for that page. (The “Edit” buttons will not be visible when other people are viewing the virtual poster session.)
When we’re happy with how everything looks, it’s time to publish (or “launch”) our site. When we return to “My Home” using the menu on the left side of the page, we will see a pink button inviting us to “Launch site.” Click on the button and follow the instructions.
Now we can click on the “View site” button or simply navigate to our site’s web address to view the final product. We can always add more posters or make changes to the content later on.
The steps in this tutorial are a basic recipe for creating an asynchronous poster session via WordPress. Depending on your needs, you could modify your virtual poster session by:
- Changing the visibility of the pages or posts from “Public” (“Visible to everyone”) to “Password Protected” (“Protected with a password you choose. Only those with the password can view this post.”)
- Providing links to Zoom, Discord, Google Meet, or other similar services to allow for live interaction between poster authors and attendees.
- Adding more pages and blocks to your site to provide different ways to engage with the poster session, such as a separate page to view posts with particular categories or tags.
- Experimenting with other layouts and plugins.
