Category Archives: Releases

Glow Blogs Update May 2025

Glow Blogs was updated yesterday.

The Following Plugins were updated. Jetpack, Syntax Highlighter, WP Accessibility, Mega Menu, H5P, Youtube Embed , 3D Flipbook, Userway Accessibility, WP Draw Attention.

The Plugin updates in the main as small fixes and compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.

Jetpack

Fixed: A problem with the Jetpack icon not being visitable in the dashboard. Access to turn on and off the jetpack modules has been restored to the dashboard. The interface has changed a little. The Modules have been split into tabbed sections in the Setting screen.

You can access the older simpler interface by using the Modules link in the settings or Dashboard.

H5P

Fixed: Various problems with the H5P plugin. You now can install all of the H5P content types.

You may see aproblem with installing some content types. In particular the Games Map, Interactive Video and other large content types. The libraries are large and need other libraries to be installed. You may occasionally see a 503 error but refreshing the page will show the content type installed and ready to use. We would recommend installing the interactive Video content type before adding the Game Map, Branching Scenario or Column types.

Glow Blogs updated April 2025

Glow Blogs has just been updated to WordPress 6.7.2

This has not brought a lot of new features that users will notices but there are improvements in performance, security & accessibility.

Most of the improvements to the editor are for the block editor and site editors, bringing some more features to many of the blocks and improvements to the site editor.

Not many users of Glow Blogs are using the block or site editor yet. We would recommend trying the block editor as it makes posting different types of content simpler. There are also a lot more possibilities for changing the appearance of the content & layout.

The Site editor is more complex but lets you completely change the layout and appearance of the site.

We have more information on the Block editor. We have a site that explains a lot more about the individual blocks along with lots of tips for using it: Blocks – Using the Blocks Editor in Glow Blogs. Finally our newer tutorials cover many of the features of the block editor.

This video shows some of the main changes in WordPress 6.7. Remember third party videos show WordPress in general so some of the features may not be available on Glow Blogs.

Housekeeping

This release also prepares for our housekeeping exercise. Please read: Glow Blogs Hosekeeping Announcment The exercise starts on May the first. This is paerticualry important if you have a useful site that has not been updated for a while.

Glow Blogs October 2024 Update

Glow Blogs has just had a fairly large update.

Glow Blogs is now using wordPress 6.6.2. This bring quite a lot of new features, especially to the Block & Site Editor.

Quite a few plugins have been updated too. Two of these, Max Mega Menus & SyntaxHighlighter Evolved now provide blocks to make it easier to use these in the Block or Site Editor.

The Site Editor especially has had many enhancements and improvements. If you are interested in spending time customising and designing your site it is worth a look.

The Site editor is now a central area to manage Design, Navigation(menus), Styles, Pages, Templates & Patterns. The Site Editor on Glow Blog now match that in the Site Editor – Documentation on WordPress.org .

There are some new blocks including:

The Gird Block is one of the container blocks that can be used to organize multiple blocks and adjust the height, width, and position of all blocks inside the container. Grid block – Documentation – WordPress.org

The Grid block will allow you to create very complex layouts.

The Details Block

The Details block displays a text summary and an arrow button: When you click on the text or the button, the block opens and reveals additional content on the page.

Details block – Documentation – WordPress.org

and Footnotes1

There is a new Block Theme Twenty Twenty-Four

Twenty Twenty-Four is designed to be flexible, versatile and applicable to any website. Its collection of templates and patterns tailor to different needs, such as presenting a business, blogging and writing or showcasing work. A multitude of possibilities open up with just a few adjustments to color and typography. Twenty Twenty-Four comes with style variations and full page designs to help speed up the site building process, is fully compatible with the site editor, and takes advantage of new design tools introduced in WordPress 6.4. Twenty Twenty-Four | WordPress Theme | WordPress.org

Here is a great video that explains some of the best new features in less than 7 minutes:

Note there are still some issues on Glow Blogs you can keep up to date with them on the Issues page.

  1. The Footnotes block will be added to your page or post as soon as you insert your first note using the Rich Text option. This new block works like other blocks and it can be moved around and removed. Footnotes block – Documentation – WordPress.org ↩︎

Glow Blogs Update 14 Aug 2024

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

Glow Blogs New “New Site” Functionality

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.

Glow Blogs Updated 1 Feb 2024

  • 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

Glow Blogs Update: More Blocks & More

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.

Glow Blogs Update June 2023

Highlights

  • The WordPress version is now 6.2
  • We have included new themes Twenty Twenty-two & TwentyTwenty-Three
  • WordPress 6.2 and the new themes bring Full Site Editing to glow blogs.

Full Site Editing

WordPress Full Site Editing allows non-technical users to have more control over the appearance and layout of their website. It enables you to customise your entire website, including headers, footers, sidebars, and content areas, using a visual editor.

There is a lot to FSE, we will add more information and links to help on the Help Blog over the summer.

A couple of interesting improvements

Themes with FSE can allow you to easily swap from a set of predefined styles, or create your own.

Animated gif of the styles available in the Twenty Twenty Three theme
Animated gif of the styles available in the Twenty Twenty Three theme

Distraction Free mode. If you are rather overwhelmed by the new Block Editor you may like distraction free mode. This helps in giving you more space to write on and a much calmer experience. You can choose it from the editor settings, and it removes all toolbars and editing panels from the screen.

Openverse

An extensive library of free stock photos, images, and audio, available for free use.

Openverse is built into the Block editor, this allows you to search openverse for an image you can use legally. What is different from similar searches using other tools is that this also adds the attribution text below the photos.

Screenshot of openverse in Glow Blogs

There is more information on some of the main feature added in these posts:

What’s New in WordPress 6.0 (Features and Screenshots)

What’s New in WordPress 6.2 (Features and Screenshots)

These refer to standard versions of WordPress so there many be a few details of difference from glow blogs.

Remember too, general WordPress help online now often assumes the newer Blocks editor. This is not enabled by default yet on Glow blogs, but can be easily turned on.

Glow Blogs Update April 2022

Glow Blogs has had another update. Here are some highlights

Use H5P content on other blogs via shortcode

You can now allow your hp5 interactive content to be used on other Glow Blogs. See the H5P example blog Sharing page for details.

Plugin Copy Posts

This post allows you to create template posts that can be copied to other users blog and edited there. This will be useful for providing a starter for e-Portfolio posts by pupils. More information here on the help blog.

Plugin Block/e-Portfolio compatibility

The e-Portfolio plugin has been updated so that profile posts can now work with Gutenberg blocks: Gallery, Cover, Audio File, Video, Media/text, Pull quote, Table, Verse, Next page.

Some inappropriate blocks: Buttons, Search Field, Social Links, will not be shown in a pdf profile.

Other Changes

  • Many plugins and themes have been updated to newer versions
  • Security Update for WordPress
  • A bug in the comment form was fixed
  • A bug in Jetpack Sharing links was fixed

Other recent changes

Remember you can use the newer Blocks Editor for composing posts now.  We have started a Block Blogs to give more information.

The H5P plugin allows you to make all sorts of interactive content.  See the H5P examples blog for examples and more information.

H5P Plugin

New to Glow Blogs the h5p plugin. This plugin allows you to create a wide variety of interactive content, From 360 tours to word searches, cloze procedures, quizzes and more.

We have a blog with some more information to get you started: H5p examples

H5P makes it easy to create, share and reuse HTML5 content and applications. H5P empowers everyone to create rich and interactive web experiences more efficiently – all you need is a web browser and a web site with an H5P plugin

from: H5P – Create and Share Rich HTML5 Content and Applications