Category Archives: Releases

news, Releases

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.

news, Releases

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.

news, Releases

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

 

news, Releases

WordPress Update

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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.

news, Releases

Glow Blogs Update September

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Glow Blogs has just had a small update which included:

Speeding up the loading of the Local Authority Home pages.

Add the ability to add O365 Forms, Office Mix and Stream.

You can embed all of these by pasting the URL into the post editor. No need to copy the embed code.

Example Form:

 

Screenshot of the Form editor, click to expand:

Screenshot of Form Editor

 

and a gif showing how easy it is  click to expand:

Gif Embedding Form on Glow Blog

Releases

WordPress update July 2016

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The recent Glow Blogs release incorporated a new version of WordPress, this add features from both WordPress 4.4 and 4.5 to Glow blogs some of the highlights are listed below, taken from Version 4.4 « WordPress Codex and Version 4.5 « WordPress Codex

Features from 4.4

Responsive images:
WordPress now takes a smarter approach to displaying appropriate image sizes on any device, ensuring a perfect fit every time. You don’t need to do anything to your theme, it just works.

Embed your WordPress content:
Now you can embed your posts on other sites, even other WordPress sites. Simply drop a post URL into the editor and see an instant embed preview, complete with the title, excerpt, and featured image if you’ve set one. We’ll even include your site icon and links for comments and sharing.

For example I’ll paste in the url for a recent tip page from this site:

Follow Blogs from My Sites

  • New Theme – Twenty Sixteen
    Modern take on the classic blog design
    Flexible header and fun color schemes will make your content shine
    Mobile-first and responsive

Features from 4.5

Customizer Improvement
Device Previewer Buttons in the customizer controls footer shows how your site looks in mobile, tablet, and desktop contexts before making changes to its appearance. Theme installer previewer has the same function.

screenshot of mobile view in customiser

Visual Editor Improvement
Inline Link Editing enables users to direct URL input without switching to modal dialog.

gif of adding links in the visual editor

Version 4.5 adds new shortcuts in Visual Editor.

  • Use `your code` to transform my code
  • Use --- to transform <hr /> create a rule

Comment Refinement
Refreshed Moderate Comment Screen has formatted comment content for display, navigation via a text link, updated message styles and so on. The comment form now enforce the maximum length of each field.

Optimization of Image Generation
Image sizes are generated more efficiently and remove unneeded meta, while still including color profiles in Imagick, for reduced sizes of up to 50% with near identical visual quality.