Category Archives: news

Issues, news

Widgets in New Site Issue & Workarounds

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There is a problem with the display of widgets when editing them. This only happens with a classic theme on newly created sites. It does not affect older sites.

When a new site is created it comes with a pre-installed set of widgets. This is theme dependent.

When you go to edit the widgets in this scenario the pre installed widgets show up labeled ‘block’ in the widget editor. They still work on the front page of the site but may cause confusion.

Screenshot of Widget Area in the Dashboard. The widgets are all labeld block
Screenshot of problematically labeled blocks.

Adding more widgets to the sidebars and other widget areas is not affected, these show up as expected.

This seems to be a side effect of our transition from the classic editor and classic themes.

We are looking at fixing this but it is a tricky problem.

Workarounds

  1. Ignore the problem, the widgets still work. If you are happy with the widgets that are pre-installed by the theme just keep them.
  2. Ignore the problem but add any more widgets you need. Adding more widgets works as expected.
  3. Delete the widgets labeled ‘block’ and replace. The newly added widgets will display properly. If you look at the front end of the blog you should be able to note the widgets you need to replace.
Screenshot of a widget area in glow blogs with a standard set of widgets
Here we have replaced the ‘block’ widgets with new ones. These are correctly labeled.
news, Releases

Glow Blogs Update 14 Aug 2024

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We are pleased to announce a new release for Glow Blogs, which includes several fixes and updates to plugins and themes.

Fixes

Embedding Sways: Microsoft recently changed the URLs for Sway embeds, which disrupted the embedding process on Glow Blogs. The developers have now improved this process. We’ve also updated the help documentation to show how to embed a Sway in Glow Blogs moving forward.

H5P Results: If you provide H5P content for your learners, a bug affecting the display of results has been fixed. You can find more information about the H5P results system on the H5P example site.

Glow Analytics: A bug that affected viewing analytics on very old Glow Blogs has been resolved.

Accessibility: Various accessibility improvements have been made across the service, including updates to the “Create a Site” page.

Plugins

The following plugins have been updated to newer versions:

3D flipbook, Akismet, Event Organiser, H5P, Userway Acessibility, WordPress Importer, WP Accessibility, WP Draw Attention, WP Postratings and Youtube Embed Plus

Themes

These themes have been updated

Twenty Twelve, Twenty Thirteen, Twenty Fourteen, Twenty Fifeteen, Twenty Sixteen, Twenty Seventeen, Twenty Nineteen, Twenty Twenty, Twenty TwentyOne, Twenty TwentyTwo and Twenty TwentyThree.

Please note that the Make and Agama themes have not been updated by their designers for some time. These themes are often used for more complex site designs. To ensure longevity, it may be advisable to use the Site Editor and the Twenty Twenty-Two or Twenty Twenty-Three themes for more complex site designs.

Upcoming

We hope to upgrade the WordPress version used on Glow Blogs soon and add the Twenty Twenty-Four theme. The improvements to the Site Editor in that version of WordPress may assist you with site design beyond what you can achieve with classic themes.

There are currently many Glow Blogs that haven’t been used or updated for some time. To improve performance, we will conduct a housekeeping exercise before the end of the year to remove old and unused Glow Blogs. This will only affect blogs with no users and no recent updates. These blogs will be archived first, allowing people to check if they are still needed. More details and dates for the Glow Blogs Housekeeping will be shared soon.

Digital Tidy Up of Glow Blogs – Glow Connect
How To, news

Glow Blogs Start of Session FAQ 2024

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A few quick tips that might help at the start of this new session.

Forgotten username or password

Your RM Unify Admin, who may be in your establishment or Local Authority will be able to help.

I need to access a blog where I do not have a role. For example you have moved school.

An Admin of the blog should be able to add you. Adding Users, Setting Roles | Glow Blog Help

No one in school can access a blog (perhaps staff have moved or retired)

You need to get your Local Authority to raise a call with the RM help desk.

Make sure you include the usernames you want added to a blog and the URL of the blog.

