Getting everyone up to speed…

April 3, 2007

In the year since we started the KLOW project, there have been many changes and discoveries in the Wordpress suite of tools. The newer sites are much, much more fully functional than the first, “beta” sites. To that end, while I’m moving everyone to the new server, I’m also trying to bring everyone up to the newest, latest, greatest incarnation of KLOW.

Some changes you might notice:

• Wordpress has been upgraded to 2.1.3 from 2.0-2.1 for security and functionality reasons.
• Links has turned into “Blogroll.” The functionality is the same.
• You now have stats. - on the Dashboard, you will see a menu called ShortStat. This contains information on unique hits and what pages are getting hits in your website.
• Organizer is back, and it allows for resizing of images. Just click Organizer, then Resize.
• You can upload themes and plugins (but be warned, plugins can break your site to the point you will have to call me to have it fixed, so be cautious. We’ll do a post on this later.) - See the “Upload themes” page under Presentation and the “Upload Plugins” page under Options.
• Improved protection from comment spam - Everyone now has Akismet spam protection.
• There is an Event Calendar functionality - When writing a post you can set a category to be “events” that will allow you to set the date/time of the event, and it will show up on the calendar. You can choose to have these posts as part of the blog chronology or not. This may require further explanation, in a post to come later.
• There is a “Paste from Word” function - Click this button to expand the toolbar (lots of new functionality there, incidentally) copy your text from word, then click this button to paste it into your KLOW site. This should work better than it used to.
• There is also an “Undo” function, under the expanded toolbar. All of the new icons have tooltips, so you can just mouse over them to see what they are and what they do. We encourage you to click around.
• You can change the colors of text in posts and pages - Again, click the button to expand the toolbar, then pick the color with the button.

• You can backup the content of your site - Just click “Manage” and the “Backup,” check all of the boxes, and click “Backup.” You will want to save the file to your computer. Should you have a problem, we can re-create the content of your site easily from this backup. You’ll probably want to do this once a month or so (less if you’re an infrequent updater).
• You can set a Favicon for your site - click Options -> Favicons to upload your icon. (JPG format, please)

Please feel free to get in touch with us for information regarding these changes. Not all sites will have all of these functions right away, it will take some time to get everyone migrated, upgraded, and freshened up.

Posted in FYI