Our third new plugin released this week is an easy way to integrate Facebook with your blog.

The Facebook Like plugin gives you the ability to quickly add a ‘like’ button at the beginning or end of posts or pages.

To give it a try, don’t be afraid to click on “like” at the bottom of this post! :)

Plugin Features

• Easy to setup – all you need to do is activate, and the plugin automatically does the rest!
• Change location – you can choose to have the “like” button at the beginning or end of each post, and rather or not to display it on your front page or not.
• Customization – other settings include changing the colors to match your blog and making the button bar bigger or smaller.

How to Customize

After activating the plugin, you can click on Facebook-Like under the Settings tab of your blog’s dashboard.  From here, you will find all of the options with explanations provided.

More New Stuff!

This makes THREE new plugins made live this week – including the new PayPal and Calendar plugins.

The next few months are going to bring even more new plugins and features to Edublogs!

Be sure to follow us at twitter.com/edublogs and facebook.com/edublogs so that you can be the first to know as we roll out the coming changes!

As promised, we are releasing THREE new plugins this week!  

The first is an easy way of accepting payments or donations right inside your blog.

The second, which has been a highly requested feature, gives you the ability to place a calendar on any post or page in your blog.

This plugin can be used as an event calendar, lesson plan book, or maybe a class birthday calendar.  We would love to hear about other ways that this feature might be used.  Feel free to leave a comment below with your ideas!

So how do you use the plugin?

It’s easy.  Pro and Campus users can activate the plugin from their dashboard.  This will create a new Calendar tab near the bottom of the left column in the dashboard where you can configure the calendar.

The most common way to use the calendar is to create a new page and copy and paste {CALENDAR} into the page where you want the calendar to appear.  Make sure to include the brackets and use all upper case letters.  This can be used on any page or post in a blog.

To add events, click on Manage Calendar on the calendar tab.  Events can be recurring, scheduled for all day, or given specific times.  You can assign events to different categories and give each category a different color so it can be easily identified on the calendar.  You might find ColorPicker.com useful when assigning colors.

And what about widgets?

Once the plugin is activated, you will find two new widgets to put in your blog’s sidebars.  There is one for “Today’s Events” and one for “Upcoming Events”.

A calendar may just be the perfect addition to a class blog to keep students and parents informed. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s release of plugin number three!