Including a photo gallery in your posts or pages is now a whole lot easier. And here’s what they look like:
This big improvement is a built-in feature of the current WordPress MU software. It offers great potential for school use:
- It provides really good support for commenting on individual images, not just one the post.
- It allows photos to be displayed with captions.
Go and take a look at the original post on the King’s Meadow site to see it in action.
It’s also the ideal way to show off collections of photos of paintings or other activities where your audience might still want to have a good look at an individual photo, and not watch it quickly change into another one as part of a slideshow!
To use it, just upload a set of images in the usual way. Just don’t hit “Insert in Post” while you’re working with the individual images, use Insert Gallery instead. You’ll just see the word Gallery in square brackets, but the image gallery will displayed when the post or page is visited.
If you’ve an eduBuzz blog, you’ll have had to avoid using the default “Flash uploader”, which was generating an “HTTP Error” message: that’s now sorted.
We believe the fault’s now fixed (a site-wide WordPress plugin needed to be upgraded). Feedback welcome - please leave a comment.
French video sharing site Dailymotion.com offers a wide range of entertaining French-language videos which can help make language learning fun. And if you’ve an edubuzz blog, you can easily embed them in your posts. Here’s how to do it:
- Click “Menu” in the bottom right of the video, then choose “URL and embed code”
- Under the Embed box, click “Copy code”.
- In your WordPress blog’s editor, click the yellow A (for Anarchy) toolbar button.
- Paste the Embed code into the box that pops up. (You’ll notice the box says “For DAILYMOTION and BREAK videos and iTUNES IMIXES just copy and paste the code from their embeddable players.)
Thanks are due to Jackie Swan for the idea. And here’s the end result, using one of Dailymotion’s most popular recent videos:
The eduBuzz Support Wiki at http://edubuzz.org/support now features five short video tutorials on WordPress.
Each video is around 5 minutes long, and is ideal for new users or for people needing a quick intro to the redesigned back-end menu system. Topics covered are:
The videos, presented by James Farmer, are from WPMU DEV Premium.
Edubuzz.org has been updated over the holidays, so if you’ve an edubuzz blog you’ll notice changes to the admin screens. If you just need a quick tour of the basics, get your speakers on and watch the 5-minute video (11MB, opens in full-screen), or use the player below.
The good news is these changes make WordPress easier to use. The more advanced options, for example, have been moved below the Write Post screen to make the interface less intimidating for new users. This will make it easier for more students and staff to get started with web publishing.
Some new features have been added in response to feedback from WordPress users world-wide. These include:
- the ability to set the size of image thumbnails, and to use mid-sized thumbnails
- the replacement of the separate Upload area, which confused some people, with “Add Media”
- a full-screen editing option
- easier, more obvious, options for making posts appear on future dates
Jeffrey Zeldman provides a good 10-point summary of the key changes.
Of course, if you need a bit more assistance, please get in touch by leaving a comment or by email.
The edubuzz blog system has now moved home, and the service is back. Basic tests have been successful, but if you notice anything wrong, please get in touch or leave a comment.
The changeover meant taking the system down from last thing yesterday until earlier today. Apologies if that caused you any inconvenience.
The new place has much more storage capacity, and more memory. The move was necessary for two reasons. First, performance: the server was becoming overloaded during morning and afternoon peak periods. That was down to lack of memory. Secondly, free storage capacity for uploaded files was becoming low. Continue reading ‘Edubuzz blogs move home’
Things are getting a bit crowded in the edubuzz house, so it’s time to move to a bigger place.
Currently we’ve around 1000 blogs, 1500 user accounts and up to about 10,000 visitors a day. WordPress Multi-User has a healthy appetite for memory, and we’re finding out the hard way what happens when it can’t get enough.
This weekend the blog system will be moving to a larger capacity server. The plan is to make the changeover late Friday evening, so there will be a bit of downtime then. If all goes well, it should be back in service on Saturday.
During the school Easter break, Edubuzz blogs have been upgraded to a new version of WordPress Multi-User, so there are a few new features to explore.
What’s changed? Main changes you’ll notice are:
- An new Advanced Editor toolbar button lets you easily use colour text, format headings, insert custom characters (e.g. £, √, ≠) and undo changes.
- The upload area now displays the size of uploaded files, making this key information easily available for the first time.
- You can now add tags to posts, and a tag cloud to your sidebar. This provides the foundation for site-wide tagging, tools for which will appear in later versions.
- The amount of upload space you’re using is displayed, so you can see when you’re getting near the limit. We can now also manage available space on a blog-by-blog basis. so individual blogs can be provided with more storage space.
eduBuzz blogs now have a “Paste from Word” editor button.
Up till now, if you pasted content from Word then you’d often end up with odd-looking results. That happened because pasting brought over not just the content you wanted, and structural information like tables, but also formatting information, such as fonts and font sizes. Ideally, we want the blog’s theme to control presentation to keep posts looking consistent.
The WordPress Plain Text plugin, suggested by Ollie Bray, provides an alternative solution. Because this is such a common problem, we’ve installed it as a site-wide plugin.
The key benefit it brings is the ability to include tables in blog posts and pages in a way that avoids any need to use HTML.
Here’s an example of pasting from a Word document using the tool.
Continue reading ‘eduBuzz blogs now feature “Paste from Word”’
