Six Steps to Creating your Intranet

4) Start Adding Users and Content

Please visit this menu below after you have activated the Simple Intranet plugin by visiting yoursite.com/wp-admin to login as an Administrator and then going to Dashboard / Simple Intranet / Simple Intranet.   You’ll see 3 steps to setting up the most common tasks of an employee directory, an event calendar and online forms. You can start adding users (Users / Add New) or import users from a CSV file (User / Import from CSV) using the csv template file provided in that menu area.

NOTE: To password protect your entire WordPress site behind a login (which is recommended), go to Dashboard / Groups and at the bottom under the Private Site heading, check the box next to “Redirect all logged-out users to the login page before allowing them to view the site.” if not already checked. 

You will want to start by visiting the Dashboard / Pages / Add New to create key content pages for your activity feed, directory, forms and file upload area. You may wish to name them something like “Activity Feed”, “Directory”, “HR Forms”, and “File Repository”.  To set one of the pages to display on your homepage, you can visit Dashboard / Settings / Reading and set the Front Page to the page you wish to show.

To activate the Activity Feed, go to Dashboard / Settings / Activity Feed and be sure the page ID is updated to the page ID of the page you created for “Activity Feed” (to view the page ID, edit the page and see the ID in the URL such as “post=21”) .  You may also want to find a draft of “Activity Feed” and change the settings on the right to Publish (public). You need to ensure that you have comments enabled on this page for it to work (Dashboard / Settings / Discussion is where you set them to be enabled). You can also edit the Activity Feed page, click on “Screen Options” in the top right to display a menu and check off “Discussion”.  You will then see a Comments area that you can check off below the text edit area to ensure comments will show in the Activity Feed.

To add a directory you can start as easily as pasting [employees] into the “Directory” page you created.  To find out more options on shortcodes for this directory list view, visit our Documentation section. To add a employee directory in a grid vs list view, you’ll need to download another specific plugin called Simple Employee Grid View from the Members area and then add the [employee_grid] shortcode, with any desired extra parameters as noted also in the documentation area.

Your event calendar is already activated at yoursite.com/events and you can visit Dashboard / Events / Settings to modify views and more (the event calendar doesn’t no use a shortcode). You may wish to provide your users with a form to complete. To add a front end event form, you can install the Community Events add-on plugin from the members area and add this URL to your menu yoursite.com/events/community/add (see Dashboard / Events / Settings / Community for more).

You can visit Dashboard / Forms / New Form to create a new form name and fields using the options on the right and dragging them to the left.  You can edit the fields, make them required and resave the form. You can then add it into the “HR Forms” page you created by editing that page and using the “Add Form” button about the text/HTML editing box.

To create a File Repository page, download our Simple Files plugin from the Members area, and add the [page] to a page.  To set up permissions for files and folders, you’ll want Simple Intranet installed. You’ll want to visit Users / Groups / Add New to set up new Groups (same as WordPress roles). If you don’t see the Groups menu, try deactivating and reactivating Simple Intranet to refresh menus. Then go into Dashboard / Users / All Users and assign Users you want to the new Groups (roles) you set up. 

This will then allow you to paste the [file] shortcode for Simple Files into a page such as “File Repository”, and set Permissions by Group.  You can also set permissions by User (vs Group) in the gear icon (options) area, and also see if you have the ability given your PHP configuration to allow for multiple file uploads and downloads using zip files.  You can then create folders for each department etc and assign permissions to View/Download/Share etc for just the departments who have access.  So to view a Marketing folder with marketing files in it, a user would login with a “marketing” role slug and only view their folder, but not a Sales folder.

5) Create A Menu

In Dashboard / Appearance / Menus, add a menu name and click on Create A New Menu.  Then check off the pages you want to assign to the menu from the left and add them to it. Then click the “Manage Locations” tab to assign the menu name you created to the location you want in your theme.  Note, this may vary depending on what theme you choose, and you may have to assign the menu name you created elsewhere also in your theme menu (Dashboard / Appearance / Themes / Edit or similar).

6) Set Up Your Permalinks & Branding

Visit Dashboard / Settings / Permalinks to reset your link format to “Post Name”. This is a good practice to make links more user friendly and also helps with ensuring page navigation works well in the Employee Directory and other areas. Visit Dashboard / Settings / Add Logo and upload your logo to appear at the to of the Dashboard and on the login screen.

You may wish to add other plugins from the Members area to extend functionality of your intranet.  You can reference the shortcodes in the Members area or also in the Documentation section for details on widgets and shortcodes.