Category Archives: news

Getting Help with Glow Blogs

During the times of School Closure many schools are using Glow.

Blogs are particularly suited publishing news and information in a timely fashion and one of the easiest ways to post public information that does not need a log on to. The recent infrastructure changes make Glow Blogs a more robust platform too.

If you need help with Glow Blogs, here is how to get it:

If you need to know how to do something the Help Blog is a good place to start use the search box from any page of look at the Site Map.

There is a list of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers)
Three of the most common are:

If you can’t find what you want you can get in touch using the contact form. Or leave a comment on any of the pages. If you do not get an answer to these please email gw09johnstonjohn4@glowmail.org.uk

If the problem looks like a bug or a problem with an account you need to log it with the RM help desk via you LA.

If the question does not relate to Blogs you are better looking at:
General Glow Help Information

If your question is about Accounts and password
Accounts and passwords

Glow Blogs Theme Retirement

The themes made unavailable in December will be retired completely on the 30th of January along with themes that were removed from the theme picker  in 2015.

Removal of old and unmaintained themes will allow us to update Glow Blogs and keep blogs secure.

If your blog uses on of the old themes, it will be automatically switched to the Twenty Fourteen theme on the 30th of January 2020.  As this may result is a few changes to your blog appearance, menus and widgets we suggest that you change your theme before then.

We have general information on themes and advice on testing and changing themes  here on the help blog. Please get in touch if you need more advice.

You can find out more about the process on Glow Connect:

Guidance on Glow Blogs Theme Retirement

Themes being retired include: classic, default, digg3, dundee, fjords, K21.0.3, oxygen, p2, regulus, suburbia, suffusion, visual and wp-andreas01.

Glow Blogs Theme Retirement

As we work on improving and upgrading Glow  Blogs some of the themes currently in use are not compatible with newer versions of WordPress. These are going to be retired, first made unavailable in the theme picker from Tuesday 17th December  and next year removed from Glow Blogs altogether. Glow Key Contacts will be receiving advice.

More information is available on Glow Connect

Retirement of Glow Blogs Themes

If you are using one of the listed themes you start thinking of changing to another one. We have information on changing themes here.   Please leave a comment or get in touch if you need more information on changing themes or need advice on how to support a particular feature.

Jetpack sharing IE 11 Bug

We have discover a small issue with the Jetpack sharing module on Glow Blogs.

If Facebook and Twitter are selected to hide behind the share button they don’t show in IE11 it doesn’t work with Official buttons so the other option needs selected or they have to be shown individually.

Jetpack sharing settings screenshot

We use the Icon Only setting here on the help blog.

Jetpack sharing settings - buttons

 

We hope to fix this in a update soon.

Creating a School Website Videos

Mr Feist, a Principal Teacher & Digital Leader of Learning in Mosspark Primary School in Glasgow, has produced a series of videos on creating a school website. The video are hosted on YouTube and displayed in Mr Feist’s Glow Blog:

Creating a School Website for FREE! | The Digital Revolution

You can Follow Mr Feist 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@mrfeistsclass) on Twitter.

Glow Blogs Clean Up

There are now well over 200000 blogs in Glow Blogs. Many have now fallen into disuse.

We are going to be removing some inactive blogs to help with the performance of those in use – this will include private blogs with no users and blogs with no updates for over 2 years. Further information will be issued in the next two weeks.

So if you have a blog you use, but it has not been updated for a couple of years it might be an idea to update it.

Glow Blogs Update

Glow Blogs had a small update this week:

WordPress – 4.9.2 > 4.9.4
event-organiser plugin – 3.6.2 > 3.6.3
google-language-translator plugin – 5.0.33 > 5.0.43
wordpress-importer plugin  – 0.6.3 > 0.6.4

These were small maintenance and bug fixes. They should not affect the majority of Glow users.

Glow Blogs Update WordPress 4.9.1

We will be having and update of Glow Blogs this afternoon/evening.

Work will start at 16:00 and service will be restored as soon as possible thereafter.

Here is an overview of the update, we will be posting details of any changes to the help ASAP.

Name Current Version Update Version
WordPress 4.8.3 4.9.1
Plugins
Event-organiser 3.4.1 3.6.0
Wp-postratings 1.84.1 1.85
Themes
twentyfifteen 1.8 1.9
twentyfourteen 2 2.1
twentyseventeen 1.3 1.4
twentysixteen 1.3 1.4
twentythirteen 2.2 2.3
twentytwelve 2.4 2.4

Help Pages related to this release:

Gallery Widget

 

WordPress Update

Glow Blogs have been updated from WordPress 4.7 to 4.8.2

The main features in this update:

New Widgets

There are new Text, Image, Audio & Video widgets More details and examples.

Improvements to adding links

Adding and editing links is now a better process.

See the Version 4.8 on WordPress Codex for more details.

PDF upload problem – Fixed

We have had reports with a problem uploading PDF files to Glow Blogs.

This issue is now fixed, here is an example 3 page PDF uploaded to blogs: Test PDF file

PDFs that are uploaded  to blogs are linked to the  image thumbnails of the pdf. This looks like the first page of the pdf.

The developers are investigating a fix which we will be implemented as soon as possible.

We have a workaround at rather kludgy workaround.

You can upload pdfs somewhere else on the internet and link to them in your blog.

The O365 OneDrive provide by Glow is a good place to do this. After uploading a PDF to one drive you can ‘share’ it. Make it public and copy the link. In the blog post you want to add the pdf to you can, instead of uploading the file, link directly to it like this:  Download Test PDF