Since the launch of the new academic blogging service we’ve been squirreling away behind the scenes adding new plugins and themes to improve our new service. Recently we’ve added the following plugins and themes, which we hope the community will find useful.

Plugins:

• Akismet plugin – checks your comments and contact form submissions against Akismet’s global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content
• Disable comments plugin – globally disable comments on any post type (posts, pages, attachments, etc.) so that these settings cannot be overridden for individual posts
• Flickr Album Gallery – use your own Flickr API and Flickr Album ID to publish Flickr Albums on your WordPress Blog website.
• UoE Twitter embed plugin – add @username and #hashtag searches on your WordPress site
• WP QuickLaTeX – insert formulas & graphics in the posts and comments using native LaTeX shorthands directly in the text
• WP Accessibility – helps with a variety of common accessibility problems in WordPress themes.

Themes:

• Awesomepress – fully responsive, accessibility-ready, lightweight, customizable, translation ready & RTL language support theme.
• Bhari – lightweight, responsive theme for bloggers who love to write articles
• SPLOTPoint – works as both a presentation tool and an information resource.
• Tiny Framework – adds full accessibility and Structured Data Markup with Schema.org microdata format support.

Further information, and plugin documentation can be found on the service webpages

Look out for the next update which should be deployed in around 6 weeks time…

Happy Blogging,

Academic Blogging Service Team

(Squirrel by John James Audobon from The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, Vol.II, 1846. Image (c) University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections)