Did you know the contents of your dashboard can be rearranged? Yep, you can control what appears there.
What about the admin bar, you can decide if you want to see it on your blog, the admin page or neither.
Want to know something cool? How about you try and compare the same revision of a post. I’m not going to tell you how to do it, but it does yeild cool results…
Just upgraded BlooLagoo to the newest wordpress version, so you’ll find the backend where you actually do the blogging is a lot different.
Any questions or bug reports please check out the forum thread!
Hopefully the upgraded went well, please report any bugs you find!
So sometime in the next few weeks (hopefully) MU (which is what is running here) will update to match the current Wordpress version. This update does bring a lot of changes to it, which may not be seen in the site’s front-end, but it is seen in the backend.
As you can see from the backend some changes are a foot. While it’s a little different, trust me when I say it’s a lot better. Easier to use and just nicer to look at.
Before I upgrade I will notify all of you and do a full and complete backup so if all goes wrong we can just restore from the previous installation.
Functionality may break for a bit, so I’ll switch off any registering for new blogs until we can make sure it’s working fine.
Hi there,
For a while new blogs that signed up would just white page upon activation. If you used the login link emailed to you and changed the theme everything should be working.
I’ve manually gone through and switched them theme of those blogs it’s affecting, don’t worry. A side-effect of this is you’ll see me added as an admin of your blog, but don’t worry, you can go ahead and remove me (otherwise I will when I get a chance).
Hopefully that will no longer appear, I think I’ve fixed the problem.
Cheers 
Currently our number of themes is minimal. This is because themes need to be tweaked to actually work on this website.
So I’ve pulled them all down and am going to slowly work through them.
So here’s how it works. If you discover while Googling around a theme you love and want it for your blog, you just need to post in this thread a link to the theme’s home page. I will check it out and then add the tweaks and then make it available to be used.
Note: If it’s a theme you’ve paid for yourself (why?) then I’ll add it just for you and not everyone else.
If you google for “Free Wordpress Theme” you’ll find thousands of them.
The themes we had I’ll be working on when I can and releasing them in small batches.
If your current theme is broken or breaks, please poke me by creating a thread in the support forum and I’ll attempt to fix it (if I can).
Please discuss this post in it’s forum thread -> Theme Requests
If you log into your admin panel and click on your username in the top right corner you will be taken to your profile.
This page lets you add your personal information (most of which will only show up depending on the theme) and your password.
But one thing I’m mentioning is your Nickname. Now my login name is not BlooLagoo, it’s actually admin as I’m the admin here. However that’s boring, so I set my nickname as BlooLagoo, saved the page and then set my displayname as my nickname.
That way your display name can be grammatically correct, you can have capital letters in it etc. No more leo, you can be Leo.
So Custom CSS has been added to the Design panel, basically you can enter some CSS to apply to your blog. This is also independent of your theme, so if you change your blog theme the custom CSS still is applied (which may or may not be what you want).
The only stipulation is you cannot remove the footer links, but that’s a small issue. The CSS thing isn’t perfect, but it’s the best we have at the moment.
I’m currently working on speeding up the site and the admin interface, by working out which plugins don’t need loading automatically. New plugins are constantly being added to the actual site, but they’re optional. Don’t forget to take a look inside the plugin folder to see if there’s anything you want there, some of them are really useful.
Hopefully site speeding up goes well
Now a question, is this announcement thing on the dashboard annoying for anyone? If it is annoying then I can remove it from showing new posts on the dashboard and instead just have it under News which you’ll have to manually check yourselves.
Each blog can have its own theme, and as such there’s just over a hundred to pick from. However, those may not be anything you want.
If you google for “Free Wordpress Theme” you will literally find thousands to pick from. If you do find one you like and it isn’t available here, drop an email over to admin[at]bloolagoo.org with a link to it and I can get it added.
Since this is a shared blogging environment you don’t actually have access to editing the files. However, if you do want to edit a theme just poke me and we can sort things out. You can provide the theme and I can add it just for your own website (as I’ve done for my own, since that theme has been modified a lot and wouldn’t work with another blog).
There are a lot to pick from, so go nuts.
So, did you know that it is possible to post in the future?
Sometimes you may have an idea for a post, but you really don’t want to publish it immediately. You may have only just posted and instead want to space it out a little bit. This is where scheduling posts comes into play.
On the write/edit post page above the Publish button is a short link saying “Publish immediately Edit”. If you click the edit link a box appears where you can specify what date should appear as the published date.
If you pick it in the past then Wordpress will consider it already published, but if you stick a future date it turns to a scheduled post.
This means that until that specific date/time then the post will not appear.
You can write a post for the next week in advanced if you want, so your blog is updated with new content each week.
Isn’t that neat?
So when I get it sorted out this main blog is going to display stuff from everyone else’s blog, so we can all see it and nobody vanishes to obscurity.
This of course is no easy feat, this software doesn’t get as much love and attention as it’s sibling and as such a lot of what is being done is being coded by hand.
I’ve added two sections, a Site News section where I’ll post updates and they can be commented on. I’ve also added a new Featured Content page which is where every once in a while a different user will be featured.
Let’s talk about something else, did you know that you can share blogs with other users? Yep, if you allow it they can post on your blog and you can post on theirs. There is a use for it, such as myself who uses blogs to post announcements about my different projects. When they’re running anyone I allow can actually post an announcement to it.
Might start a Gaia related blog that we can all add to, to see about the wonder and mystery of all that is Gaia related.
That’s all for now.