February 28, 2008 – 10:24 pm
One of the nice things about a blog is that you can change the way it looks very easily.
We’ve just added a new theme, imaginatively called ‘uniblogs’, which site admins can activate in the ‘Presentation’ tab of their site’s admin interface. This new theme also uses the Sandbox theme as it’s basis, but this time almost nothing has been changed, so upgrades to new versions of Sandbox should be a snip.
If you’d like to see this theme in action before applying it to your blog, you can check it out on the search engine blog. It’s a lot less formal and more ‘blog-like’ than the main ‘unimelb sandbox’ theme, so hopefully people will enjoy using it. Any issues people have with it - let us know!
What are widgets?
Not only can you change the theme of your blog, but you can rearrange the way things appear in the sidebar. The little chunks of information in the sidebar of your blog are called ‘widgets’ and you can manage them in the same ‘presentation’ tab as the themes. It’s dead simple, just drag and drop. On most widgets, you can click on the little options button 
to change the title or content of the widget.
February 14, 2008 – 8:55 pm
We all like to know who’s been reading our stuff, so here are a couple of methods that you can use to view your web statistics.
Google Analytics
Yes, even though you don’t have control over the template in our wordpress MU installation, you can still insert your own google analytics code.
In the ‘Presentation’ tab of the admin interface, select the ‘Widgets’ sub-tab and use a text widget to contain your GA code. Of course, the GA code is invisible, so you can put other stuff in the text widget too.
Firestats
Firestats is a plugin which we’re experimenting with. There is NO guarantee that we will continue to make it available if it causes problems, but for now, it’s a convenient tool for gathering and viewing stats.
In your wp-admin, under the Plugins tab, activate Firestats. Then, in the Dashboard tab, you’ll find a sub-tab that allows you to view and configure Firestats. Mostly, you don’t have to change anything.
If you want to advertise your stats, there’s a neat little widget you can use to display stats and popular posts.
January 23, 2008 – 11:42 pm
Wordpress is great for words, but not brilliant for pictures. There are ways of integrating with gallery software and other tools, but they’re not very robust in a big multi user blog like ours. Instead, we’ve implemented a simple tool called ‘Slimbox’ which should give everyone access to eye-popping slideshows. It’s easy to use…
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January 22, 2008 – 12:57 am
We’re pleased to offer locally installed Wordpress blogs as an alternative publishing method for University of Melbourne users.
Our blogging tool, Wordpress MU, lets us centrally handle a lot of the management tasks like upgrades, stats, themes, spam control and plugins, leaving you to get on with writing your content.
With simplicity come constraints, but if you find that Wordpress MU doesn’t do everything you need, we can upgrade you to a stand-alone Wordpress install, or even migrate you into the CMS.
In most cases though, we’d recommend just getting started this way and seeing where it takes you in the longer run.