We’ve just rolled out some great new features onto Edublogs Campus – which will make it considerably easier for your community to find content on your site!

Displaying these features on your homepage is as simple as:

1. Go to Pages > Edit in your main blog’s dashboard

2.  You should see three new pages – Blogs, Site Search and Tags

3.  Now check out your Campus homepage and presto! The pages should now be displaying on your homepage.

4.  And, on the off chance the pages don’t auto created all you need to do is quickly open up the Blogs page in Edit Page mode and click Update Page

Here’s a quick overview of each.

Blogs Directory

One of the things we’ve been asked a lot for of late has been a simple, attractive way of locating blogs on your site!

Well, you asked, and we answered – introducing the Blogs Directory.

The Blogs Directory displays all the blogs on your entire Campus site alphabetically and in a paginated form on its own Blogs page on your homepage.

Now your community can quickly locate a specific blog and then click on the link to check out that blog!

Alternatively you can search for a blog URL using the search option!

Check it out in action on Edublogs @ Caroline Chisholm Catholic College!

Please note:

• To display avatars your blog users will need to upload their blog avatar via Settings > Blog Avatar.

Global Site Search

So you want a tool that that allows anyone to search across your site – without the need to Google etc?

Here it is!

On your Site Search page, you simply need to whack in your search terms and you’ll get a beautiful paginated listing of latest posts containing that term… with avatars attached!

Check it out in action on Literacy 44!

Please note:

• This feature only searches posts on public blogs — any posts on private blogs (only visible to logged in users) isn’t searchable.
• To display avatars your users will need to upload their avatar via Users  > Your Avatar.

Global Site Tags

And the best for last — Global Site Tags!

This powerful and elegant tool allows you to do three things.

First up it provides you with a global tags widget so that you can simply show a beautiful tag cloud on your homepage or your users can add it to their blog!

Just go to Appearance > Widgets and add Global Site Tags widget to your blog sidebar.

And it auto creates a page called “Tags” on your Campus homepage which gives you a full size page view of them too.

Check it out in action on Literacy 44!

Please note:

• Tags on private posts display on the Global Site tags page but if you click on the link and no posts are listed this means they are all posts on private blogs (only visible to logged in users).
• To display avatars your users will need to upload their avatar via Users  > Your Avatar.

Other Info That’s Good To Know

To get the most out of these features you need to either:

1. Use a blog theme on your Campus homepage that includes navigation links at the top of the blog to pages
2. Or add the Pages widget to the sidebar of your Campus homepage via Appearance > Widgets

Here’s our Top 3 Tips For Designing Your Homepage to help you get the most out of your Homepage!

And on the off chance you don’t want to use one or more of these features on your homepage — just go to Pages > Edit and un-publish the page you want to remove.

For WordPress MU users you can download these features from WPMU DEV Premium:

1. Blogs Directory
2. Global Site Search
3. Global Site Tags

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

http://thecampus.edublogs.org/

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We’ve just rolled out some great new features onto Edublogs Campus – which will make it considerably easier for your community to find content on your site!

Displaying these features on your homepage is as simple as:

1. Go to Pages > Edit in your main blog’s dashboard

2.  You should see three new pages – Blogs, Site Search and Tags

3.  Now check out your Campus homepage and presto! The pages should now be displaying on your homepage.

4.  And, on the off chance the pages don’t auto created all you need to do is quickly open up the Blogs page in Edit Page mode and click Update Page

Here’s a quick overview of each.

Blogs Directory

One of the things we’ve been asked a lot for of late has been a simple, attractive way of locating blogs on your site!

Well, you asked, and we answered – introducing the Blogs Directory.

The Blogs Directory displays all the blogs on your entire Campus site alphabetically and in a paginated form on its own Blogs page on your homepage.

Now your community can quickly locate a specific blog and then click on the link to check out that blog!

Alternatively you can search for a blog URL using the search option!

