Category Archives: Releases

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.

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Glow Blogs Update June 2023

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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.

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Glow Blogs Update April 2022

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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.

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H5P Plugin

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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

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Glow Blogs Update 26 Aug 2021

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The Glow Services has had a major update

WordPress has been updated. As usual we are slightly behind the latest version from WordPress.org

Many of the plugin and Themes have been updated.

It is now possible to use the Gutenberg Blocks editor on Posts and Pages. You can read more about the Blocks editor. We will be updating the help site to cover this over time.

The Lightbox plugin has now been removed, if a site has used the Lightbox plugin then this will be picked up and Jetpack will be enabled with the Carousel module also enabled.

There is a new plugin Advanced Search and filter plugin This allows large complex sites to create searches which include filters for categories, tags and other taxonomies.

You can now upload ppsx (PowerPoint Slide Show) files to Glow Blogs. These files may be large if they contain audio narration, this will take files space in your media library.

We are looking feedback on how people use Glow Blogs this will help us develop new functionality. Please fill in this short survey. It is linked from all the LA home pages.

There is a new ‘jQuery Migrate’ plugin that is activated across the service. This requires no activity from blog users. The plugin does send email to some blog admins, these can be ignored. We hope to stop the service sending these emails.

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Glow Blogs Update 27 Jan 2021

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Glow Blogs has a small update yesterday at 4pm

There are two new Plugins.

Mega Menus Max Mega Menu – WordPress Mega Menu Plugin 
This is a really powerful menu plugin, it will give more responsive and accessible menus. It also fixes the problem with the Yoko theme’s menus on mobile.

WP Accessibility

This plug-in helps with a variety of common accessibility problems in WordPress themes. While most accessibility issues can’t be addressed without directly changing your theme, WP Accessibility adds a number of helpful accessibility features with a minimum amount of setup or expert knowledge.

New themes:

Twenty Nineteen, Twenty Twenty and Twenty Twenty One.
These Themes are particularly designed for the New Gutenberg Editor. They will come into their own when we have tested and implemented the new editor.  The themes will function well using the current editor.

Various Themes have been updated to the latest version.

New sources of external services to embed

The ability to embed content from more external services including FlipGrid, Padlet, Thinglink, Waklet, Micro:bit & Prezi. We now have a blog showing how various embeds work: Embeds – Examples of embedding content from other sites on Glow Blogs

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Glow Blogs Updated 18 Aug 2020

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Glow Blogs had an update today. There are several changes mostly with the Jetpack plugin. This has been updated and brings a few new useful features.

There is a new module Copy Post, this adds the ability to start a new post based on existing posts. This adds a link to the posts and page lists. It need to be activated in the Jetpack settings.

The contact form is now edited directly in the post or page editor.

Lazy Images makes pages load much faster by only loading visible images, waiting to load images that are offscreen as you scroll down.

Sitemaps are files that list each post and page that should be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing. Jetpack allows you to generate such files thanks to the Sitemaps feature. Once activated you can find the sitemap.xml file on your blog at: yourblogurl/sitemap.xml

So for the help site this would be

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/glowbloghelp/sitemap.xml

If you have the sitemap activated you can submit it to google to help with indexing your site and produce a sitemap on your site by using the [sitemap] shortcode.

Tiled Galleries this add several different galley options to Galleries. This includes tiled mosaic, a square grid, and a circular grid.

More Trees
Tools
Trees
A pier
A World in a Glass
Zoom

We will be adding more help on some of these features soon.

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Glow Blogs Update

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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.

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Glow Blogs Update WordPress 4.9.1

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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