Themes and Plugins

We are frequently asked how to add plugins and themes that are not available in the system to a Glow Blog.

In a WordPress multi-site system plugins are added by the Network Admin not individual blog administrators. We have added plugins and themes regularly as part of our upgrade and maintenance process for Glow Blogs.

We gather Suggestions for the next planned release, you can add requests for new plugins or themes by getting in touch with your local authority Key Contact.

These requests need to be reviewed and tested for performance and security. This takes time and has a cost. Some WordPress themes and plugins are not comparable with a multi-site setup and some many have performance effects or security implication that would prevent their deployment on Glow Blogs.

6 thoughts on “Themes and Plugins”

  1. Hi there, We are just relaunching the Bellahouston Academy website as a Glow blog. I would like to add Google Translate plugin like on Lourdes Secondary website. How do I go about this?

    Kind regards,

    Clare

    1. Hi Clare,
      The Lourdes Secondary glow blog uses the suffusion theme which includes a translate widget.
      Unfortunately the suffusion theme is not available in Glow Blogs anymore. Existing blogs that use it can continue to do so for a while but you cannot change it in the theme picker:
      https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/glowbloghelp/2015/07/14/theme-changes-july-2015/
      We hope to have a more general translation widget in the future.

      I’ve describe a workaround to allow translation to a single language at a time here:
      http://johnjohnston.info/blog/translating-glow-blogs/

  2. We are moving over from SharePoint to Glow Blog to create our website and we are using the Oxygen Theme – everything is fine with this but I cannot find any block calendars to embed onto one of the pages to show our events, holidays, etc – our parents and staff use this all of the time. I believe that some of the functionality has been removed in WordPress through Glow. Are there any options?
    Thanks

    1. Hi Nina,
      We have not removed calendars from Glow blogs, they are not a feature of standard WordPress.
      They are usually provided by one of a range of plugins. We do not have any such plugin in Glow Blogs at the moment. However it is a frequent request and in the backlog. We do not have a timescale for implementing this at the moment.

      1. Hi John

        Thanks for that! Yes I noticed that there were a few comments about calendars.
        I am very new to Glow – if and when the plugin is available, how do you let everyone know?

        Thanks!
        Nina

        1. Hi Nina,
          We inform Glow Key Contacts, add the information to Glow Connect and post here too. You will see the posts from this blog in your dashboard too.

          Cheers

          John

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