Check it out in action on Edublogs @ Caroline Chisholm Catholic College!

Please note:

• To display avatars your blog users will need to upload their blog avatar via Settings > Blog Avatar.

Global Site Search

So you want a tool that that allows anyone to search across your site – without the need to Google etc?

Here it is!

On your Site Search page, you simply need to whack in your search terms and you’ll get a beautiful paginated listing of latest posts containing that term… with avatars attached!

Check it out in action on Literacy 44!

Please note:

• This feature only searches posts on public blogs — any posts on private blogs (only visible to logged in users) isn’t searchable.
• To display avatars your users will need to upload their avatar via Users  > Your Avatar.

Global Site Tags

And the best for last — Global Site Tags!

This powerful and elegant tool allows you to do three things.

First up it provides you with a global tags widget so that you can simply show a beautiful tag cloud on your homepage or your users can add it to their blog!

Just go to Appearance > Widgets and add Global Site Tags widget to your blog sidebar.

And it auto creates a page called “Tags” on your Campus homepage which gives you a full size page view of them too.

Check it out in action on Literacy 44!

Please note:

• Tags on private posts display on the Global Site tags page but if you click on the link and no posts are listed this means they are all posts on private blogs (only visible to logged in users).
• To display avatars your users will need to upload their avatar via Users  > Your Avatar.

Other Info That’s Good To Know

To get the most out of these features you need to either:

1. Use a blog theme on your Campus homepage that includes navigation links at the top of the blog to pages
2. Or add the Pages widget to the sidebar of your Campus homepage via Appearance > Widgets

Here’s our Top 3 Tips For Designing Your Homepage to help you get the most out of your Homepage!

And on the off chance you don’t want to use one or more of these features on your homepage — just go to Pages > Edit and un-publish the page you want to remove.

For WordPress MU users you can download these features from WPMU DEV Premium:

1. Blogs Directory
2. Global Site Search
3. Global Site Tags

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

http://thecampus.edublogs.org/

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Our new Anti Splog plugin for WPMU is upsetting the day of quite a few sploggers over at Edublogs… and they are taking the time to write in about it and tell us

Bear in mind they have all been manually submitted, by manual sploggers, to us, so that we might un-ban their blog. Here’s my favourite:

“this is not a spam, i’m just posting about a weight loss program!”

This post was originally posted on Incorporated Subversion and was posted by James Farmer

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We’ve got some big plans for Edublogs.org for 2010 — including cool new features.

The best news is we’ve already installed some of the new features onto Edublogs Campus– so I thought you might like a quick overview of them.

P.S We haven’t forgotten everyone else.  We’re planning to upload these new features to:

1. Edublog.org within the next few weeks
2. WPMU DEV Premium for WordPress MU users

Add New Users

This is a nice simple feature, but very powerful tool for creating and adding new users to your blog in batches of up to 15 users.

This is the fastest way to add students quickly to your class blog — if they don’t have a username.

Off course this means there’s now four tools that create usernames slightly differently so here’s a quick summary of their differences.

Limiting who see comments in dashboard

You told us you didn’t want students who are contributors or authors seeing unapproved or spam comments — to prevent younger students from seeing inappropriate comments.

So we’ve:

1. Removed the Recent Comments module from the dashboard of contributors and authors
2. Made it so they can only see approved comments on their comments page

Now they can’t see any comment until you’ve approved it!

Giving Contributors ability to upload media

You want to moderate all student posts by making them a contributor but that’s been annoying you because contributors can’t upload media such as images, videos….

Problem solved!

We’ve adjusted the role of contributors so they can now upload their own media and you can review their posts before publishing them!

My Blogs

Sick of the endless searching for your students dashboard on your My Blogs page?

We heard your pain….and transformed your one column into four!

Clicking That Pesky File URL

Been caught out by remembering to click on File URL before Insert into Post when you’ve been uploading audio, video etc files to your posts?

