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‘

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!

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!

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 PDFto 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!

We have always had many different privacy options available to our bloggers blogs can be as public or as private as youd 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 wont 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.

Thats 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.

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 andcustomizablethemes
• 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!

 
A couple of weeks ago, we introduced you to Yoko – our most mobile and iPad friendly theme yet.

As of today, we’re adding Liquorice to the mix, which is also “responsive” to whatever screen size your blog’s visitors are using.

We think many of you will like the more whimsical fonts and easy to read layout of this new theme.

Make sure to go to Appearance > Premium Themes and check it out!

For those of you that don’t want to change themes and still offer your mobile readers something good to look at, not to worry, we’ve got even bigger news coming soon on that front!

Whenever you first create a blog here on edublogs.org you are given a brand new URL, or link, for your site.

For example, studentchallenge.edublogs.org is the URL for theStudent Blogging Challenge blog.

As of today, you can also access the same site using studentchallenge.edublogs.com – see what we did there?

Even though the .org ending is the real URL (and the one you should use and give out to people), the .com ending will now work!

This will especially come in handy when giving out class blog links to students and parents that can forget or get the URL mixed-up.

Other Fun URL Facts

• We see lots of users that out of habit, put a www. at the beginning of their URL. And while that will work too, it makes your link longer than it needs to be. Leave the www off! :)
• You can use domain mapping to change your URL to any available domain on the web. For example, theedublogger.edublogs.org is domain mapped to theedublogger.com – which is much shorter and easier to remember!
• You can have an unlimited number of blogs, all with different URLs, with your one username. Just go to the “My Blogs” page in your dashboard to create new ones or manage the ones you already have.

Happy blogging!

We are thrilled to unveil a brand new theme today!

Yoko – as it is called – is our first “responsive” and HTML5 theme.

This means that it will look great on all types of devices – including tablets and phones.

Exciting, huh?

This works because the theme is designed to move the sidebars and change image and text sizes automatically - all depending on the screen size.

You can see the theme in action on Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day blog.

Features

• Responsive and mobile friendly design
• Custom header image with several pre-set images to choose from
• Select the link and background colors to personalize the look
• A social widget that makes it easy to share links to your facebook, twitter, google+, and linkedn profiles
• Modern feel using the latest in web design

Yoko is already available as a ‘premium’ theme on edublogs.org blogs – for Pro and upgraded student blogs. It will soon be available on all Edublogs Campus sites as well.

Quick help with themes:

1. Changing your blog’s theme
2. Uploading your own custom header image
3. Creating your own custom navigation menu

We’ve got more themes like this in the works to release over the coming months. If you haven’t updated your blog’s look in a while – now might be a great time to do so!

Happy blogging!

One of the best parts about working at Edublogs is seeing daily all of the amazing learning experiences of students through blogging.

We regularly try to share these examples on our Facebookand Twitterpages, but this one in particular seemed worthy of a bit more.

Six teachers, from six different corners of the world, have collaborated together and co-created the Our World, Our Stories project blog.

The seven week long project has a different class, each from a different country, leading the students through learning experiences each week. For example, this week the students are discussing about the similarities and differences between their typical school days in each country.

You can learn more about all of the details on the about page here.

We absolutely love this idea and encourage everyone to check-in on the blog over the coming weeks to see how it plays out.

Or if you are interested in doing something similar with your students, feel free to leave your name, location, age group, and a link to your blog or contact info in the comments below.

Perhaps you can find willing classes to start a global blogging project on your own.

What amazing work by these teachers, and what an exciting experience for these students!