News

Today we're happy to announce the relaunch of our 21Classes service.

With our new design, navigating the website becomes much easier. There is no separation between "Shop", "Product" and "Features" anymore, we simply have one "Product" section. Volume discounts now reflect our yearly subscriptions and are much easier to compare with our single offer.

Also, in extension of the changes we implemented last week, now all pages are SSL-encrypted. Whenever you or your students access any page on our system, you're always redirected to the corresponding secure page in case only http is entered.

Finally, we proudly announce the launch of our new "Teacher Blog" product. In contrast to our existing Classroom Blogportal, a "Teacher Blog" only allows the teacher to post stories, where students can only read and comment on them. Access restriction settings are the same as for Classroom BlogPortals, so if you only want to run a single blog and have your students comment, check out our new "Teacher Blog".

Of course all features of our Classroom BlogPortals stay untouched, you still have all multi-user blogging functionality available - just more secure.

If you have any questions about our new product, please contact our 21Classes Customer Service.

We're happy to announce the launch of our brand new release 3.5 of our 21Publish Weblog Server platform. This release contains various improvements, for example:

• Improved response times (up to 20% faster)
• Better memory handling
• Centralized access rights management
• Various bugfixes

The release has already been rolled out on all our hosted services.

For more information on this release, please contact our customer support.

Since the new school year started, various teachers requested a functionality to easily wipe out all existing student accounts within their ClassroomBlogportal. And today we're happy to tell you this option is now available!

Simply log in to your account and go to "Student accounts -> More options -> Delete all student accounts". Please be careful when using this feature, since there is no way of recovering any deleted accounts.

Once deleted, you can start adding new students all over again.

We're happy to announce further improvements at 21Classes.com: since many of our teachers indicated in our survey this year they'd like some spell checking functionality, we finally added it. Whenever a student now posts a new blog entry, she can click the new spell check icon on the top right of the editor window, and the whole story is checked for spelling mistakes. We're also working on a feature to suggest some potential correct spellings, though this is something for the (near) future.

And we're about to release a new design for both classroom homepages as well as student blogs. More news will follow soon.

Happy blogging
Your 21Classes Team

Good news if you're receiving spam comments on your BlogPortal: 21Publish now offers three different plugins to fight spam: 21Publish, akismet and defensio.
The native 21Publish plugin is a very basic service with only limited filtering capabilities, but we are constantly enhancing this service. If you stay with the 21Publish service, you will always get the latest anti-spam updates provided by 21Publish.
The other plugins can connect to services at akismet.com or defensio.com, two very common and powerful anti-spam services. If you want to use any of them, you need to sign up with the corresponding service and get your own API key, which you can then insert into your account.

To check out the new features, simply log on to your portal and go to "Portal Homepage -> More Options -> Spam checker".

If you do not enable any plugin, your BlogPortal will automatically use the 21Publish spam filter, so don't worry if you do not want to change your settings in the short term.