Yes it’s driven us crazy too so we’ve done a quick patch to solve the problem….now you don’t need to remember as it does it for you!

P.S. Heaps of schools, districts and Universities are taking advantage of our 30 Day free trial of Edublogs Campus, get in touch with us any time to start yours!

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

http://thecampus.edublogs.org/

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We’ve got some big plans for Edublogs.org for 2010 — including cool new features.

The best news is we’ve already installed some of the new features onto Edublogs Campus– so I thought you might like a quick overview of them.

P.S We haven’t forgotten everyone else.  We’re planning to upload these new features to:

1. Edublog.org within the next few weeks
2. WPMU DEV Premium for WordPress MU users

Add New Users

This is a nice simple feature, but very powerful tool for creating and adding new users to your blog in batches of up to 15 users.

This is the fastest way to add students quickly to your class blog — if they don’t have a username.

Off course this means there’s now four tools that create usernames slightly differently so here’s a quick summary of their differences.

Limiting who see comments in dashboard

You told us you didn’t want students who are contributors or authors seeing unapproved or spam comments — to prevent younger students from seeing inappropriate comments.

So we’ve:

1. Removed the Recent Comments module from the dashboard of contributors and authors
2. Made it so they can only see approved comments on their comments page

Now they can’t see any comment until you’ve approved it!

Giving Contributors ability to upload media

You want to moderate all student posts by making them a contributor but that’s been annoying you because contributors can’t upload media such as images, videos….

Problem solved!

We’ve adjusted the role of contributors so they can now upload their own media and you can review their posts before publishing them!

My Blogs

Sick of the endless searching for your students dashboard on your My Blogs page?

We heard your pain….and transformed your one column into four!

Clicking That Pesky File URL

Been caught out by remembering to click on File URL before Insert into Post when you’ve been uploading audio, video etc files to your posts?

Yes it’s driven us crazy too so we’ve done a quick patch to solve the problem….now you don’t need to remember as it does it for you!

P.S. Heaps of schools, districts and Universities are taking advantage of our 30 Day free trial of Edublogs Campus, get in touch with us any time to start yours!

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

http://thecampus.edublogs.org/

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Your homepage is the hub of your site and the first page people see when they visit your site.

It is exactly the same as any other blog on your site. This means you can write posts, add pages, change themes, add widgets etc that provide information and tips to help your users.

The key to designing a good homepage is to think how you can use it to support your blog users while making your WordPress MU site more effective to manage.

Here are my top 3 tips for designing your homepage:

#1 Choose A Good theme

Popular themes for homepages on Campus sites are WPMU-Nelo, WPMU-Dixi and WPMU-Triden because they are the most customisable themes:

1. WPMU-Dixi includes optional RSS feed for up to 4 feeds on the front page.
2. WPMU-nelo: see this theme in use on Sample Academic blog
3. WPMU-triden includes the option of a custom image gallery – see this theme in use on Sample Student portfolio

These themes are included in all Edublogs Campus sites and can be downloaded from WPMU DEV Premium.

Any of these themes will make your homepage look considerably more attractive than the default theme.

Read how National University of Singapore customised their homepage using WPMU-Nelo!

For more information on working with themes see:

1. What to consider when choosing your blog’s theme
2. Changing themes site wide
3. Changing themes on a per blog basis
4. Changing your blog’s theme
5. Uploading your Custom Image Header

#2  Include A Link for Users to Create their own blogs or usernames

Creating blogs and usernames is time consuming.  Where possible it’s always best to get your community to create their own.

