Year: 2012

New! An Easy Image Widget and Custom CSS

We are happy to announce the release today of two new exciting features for our Pro and Edublogs Campus users!

Easy Image Widget

Have you ever wanted to add a badge, photo, or other image to the sidebar of your blog?

Before now, it took pasting in some HTML code to get it to work – but now this new widget makes it a breeze!

How to use:

  1. From your dashboard, go to the ‘Plugins‘ menu
  2. Activate the ‘Image Widget‘ plugin
  3. Go to Appearance > Widgets
  4. Drag the ‘Image Widget‘ to your chosen sidebar
  5. Upload the image or badge from your computer
  6. Press ‘Save‘

Please note:

  1. The Image widget plugin is automatically activated on all blogs on Edublogs Campus and there is no need to activate it in Plugins.
  2. So if you are using an Edublogs Campus blog just go to Appearance > Widgets and you’ll see the Image Widget in your available widget area.

Custom CSS

For you power users out there, you will love the new ‘Custom CSS‘ item under the ‘Appearance‘ menu item of your blog.

 

If you know a bit of CSS (which stands for Cascading Style Sheets), then you will be able to change different attributes of your theme, including colors, fonts, spacing, and more.

Our favorite resource for more information, code examples, and tips on CSS can be found here.

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements coming soon!

Two New Plugins! Easily Add Fonts and Tables to Your Blog

We’ve just released two new plugins for all Pro and Edublogs Campus blogs!

1. MCE Table Buttons – Activate this plugin and several new table management buttons will appear when you are working on a page or post.

Similar to the table tools in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, this new plugin makes it easy to create and edit large tables.

2. Supreme Google Webfonts – Adds two new often requested visual editor items!

One that lets you choose from dozens of fun and nice looking fonts and a second that lets you easily choose the font size.

See Them In Action!

How Do I Use These?

Easy :)

  1. Go to the Plugins menu item in your dashboard
  2. Scroll down until you find MCE Table Buttons and/or Supreme Google Webfonts
  3. Click Activate
  4. Go to Posts > Add New
  5. Enjoy!

New Plugin! Easily Print and Make PDF’s of Posts!

 

One of the more common requests we get is to have an easy way to print or save posts.

Well now you can!

Visit the Plugins menu in your blog’s dashboard and you will see ‘Print Friendly and PDF’.

It is crazy easy to use – once activated go to Settings > Print Friendly and PDF to choose where you want the buttons to be and how you want them to look.

One of the best features of this plugin is that with just a few clicks, you can hide images or parts of text that you don’t need to print – saving paper in the process.

The downloadble PDF files look great as well.

You can see the plugin in action on any of our help and support documents so that you can quickly save or make a print out for handy reference.

Enjoy!

New Feature! Easy Password Protect Your Entire Blog

We have always had many different privacy options available to our bloggers – blogs can be as public or as private as you’d like.

Until now, if you wanted your blog to be private so that only a certain group of people could see it, you had to create and add usernames for each individual to your blog.

In short, it was kind of a pain.

Now you can quickly set a single password for your entire blog which you can give out to anyone you want to allow access.

This might be great for a group of student blogs that can all share the same password, meaning every student won’t need to be added to every single blog.

Or, it could work well on blogs meant for private communication or collaboration in a group, club, or school.

How does it work?!

First, go to the Settings > Privacy page of your blog.

Choose the last option on the list.

Enter any password you want and click ‘Save Changes’.

That’s it!

Now when anyone visits your blog, they will see this notice:

It is important to note that users can also choose to login with their Edublogs username and if they are registered users on the blog, they will have access that way as well.

Check it out now and let us know what you think!

The new password protect option is available on all Pro and upgraded student blogs now, and it will be rolling out to our Edublogs Campus networks soon.

New Dashboard Tools for Better Blogging and Student Management

We’ve got a huge amount of new blogging toys coming your way here in 2012!

To help lay the ground work for the even better stuff yet to come, you will now notice two snazzy new boxes greeting you when you first login to your blog’s dashboard.


There is more!

Go to Dashboard > My Blogs and you will see a list of all blogs you belong to, improved management tools, and a filter to only show blogs that need your attention to moderate comments or posts!

And one more thing!

We’ve done a ton of work on many of the more behind-the-scenes type of things that will help ensure a happy and fun blogging experience for all.

Part of that work includes a better payment and account management system for Edublogs Pro – which many of you may notice, we now can accept credit cards without the need for PayPal accounts! We’re also happy to work with your school to accept Purchase Orders or checks too!

This is something we’ve heard from many of our users needed improvement, so we’re happy to make the checkout and Edublogs Pro subscription management process even better.

Stay tuned!

Just a sneak-peek at what our team is working hard to bring you in the coming weeks and months:

  • better student moderation and management tools
  • more beautiful and customizable themes
  • an improved mobile blogging experience
  • and much, much more!

What do you think?!

Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below with your thoughts on the above or if you have ideas of your own on how we could be better.

Happy blogging!

Provide some details for your blog
No stress, you can always change this later on.
Use only lowercase letters (a-z) and numbers.
.edublogs.org

« Go back Register Account » Create a Site »