New Plugin! Add Buttons, Tabs, Feeds, And Sidebars Anywhere!

The new ‘Live Shortcodes‘ plugin makes it easy to add buttons, tabs, sidebars, accordions, and much more to your blog.

You can now take control over the content you publish like never before.

What Does It Do?

This plugin gives you the ability to easily add many new elements to your pages and posts.

Here is a quick overview of the available elements:

1. Accordions

Break content into sections that visitors can open and close.

Accordion

2. Toggles

Just like accordions, but more than one section can be open at a time.

toggle

3. Tabs

Like an accordion too, but with the sections across the top.

tab

4. Dividers

Break up paragraphs with one of several different divider styles.

dividers

5. Buttons

Customize the color, shape, and style of buttons that can be links to anywhere on the web.

button

6. Latest Posts

Show a list of latest posts from your blog. Customize the details that are shown.

7. RSS

Display content from any RSS feed on any page or post.

8. Reader Content

Show latest posts from your reader – blogs you follow or all posts you’ve written on the network.

9. My Class Blogs

Add a list of all student blogs in a class using the ‘My Class’ tool. Determine if the list is alphabetical, random, or most recently updated.

10. My Class Recent Posts

Place a list of all posts from student blogs that belong to a class.

And we plan on adding more to this list soon!

How To Activate

The Live Shortcodes plugin is available to all Edublogs Pro and CampusPress customers.

Just go to your Plugins menu and click Activate to enable.

Then, whenever you add a new page or post, you’ll see a new “Add Shortcodes” button above your editor.

It is super easy to use and to customize each element, but if you’d like any additional help, please see the full plugin help guide here.

What’s Next?

Let us know in the comments below if you have any ideas or requests for items we can add to the shortcodes plugin. We’ll do our best to build them in!

In the meantime, we have more new exciting features and news coming later this week.

And don’t forget, time is running out on winning a FREE EDUBLOGS PRO in celebration of our 10th birthday!

Happy blogging!

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!

Take your tag cloud to the third dimension!

Tags are an excellent way to organize blog posts and helps blog visitors browse posts based on a specific topic.

Tag clouds are a useful way of showing which tags are more popular than others on a blog.  The larger the size of the word in the tag cloud the more posts that have been tagged using that term.

We’ve just installed a new plugin for Edublogs Pro and Campus users which brings your tag cloud into the new decade.

Plus, I think that you will find that it is a lot of fun to play with!

Here is the 3D tag cloud in action for our Edublogs News blog:

[wp-cumulus]

Activating the plugin is as simple as:

  1. Go to Plugins > Installed Plugins
  2. Click activate underneath 3D Flash Rotating Tag Cloud (WP Cumulus)

After activating this plugin, you will have access to a new ‘WP Cumulus’ menu under the ‘Settings’ tab of your dashboard.  From here you can control the speed, color, and several other functions of the tag cloud.

You can even choose to use categories alongside or instead of tags.

The plugin allows you to put your 3D cloud on any page or post or in a new widget on your sidebars.

For one more example, check out the 3D tag cloud in the right sidebar of TheEdublogger.com!

Adding a 3D Tag cloud

New Plugin #3 – Add a Facebook “like” button

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

fblikehand

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!

New Plugin #2 – A Calendar For Your Blog

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

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?

calendaroptionsIt’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!

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