1.  Go to Settings > Discussion.

2.  Select Enable threaded (nested) comments

3.  Scroll to bottom of page and click Save Changes

Please disable threaded comment plugin before enabling threaded comments via Settings > Discussion.

1. Those that can’t be altered to themes that are “extremely customizable”
2. Standard blog themes to very unique themes including photoblog, magazine, newspaper, twitter and Facebook themes.

You change your blog theme by going to Appearance > Themes or Appearance > Premium Themes in your dashboard.

Categorizing the themes

Since you can spend considerable trying to find the “perfect theme” we’ve helped make your task easier by categorizing the 137 themes below based on:

1. Layout – number of columns
2. Color Scheme and how customizable the theme is
3. Ability to upload custom image header – those that allow are shown as recommended header image dimensions, in pixels, to upload (written as width by height)
4. Presence or absence of links to pages as navigation tabs at the top of the theme – as shown in page link column as Yes/No
5. Presence or absence of tagline in blog header – as shown in display tagline column as Yes/No
6. Uniqueness

Please note:<

• You can remove or add links to pages in the top navigation of themes using a custom menu navigation bar (via Appearance > Menu).

Almost all Edublogs themes include ability to:

1. Upload custom image headers
2. Add a background image
3. Display comments on pages

ONE COLUMN THEMES

Single Column themes have a central post area with no sidebar.

These theme appeal to people who like to keep their theme simple by preventing the clutter often created by sidebar widgets.

All widgets are located at the bottom of the blog on one column themes.

TWO COLUMN THEMES WITH LEFT SIDEBAR

Two Column themes normally a wide column for content with a narrower sidebar.

These are the most common theme layout and location of the sidebar (left or right) is personal preference.

TWO COLUMN THEMES WITH RIGHT SIDEBAR

Two Column themes with right sidebar are the most common theme layout so we’ve separated these themes based on color scheme.

White themes

Grey themes

Brown Themes

Pink themes

Green Themes

Blue Themes

Dark themes

Themes with easily changed color scheme

THREE COLUMN THEMES WITH LEFT AND RIGHT SIDEBAR

Three column themes have either:

1. Sidebars side-by-side on one side of the blog
2. Sidebars on either side of the wider content column

THREE COLUMN THEMES WITH RIGHT SIDEBARS

The most appealing aspect of three column themes is the ability to place more widgets in the sidebar.

Sidebars side-by-side three column themes on one side of the blog allows you to use this aspect well.

FOUR COLUMN THEMES

Four column themes have one content column and three sidebars.

The content column is often the same width as the other columns. This type of layout tends to be cluttered looking and less suited to reading lengthy content.

VARIABLE COLUMN AND/OR SIDEBAR LOCATION THEMES

Some themes are extremely customisable providing the ability to change the number of columns and/or the location of their sidebars.

UNIQUE THEMES

These are the specialist themes designed to suit features such as photoblogging, magazine blogs, newspaper blogs, research blogs, group discussions and custom homepages.

Themes like WPMU Dixi, WPMU Nelo and WPMU are the most customisable of all themes and well suited for a wide range of purposes.

After that, either create a new post or page, or edit an old one – just make sure that you click on the HTML tab (this won’t work in the ‘Visual’ WYSIWYG editor.)

Enter [RSSjb feed="..."] where “…” is any website feed you wish to display. That’s it

You can add the following to customize how the feed displays:

* num: number of items to be displayed (default: 3);
* pubdate: either true or false to display the publication date/not;
* pubtime: either true or false to display the publication time/not;
* excerpt: either true or false to display the excerpt/not;
* charex: limit the number of the ecerpt chars to be displayed;
* list: either “UL” or “OL” to get unordered or ordered lists;
* target: either “_blank” or “_self” to get links opened in new/the same windows;
* pubauthor: true/false whether you allow this plugin’s author footer to be displayed or not;

For Example:

[RSSjb feed="http://edublogs.org/feed" num="8" list="OL" target="_self"]

This will show the latest 8 news posts from the Edublogs news blog!

The five roles you can assign users on a blog are: Administrator; Editor; Author; Contributor; and Subscriber.

Deciding which role to assign student bloggers is a balance between:

1. How much responsibility you’re comfortable with assigning your students
2. School and District guidelines
3. Providing them with an environment that’s motivating

You also need to consider carefully what role you assign other users since Administrators are able to remove other users, including you, and editors can delete content.

The five roles a user can be assigned in decreasing level of responsibility are:

1. Administrator – can do everything including complete power over posts, pages, plugins, comments, choice of themes, imports, settings, assign user roles and are even able to delete the blog.
2. Editor – is able to publish posts/pages, manage posts/pages, upload files, moderate comments as well as manage other people’s posts/pages.
3. Author – can upload files plus write and publish own posts.
4. Contributor – can write own posts/pages but can’t publish them; instead they are submitted for review.  An administrator or editor then reviews and publishes their posts/pages.
5. Subscriber – can read comments and write comments.

Here is a summary of their differences based on User Capability:

Here is a summary of their differences based on access to features in the dashboard:

See Also:

• Changing The Role of A User on A Blog

And it’s easy to use a custom domain name with your Edublogs blog (such as myblog.com in place of myblog.edublogs.org).

Edublogs supports several options for custom domain mapping:

1) Full-domain mapping (e.g. ourblog.com)
2) Sub-domain mapping (e.g. theblog.oursite.com)

In order to have either of these working correctly you need to:

1. Purchase your own domain name
2. Be able to access the DNS settings for your domain

If you do not currently own a Domain Name, GoDaddy is a great place to purchase one.

