menu

The UVM Community UVM Blogs

Posts

New Facebook, Twitter plugins

By Scott Dellinger

I have just made available the Like and WP-TweetButton plugins to provide the Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons for your blogs.  Once you have activated one or both plugins, you can customize them from the admin dashboard, under Settings -> Facebook Like Button or Settings -> Tweet Button.

If you have used these plugins on another WordPress installation, please note that the defaults have been changed slightly so that the two buttons will show up nicely side by side without you needing to do lots of tweaking to your settings.

New Blog Theme: UVM 2010

By Scott Dellinger

A new theme, “UVM 2010”, has been made available with the look of of recently updated UVM main web site.

UVM 2010 Screenshot

This theme builds on the features of “UVM 2008”, and includes color variants, a small gallery of included banner images to choose from (or you can upload your own), three customizable widget areas, support for the new WordPress 3.0 custom menus, and several other visual preferences.

UVM 2010 Banner Gallery

Blogs using “UVM 2008” are being upgraded to the new theme, and will preserve the existing theme preferences.  Please let us know if you encounter issues.

UVM Blogs upgraded to WordPress 3.0.1

By Scott Dellinger

The UVM blogs service, blog.uvm.edu, has been upgraded to WordPress 3.0.1. This new version supports custom post types and easily created menus, the blog admin pages have been streamlined and now have a better help system, and many other things have been improved. For an overview, watch this:

In addition, WordPress 3.0 includes a great new theme that shows off its features, “Twenty Ten”.
Twenty Ten

If you encounter any problems following this upgrade, please let us know.

Embedding Videos in Posts

By Scott Dellinger

People often like to embed videos in blog posts.  On multiuser sites like this, though, letting people insert arbitrary HTML code can be a security problem for other logged-in users, and so WordPress strips out embed codes.  The alternative, though, is actually easier: simply copy and paste the URL to the video you want onto a line by itself, and WordPress will turn it into an embedded video.  For example, if you paste:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/128305/star-trek-vii-generations

then you’ll get this:

This works for links from YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, blip.tv, Flickr (both videos and images), Viddler, Hulu, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Photobucket, PollDaddy, Google Video, and WordPress.tv.

New Blog Themes

By Scott Dellinger

Two new themes have been made available: ChocoTheme and Motion.

ChocoTheme screen shot
ChocoTheme
Motion screen shot
Motion

You can preview themes and change your blog’s theme by going into your blog dashboard, looking down the menu on the left-hand side, and clicking “Appearance”.

If there are other themes or plugins you’d like to see, just let us know.

Blog Migration

By Scott Dellinger

Welcome to UVM’s new blog service, based on WordPress.  If you have an existing MovableType blog at .blog.uvm.edu, then for now, nothing has changed.  Eventually, we’ll want to switch you over, but there’s no need to panic.  If you would like your existing blog contents migrated over now, please contact Systems Architecture & Administration to become an early adopter.  We’ll move over your blog contents and work with you to iron out any issues you come across.

Skip to toolbar