Site Admin Tools

These tools provide extra features for managing your Campus site.

Admin Messages

The Admin messages provide the ability to easily place a message which will be displayed on every page inside all dashboards of your site.

Batch Create

Batch Create is the more advanced option for quickly creating a large number of blogs or users.

How it works is you create a CSV. text file using a simple text editor such as NotePad and then upload the file to Batch Create.

CSV stands for comma separate value file; all the information to create a user’s blog or username is on one line, and each item you specify is separated by a comma i.e. blog name, blog title, username, password and email address must be on the same line and separated by a comma.

Here is an example of a CSV. Text file:

1. Create a user with blog and preset password each line would look like this:

jamesqt3,James Blog,jamesqt3,mainsblog31,jamest3@gmail.com

2. To create a user with blog and auto-generated password each line would look like this:

sueqt3,Sue Blog,sueuqt3,null,sueqt3@gmail.com

3. To create a user without a blog each line would look like this:

null,null,seanqt3,mainsblog41,seanqt3@gmail.com

TIP:

DON’T use Excel to create your CSV. Text file because it frequently messes up the data putting user information onto new lines which will prevent the blogs from being created.

Blog Activity

Collects data on how many blogs updated in the past “minutes”, “hour”, “day”, and “month”.

Content Monitor

The content monitor allows you to monitor your entire site for set words that you define and sends you an email whenever they are used on posts or pages.
By default, your content monitor is disabled.

Login Image

This is the image displayed when users log into their account. The default is Edublogs images which you can replace with your own image. For best results use an image that is 290px wide and 66px tall.

Reports

This provides the ability to check post and comment activity per blog and per user for the past 15, 30 or 45 days as:

1. Page activity for a blog
2. Post activity for a blog
3. Comment activity for a user
4. Page activity for a user
5. Post activity for a user

TOS

This places a Terms of Service box on the signup form forcing the user to tick the associated checkbox in order to continue. Check out Edublogs TOS here.

Tips

Tips are similar to Admin Message in that they provide the ability to easily place a message which will be displayed on every page inside all dashboards of your site.

However unlike Admin Messages, you can add numerous tips which change as the user navigates inside their dashboard.

This is how you edit in the dashboard:

This is where tips are displayed in your users dashboard:

User Activity

Collects data on how many users updated in the past “minutes”, “hour”, “day”, and “month”.

Messages

This tool allows you to send out ‘messages’ i.e. emails at predetermined times based on when the user signed up.

Designed to keep your new users engaged, supported and interested in your site!

About Actions and Emails

Each email you can schedule to send to users is called an action. You can schedule actions (emails) to be sent over a series of days after a person has created a new username or a new blog.

For example on blogs.mu emails are scheduled to be sent to new site owners as follows:

Here is what the “How’s it going with your new Blogs.mu site?” message looks like:

Add actions as follows:

1. Go to Site Admin > Messages and scroll down to Add Action
2. Select whether the action is for when a new user is created or a new blog is created i.e. do you want an email sent when a username is created or a new blog is created?



3. Select the time delay after the username or blog is created that you want the email sent



4. Insert the message subject i.e. this appears in the email’s subject line



5. Write your message i.e. this appears in the body of the email



6. Click Add Action

NOTE:

1. Actions for:
   • Create new blog – appear under Site level actions
   • Create new user – appear under Blog level Actions
2. If you hover your mouse over the title of an Action it brings up the menu for that action and you can edit the message

You can set each message to:

1. Go out x days after an event e.g. x days after a new blog is created
2. Differentiate between actions like creating a new blog, and creating a new user.

What’s more, you can even personalise each email using the following dynamic info: %blogname% %blogurl% %username% %usernicename% %sitename% %siteurl% %systemname% %systemurl%

See Next: Working with blogs