This is achieved by:

1. Selecting ‘ Enabled. Blogs and user accounts can be created’ under Allow new registrations in Site Admin > Options so that anyone can create blogs using your signup page
2. Restricting who can sign ups to specific email domains to limit who registers on your site by adding domains to the ‘limit email registrations’ section in Site Admin > Options 
   
3. Creating a link to your sign up page with HTML code using a text widget in your homepage sidebar.

The URL of your signup page is your site location with wp-signup.php on the end.  For example,  this is the location http://blog.nus.edu.sg/wp-signup.php of National University of Singapore signup page

It is possible to make your homepage public so users can create their own account while making the rest of the blogs private.  This is done using the Privacy option in Site Admin > Options.

The privacy option is included in all Edublogs Campus sites and can be downloaded from WPMU DEV Premium.

# 3 Add a FAQ and how to get support page

Make it as easy as possible for your users to find the information they need to solve their own problems while also providing them instructions on what to do if they need assistance.

For examples on how you can achieve this check out:

1. National University of Singapore’s FAQ page
2. Global Student’s Help & Support page

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

http://thecampus.edublogs.org/

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Your homepage is the hub of your site and the first page people see when they visit your site.

It is exactly the same as any other blog on your site. This means you can write posts, add pages, change themes, add widgets etc that provide information and tips to help your users.

The key to designing a good homepage is to think how you can use it to support your blog users while making your WordPress MU site more effective to manage.

Here are my top 3 tips for designing your homepage:

#1 Choose A Good theme

Popular themes for homepages on Campus sites are WPMU-Nelo, WPMU-Dixi and WPMU-Triden because they are the most customisable themes:

1. WPMU-Dixi includes optional RSS feed for up to 4 feeds on the front page.
2. WPMU-nelo: see this theme in use on Sample Academic blog
3. WPMU-triden includes the option of a custom image gallery – see this theme in use on Sample Student portfolio

These themes are included in all Edublogs Campus sites and can be downloaded from WPMU DEV Premium.

Any of these themes will make your homepage look considerably more attractive than the default theme.

Read how National University of Singapore customised their homepage using WPMU-Nelo!

For more information on working with themes see:

1. What to consider when choosing your blog’s theme
2. Changing themes site wide
3. Changing themes on a per blog basis
4. Changing your blog’s theme
5. Uploading your Custom Image Header

#2  Include A Link for Users to Create their own blogs or usernames

Creating blogs and usernames is time consuming.  Where possible it’s always best to get your community to create their own.

This is achieved by:

1. Selecting ‘ Enabled. Blogs and user accounts can be created’ under Allow new registrations in Site Admin > Options so that anyone can create blogs using your signup page
2. Restricting who can sign ups to specific email domains to limit who registers on your site by adding domains to the ‘limit email registrations’ section in Site Admin > Options 
   
3. Creating a link to your sign up page with HTML code using a text widget in your homepage sidebar.

The URL of your signup page is your site location with wp-signup.php on the end.  For example,  this is the location http://blog.nus.edu.sg/wp-signup.php of National University of Singapore signup page

It is possible to make your homepage public so users can create their own account while making the rest of the blogs private.  This is done using the Privacy option in Site Admin > Options.

The privacy option is included in all Edublogs Campus sites and can be downloaded from WPMU DEV Premium.

# 3 Add a FAQ and how to get support page

Make it as easy as possible for your users to find the information they need to solve their own problems while also providing them instructions on what to do if they need assistance.

For examples on how you can achieve this check out:

1. National University of Singapore’s FAQ page
2. Global Student’s Help & Support page

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

http://thecampus.edublogs.org/

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The 2009 WordPress MU and BuddyPress Plugin Contest… is now open!

This follows on from the very successful 2008 contest, and we’re stumping up a cool $1000 to the prize pool for the winners!

Only conditions are that you write your announcement post on WPMU.org (host your plugin anywhere) and that your plugin is GPL.

This post was originally posted on Incorporated Subversion and was posted by James Farmer

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Credit where credit is due is important.

Yes the “Twitter Handbook for Teachers” is an excellent resource.

While it is lovely for people on twitter to regularly thank me for the resources I create (and to get all the retweets of thanks) — I DID NOT write Twitter Handbook for Teachers.  But I can understand why people think I did.