Full-Domain Mapping:

1) Log into your DNS control panel or send a support request to your registrar (the company or organiztion you’ve purchased the domain name from)

2)  Add the following three IP Addresses as separate A Records: 66.135.49.219, 66.135.49.226 and 66.135.49.227

• It is important that you add all three IPs as separate A records, and that they are the only A records for your root domain

Here’s how to set up your domain mapping using GoDaddy

1.  Log into your GoDaddy Account

2.  Click on your Domain name

• You’ll find your domains listed in My Accounts > Account Summary

3.  Under DNS Manager, click on Launch 

4.  Click edit in the @ row under A (Host)

5.  Change Points to 66.135.49.219

6.  Click on Quick Add and add Host @ Points to 66.135.49.226

7.  Then add a third A record by clicking on Quick Add and add add Host @ Points to 66.135.49.227 

8.  Now click Save Zone

9.  Next you will see a Confirm message and you just need to click OK to confirm these changes.

• Changing the DNS records is normally fairly quick however it can take up to 48 hours
• You’ll know if it is correctly configured if you click on your domain and it takes you to the Edublogs sign up page.

Adding your domain to your blog

1.  Once you have checked that your domain is correctly configured.

2.  Log into your blog and Go to Tools > Domain Mapping in your Dashboard.

3.  Insert your domain name and click Add

Click on your blog title to make sure your blog URL is now your domain name and your blog is loading.

• It may take 24-48 hours for these DNS changes to propagate across the internet, so please be patient while this happens.
• Do not add your domain to your blog until it is properly configured or you will not be able to access blog
• Please check details are correct in your GoDaddy account if your domain is still redirecting you back to the GoDaddy domain page after 1 hour

Sub-domain mapping:

1) Log into your DNS control panel or send a support request to your registrar (the company or organiztion you’ve purchased the domain name from)

2) Add a CNAME record for your subdomain (e.g. ourblog.oursite.com) to point to sb.edublogs.org

Please note that it may take 24-48 hours for these DNS changes to propagate across the internet, so please be patient while this happens – you may see errors or not be able to access your blog during this period (but odds are it’ll just be a matter of an hour or two).

Once you’ve done this follow the instructions above to add the domain to your blog.

When you set up a new Edublogs blog it automatically comes set up with an ‘About page’. Readers access this page by clicking on About in the page links at the top of your theme or in the link in your sidebar.

The idea is you change the default text on this about page by inserting your own information.

Video

 Watch the video below to learn about Editing Pages

Writing your About Page

Your about page is all about letting people know who are you, what’s your interests and what you write about.

Start with telling people more about yourself as people are more likely to engage with your blog if they can relate to you as an individual. Then tell them about your blog and the reasons why you blog.

Not too long and not too short – include photos that help readers relate to you as a person.

What’s included on an About Page does vary depending on the type of blog and its intended audience.

1. Here’s my ‘About page’ on my personal blog.
2. Here’s the ‘About page’ on The Edublogger
3. Here’s tips for writing About pages for Student and Class blogs.

Editing your default ‘About page’ is a simple as:

1.  Click Pages > All Pages in the navigation menu in your dashboard

2.   Find the page About and click the action link Edit.

3.  Now it is just a case of replacing the default text on the about page with your own text, images etc.

4.  Click the Update Page button.

When they publish their post you’ll normally receive an email notification letting you know they have referenced ( i.e. linked to) your post.

The email notification commonly includes an extract from the post they’ve written, a link to their post, a link to the post you had written and a link for deleting or spamming the pingback.

Clicking on the link to their post means you can:

1. Check out what they’ve written
2. Leave a comment on their post (if you choose)
3. Decide whether you want to approve, delete or spam the pingback. Mostly you approve all pingbacks unless it obviously been written by a spam blog (these you delete or spam).

Once you’ve approved the pingback it’s displayed in the comments on your post with just the extract of post showing enclosed in brackets like these [...]. This is so other readers can follow the link and read the post on the other persons blog if they are interested.

Below is what a pingback might look like in the comments of a post.

It’s really simple to do — only takes 4 simple steps!

Once you have written your post just:

1.  Click on Edit link next to Publish Immediately in the ‘Publish Status’ box

2.  Enter the date and time you want the post to publish

3.  Click OK

4.  Click Schedule

Your post will now be held until the time and date you specified.

You also use this method to change the timestamp on published posts which can be used to change the order the posts appear on your blog.

Unfortunately unique email addresses are important for password resets and deleting blogs.

The gmail+ method provides the solution!  How it works is you create one gmail account for your class.

For example, mathiscool@gmail.com or room16@gmail.com.

Then you use your one class gmail account with the gmail+ method to create each student account.

Gmail ignores any letters and numbers you add after a + sign and sends all emails to the one account while our system thinks each is a unique email.

So for example, you might use room16+emmasblp16@gmail.com,  room16+liamwblp16@gmail.com and so on for creating their usernames and gmail will send all emails to the class gmail account room16@gmail.com

Here’s an example of using the gmail+ method to create student blogs

Please Note:

• You must use a real gmail account– either use your own gmail account or set up a gmail account for your class e.g. room16@gmail.com.
• This also means that if you want to moderate comments on student posts they will be sent to your class email address.
• Also all password resets will be sent to your class email address

Here’s how to:

1. Use the Blog & User Creator to batch create student blogs
2. Batch add new users using the Blog & User Creator
3. Batch add existing users using the Blog & User Creator
4. Add new or existing users to a blog, one at a time

Properties of posts are:

• Blog posts appear in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post is the first post that your readers see
• Posts are dynamic (updated regularly) and have time stamps i.e. display the date posted
• You can assign tags and categories to organise blog posts
• Posts appear in RSS feeds i.e. your readers who subscribe to your blog will receive your latest post in their feed reader

See Also: What Are The Properties of A Page?