About blogs.rice.edu

Rice University’s blogs.rice.edu Service

Rice University’s blogs.rice.edu offers an academic publishing platform that enables faculty, staff, and students to create blogs and simple websites for teaching, research, service, and professional development.

This service is powered by CampusPress, a WordPress-based provider designed specifically for educational use. All current Rice faculty, staff, and students with active NetIDs can log in to blogs.rice.edu to create and manage a site.

blogs.rice.edu is a free service managed by the Office of Information Technology (OIT).

For support:

 

More than a Blog

Although blogs began as online journals, CampusPress is a full-featured content management system (CMS) that supports:

  • Professional profiles highlighting scholarly, pedagogical, and service activities
  • Regular blog posts about research, teaching, or administrative projects
  • Portfolios of completed and in-progress work
  • Class or group project sites
  • Resource libraries and digital collections
  • Multi-author publishing

Importing Content

Already have a blog on another service (like Blogger or WordPress.com)? CampusPress supports easy imports.

See the EduBlogs User Guide for detailed instructions.

Features of blogs.rice.edu (CampusPress)

  • Built on a widely used and established WordPress engine
  • Easy sidebar customization with widgets
  • Over 300 modern, accessible, and responsive themes to choose from
  • Simple import from WordPress, Blogger, and others
  • Fine-grained privacy and visibility controls
  • User role management for collaborative or multi-author sites
  • Support for embedded content from services like YouTube, Vimeo, Google Slides, and more
  • Option to use a static front page or display latest posts
  • A variety of plugins to enhance your site’s functionality, including accessibility, SEO, and media tools

Recommended Themes

We recommend starting with these accessible, flexible themes:

  • CampusPress Flex
  • Divi

Browse all themes under Appearance > Themes in your site’s dashboard.

Accessibility Requirements

Rice University requires all blogs.rice.edu sites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards. To help you meet this requirement:

  1. Users must review the Digital Accessibility Campus Initiative page and learn how to make their site accessible before getting started.
  2. Go to your site’s Dashboard > Plugins and activate the “Accessible Content” plugin.
  3. For every page and post, click the “Accessibility Review” link in the black admin bar at the top.
  4. Address any issues flagged to ensure your content passes all accessibility checks.

For more guidance, visit the Rice Accessibility Guidelines.

Support

For help with CampusPress at Rice:

CampusPress Overview Video