It was written by Tomaz Lasic (@lasic) who used the quote from my PLN Yourself wiki on the front page of his handbook and then made the very human mistake of not adding his own details as author on the front page.   So now everyone sees my name (and website) and automatically assumes I created it.

But it is also important that I give Alan Levine credit also — as he pointed out in the comments I should have attributed him.  I’ve always felt that the following words were inspired by his audio he provided for a podcast I was asked to proved for the Knowledge Tree (here is the PDF version of the podcast).

“Watching from the outside, Twitter like the the dumbest thing you’ve heard of “Why would anyone want to tell others what they are doing in 140 characters.” And yet to dismiss Twitter is a mistake because it’s an incredibly powerful tool for your personal learning and connecting with others”

However they could have come from his Being There presentation that I attended twice in 2007 and wrote about on my other wiki.

Please thank Tomaz Lasic (@lasic) for his great resource – he deserves full credit for his excellent work.  And Alan Levine (@cogdog) deserves full credit for his work.

And if you want to thank me here are the resources I created on twitter for my PLN Yourself wiki:

1. Set up your own Twitter Account – helpful information for building your PLN using twitter
2. Step 2: Set Up Twitter Account - designed as a step by step guide for f2f workshops

PS for those that know me I can’t believe you thought the handbook was my work — not one single step-by-step screenshots that is characteristic of my work!

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

http://suewaters.com/

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On a WordPress MU site you have the main blog and all the other blogs are created as sub-directories (like example.com/blog1) or sub-domains (like blog1.example.com).   This main blog, also called your homepage, is the hub of your site; it’s the first page people see when they visit your site.

Your homepage is really important; used well it supports and encourages blogging within your organisation.

Unfortunately I find it’s often neglected so I decided to do a series of posts on getting more out of your homepage.  Each post will showcase a different site and then explain how they’ve achieve the look!

So to kick off the series I’ve decided to start with National University of Singapore’s homepage because it’s an excellent example of a clever use of providing all the required information, in an easy to understand format while grabbing your attention.

They’ve used WPMU-Nelo which is a popular theme because it’s one of the most customisable WPMU themes and provides a stylish, clean, professional looking site for minimum fuss.

It’s included in all Edublogs Campus sites and can be downloaded from WPMU DEV Premium.

It originally looked like the screenshot below:

Here’s how they’ve created the look:

With WPMU-Nelo you have the choice of a custom homepage (static front page) or a post page.  They’ve used the custom homepage.

In Theme options they have changed the background, link, navigation and footer colors–

1) Background color in Blog Layout Setting to blue

2) Link color under Blogs Font Settings to blue

3) Navigation and footer colour under Navigation & Footer Cooler settings to orange

Most of the homepage look was created by uploading images using Appearance > Custom Homepage.

To achieve best results upload using the sizes indicated in the screenshot.

The Homepage intro and text at bottom of page was added using HMTL code in Appearance > Custom Homepage and links to the following pages:

1. Their sign up page – so users can create their own blogs  or usernames
2. A directory – so their community to check out examples of different blogs on the site
3. A FAQ – to answers commonly asked questions and provide support for their users

Here is where they added their intro text:

Here is where they added their bottom text.

Please note with Nelo:

• You have to upload images to each bottom box
• You can upload almost any HTML embed code to these homepage boxes (for example, YouTube Videos)

The log In & Admin and Disclaimers on the right hand side of their homepage was created using a Meta Widget and a Text widget with HTML in Appearance > Widgets

Please note on Nelo:

• For a custom homepage you add widgets to the Home Top Right
• For the pages you add widgets to the Sidebar

For more information on working with your homepage refer to:

1. Your blog theme options
2. Changing themes site wide
3. Changing themes on a per blog basis
4. Changing your homepage appearance

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

http://thecampus.edublogs.org/

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