I can log on to Glow but I can’t access a blog where I have a role.

If you have just be added to the blog, get an admin for the blog check you have been added in the right way. If you are showing as NOT LOGGED IN YET, see this FAQ. If that doesn’t help you need to get your Local Authority to raise a call with the RM help desk.

Make sure you include your username and the URL of the blog.

I can’t work out how to…

  1. Search the help blog
  2. Check the FAQ
  3. Use the contact form to get personal help.
  4. Leave a comment on one of the pages if you think that is appropriate.
  5. email gw09johnstonjohn4@glowmail.org.uk

New to Glow Blogs

News from the last year on Glow Blogs:

Block Editor

The Blocks Editor is a new way to edit posts and pages. It allows a lot more flexibility as to content and layout.  We have a blog that explains more:  Using the Blocks Editor in Glow Blogs.

Site Editor

The site editor is a new way to edit the look and design of your site. It goes much further than changing themes. More improvements should come to Glow Blogs in the session, when we wil provide more information.

Accessibility they are new ways to make you sites accessibly to different visitors. Accessibility is becoming even more important in web design and should be considered for all public blogs.

H5P is a plugin that allows you to create & display on your site a whole range of interactive content, from quizzes, multi-choice and close exercises all the way to 360 tours. H5p examples

Extra help

We have developed a few more help sites in addition to the main Glow Blogs help.  Here is a list of other help sites on Glow Blogs.

Coming Soon…

We hope to have more help material and tutorials up very soon. These may be accompanied by some help sessions online.

As always ideas and suggestions for improving Glow Blogs and the support are very welcome.

Digital Tidy Up of Glow Blogs

Glow Connect has some advice on Back to School Glow Housekeeping including advice on doing a Digital Tidy Up of Glow Blogs.

news

Glow Blogs Webinar

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Susan Sey, Education Scotland Product Manager ran a Glow Blogs Webinar last week.

This session provided an overview of how Glow Blogs could be used by practitioners and students to capture and exemplify learning.
There was a live demo showcasing how you can build pages using the new block editor.
We also looked at how you can embed interactivity by using the H5P plugin.

Glow Blogs Webinar – Glow Connect

You can download the presentation, follow links and watch a replay on Glow Connect.

Tutorials

Glow Blogs Tutorial: Simple Links Site

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This tutorial shows how to make a one page site with Glow Blogs. You can read through the tutorial or follow along on the Video.

Screenshot of a Linksl list page

The tutorial will cover using the block editor, patterns & the document overview.

This will be a Links in Bio type of page or site that is common on the internet now, sometimes called Link Trees sites. There are several services that will help you create such a site but it is pretty easy with Glow Blogs.

You could add a page like this to an existing site or create a a one page site just for sharing a set of links.

The tutorial will also help you to understand some of the basics of the Block editor.

The site will be a simple list of links. I might use it to provide a set of resources, or list different places on the internet I’ve got a presence.

You can view the completed one page example site.

This is the first of several tutorials sites that are in the works. We would very much appreciate any feedback.

news, Releases

Glow Blogs New “New Site” Functionality

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The latest release of Glow Blogs makes a slight change to how you create a new site.

There is an added choice when creating a site:

Screenshot of the New Blog page, chowing the radio buttons for choosing the editor.

You can choose between the Classic and Block editor.

Choosing Classic will create a site with the default editor for posts and pages is the classic editor and the theme is Twenty Fourteen. This is the default choice.

Choosing Blocks with make the default editor the newer blocks editor. The Theme will be Twenty Twenty-three.

In both cases you can change the editor later in the settings-> Writing page of your blog’s dashboard. You can also set it to allow yourself and other users of the site to swap back and forth between editors.

You can also change the theme in the Dashboard-> Appearance page.

The Twenty-Twenty-three theme is a block theme and is very customisable using the Site editor to edit the templates. This is a bit more complex that using the customiser on older themes.

You can use either editors to edit pages and posts on your site they are not theme dependent. The exceptions are the Make and Agama themes which do not work with the block editor.

