Official Launch Update
In preparation for a hopeful official launch of Longwood Blogs next week, we’ve applied some updates to further refine the blog system.
Unless this is your first time visiting the blogs, you’ll notice a brand new “home blog” look built by Greenwood Library in cooperation with Web Communications and based on the theme for the Friends of the Library blog. The home blog has the following major new features:
- Login fields have been moved to the top of the page to make them more prominent; links to manage and create your blogs also appear here once logged in.
- Featured Longwood Blogs news posts are automatically cycled at the top of the sidebar.
- Recent images from all the blogs appear lower in the sidebar.
In addition to the home blog changes and other minor fixes, we’ve also made some changes to the backend of your blogs such as:
- Your dashboards now display feeds of the latest site-wide blog posts and blog system news.
- You can now see how popular a theme is when choosing one for your blog (Appearance > Themes).
Possible Downtime: Thursday, March 17th
We’ve planned to do some maintenance and updates for Longwood Blogs on Thursday, March 17, 2011. Albeit most of you bloggers will be on Spring Break then or you might not even notice any downtime, the possibility still exists, so you have been warned.
More on the substance of the updates to come…
Can’t keep a good blog down
The blogs experienced some downtime over the weekend that you may have noticed. Some important doodads conflicted with our series of tubes, but the good folks in IITS have got it figured out. You may now resume your blogging.
New Plugins
This week, we have made five new plugins available for use on your blogs. Here’s a rundown:
- Add Link—enables a widget that you can use to allow visitors to add their own links to your blog (with password-protection). This is good for course blogs.
- Add Users—same as previous, except visitors can add themselves as users to your blog. Also good for course blogs.
- Lightbox 2 (replaces Litebox Plugin)—automatically makes image links on your blog use a lightbox
- More Privacy Options—adds additional levels of privacy to your blog that allow you to limit who can see your blog. You can access these new options in Settings > Privacy.
- Widget Context—adds additional options to widgets that allow you to control what pages they display on
New Themes
Last week, we got a few more themes onto Longwood Blogs for your blogging enjoyment:
Agregado and Greyzed themes also received some small updates. Look for some more themes and plugins soon.
Blogs page is now scalable
We’ve added sort and navigation options to the list of blogs to make it scalable to hundreds of blogs. So, go forth and create blogs!
@Longwood ITC
Longwood ITC
