We are upgrading blogs.ed on Wednesday the 14th of August.  The service will be unavailable from 9.30am-12.30pm (and at risk until 5pm that day).

The upgrade predominately ensures that the core application, plugins and themes stay up-to-date and secure but we are also adding a few new features:

• A new theme (Blask)
• A plugin to  improve Search Engine Optimisation (Google XML Sitemaps)
• A plugin to allow formatting in post comments (Tiny MCE Comment Field)

Coming soon:  we have a more scalable blog search and implementation of our blog retention policy. We’ll add a post with more information about this soon.

Although WordPress now comes as default with a new content editor (‘Gutenberg’), due to accessibility issues with this editor we have switched it off (leaving the WordPress Classic Editor switched on).

If you have any issues or feature requests for blogs.ed, please let us know by emailing the IS Helpline.

Thanks for using our blogging service!

The blogs.ed team

[Image attribution: The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland, by John Lindley.  Rights statement: Digital Image: Copyright The University of Edinburgh. Original: Copyright The University of Edinburgh. CC BY. Find out more at the University Collections Website]