The block editor is the future of WordPress, it allows for a modular design for flexible content creation. You can make more complex layouts than with the old classic editor. Many features, columns, groups which have been much requested by glow users are in the Block editor.

We have a page on the help blog: The Block Editor which outlines some of the differences.

We have also a blog which give a lot more details on using the blocks editor Blocks – Using the Blocks Editor in Glow Blogs. This lists all the available blocks, shows examples and has links to even more information.

news

H5P in Glow Blogs – News

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The First Annual H5P Academy Awards were just announced. The winners in the different categories:

  • Best Interactive Book (content type)
  • Best use of Course Presentation (content type)
  • Innovative Use of Multimedia (video, image and sound)
  • Outstanding Visual Design
  • Impactful Gamification

Although they are all from higher education they give a good idea of how H5P can be used at a sophisticated level.  The winners are linked from the announcement.

H5P updates

There has been a new version of Game Map and Drag the Words. You can read more on the March 2024 release note at h5p.org.

These updates are available in Glow Blogs now. You may need to update the modules concerned when you are creating H5P content:

Screenshot of the H5P create content screen showing that an update is available.

Click on the Details Button and then Update.

Issues, news

Glow Blogs Twitter Changes

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There have been several changes to the way Twitter (now X) works with Glow Blogs.

Twitter/X keeps changing the goal posts for integration with other systems. Recently they have stripped out most of the functionality for free third party use.

This is, as far as we know, the current state of affairs. Please get in touch if you have a different experience or more information.

Twitter to Blogs

Time Line Widget

You cannot use the Twitter Timeline widget anymore. We will soon be removing it from Glow Blogs. At the moment it just does not work. You might see old tweets or just a no tweets yet notice in the widget.

Screenshot of twitter widgets on Glow blogs, Not working.

Embedding Tweets

You can still embed tweets in a blog post or page by pasting in the link to that tweet. N.B. I just tested this and if you copy the link to the tweet from the twitter user interface you get a url like:

https://x.com/johnjohnston/status/1751702354888359969?s=20

you need to change x to twitter for that now to work.

In the past a tweet with replies the replies would get embedded, it now embeds the tweet and then a link to all the replies. If you embed a reply toy will get the original tweet & the one reply linked to.

Blogs to Twitter

If you paste a link to a blog post into twitter, it will produce a card consisting of the featured image which links to the blog post. As in the example above.

If the blog post does not have a featured image no image will be included.

You can still use some services to auto post tweets, https://dlvrit.com is still working for me. I presume they pay twitter for the privilege. An image will be posted along with a dlvr.it shortened link.

news, Releases

Glow Blogs Updated 1 Feb 2024

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  • Fixed an issue with Google Analytics, the ‘Sessions and Views in the last 30 days graph for last 30 days’ is now showing properly. There may still be a problem with very old blogs not being able to display the Analytics data.
  • Fixed upload of m4a audio files in block editor Audio Block.

Plugin updates include updated and small fixes for:

  • WP Accessibility
  • Google Translate
  • Syntax highlighter
  • Mega Menu
  • H5P
  • Youtube Embed Plus

In addition we should mention a new content type for H5P content was added last week. The Game Map:

Game Map: Quadrilaterals

Releases

Glow Blogs Update: More Blocks & More

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Glow Blogs has undergone an update, including fixes for various issues and notable improvements.

Fixes

  • List blocks now function as expected; a new item is generated when the return key is pressed.
  • Buttons Blocks also work correctly, creating a new button upon pressing the return key.
  • Bulk adding users in “Add Users” and “Add Curriculum Groups” now functions properly. Please note that it requires pupil and teacher information to be present in SEEMiS and sent to Glow via Click and Go.

Improvements

Still to fix

  • The Bulk Create Blogs feature is currently not operational but is expected to be resolved in October.
  • Forms created with the Block Editor are currently experiencing issues and are under investigation. However, the Jetpack Contact form can still be used in the classic editor for posts and pages, and it continues to function as usual.