On April 11, after much development work and preparation, LDPD and LITO rolled out a major upgrade to the CUL blogs platform.  The move from WordPress MU (Multi-User) to WordPress MS (Multisite) was much needed and long anticipated, and will bring a variety of benefits to everyone involved with editing, supporting, and viewing CUL Blogs.

WordPress Multisite is more secure, and will allow us to keep up with current releases going forward.  We’ll also be integrating CUL blogs with Google Analytics, and we’ll install an improved spam blocker to keep unwanted entries from blog post comments.

Along with the WordPress platform upgrade, we replaced the outdated Thesis theme with a custom theme designed by LDPD, which brings CUL blogs completely in-line with the Libraries website design, and greatly improves the viewing experience on mobile devices.  The new theme also provides a host of new features and functionality to improve the content authoring experience:

• Provides a familiar but simplified interface and navigation.
• Enables greater control over title and layout options for blog administrators.
• Offers more appearance customization, such as blog colors and rotating images.
• Allows us to easily add new functionality with plugins and custom widgets.

One important change is that we’ve updated the rich text editor, which should address some known issues with content loss while using the older version.

Another welcome addition is the integration of Akismet, which should greatly reduce the amount of spam in blog comments.  You’ll find a new spam queue on the Dashboard where flagged messages will wait for your review, and you can configure options for this feature from the Settings menu in the Dashboard sidebar.

We encourage you to spend a little time exploring the new interface and features, and we hope you’ll find this update makes working with your blogs a bit easier.  We’ll be updating our blog documentation on StaffWeb soon to reflect all the changes, so that’s always a good place to start if you need assistance.

https://culis.columbia.edu/content/staffweb/web/wcm/specialized/blogs.html

And of course you can always contact the blog support team by emailing: wordpress-support@library.columbia.edu