We upgraded the server that runs omeka.middlebury.edu. This server is now using the Chef server configuration tool to manage settings so that we can ensure proper change management over its setup.

The WordPress project is conducting a poll about the editor you use when writing posts:

Please fill out this editing experience survey to influence the future of the WordPress editor. https://t.co/RK6DtzQuVG

— WordPress (@WordPress) March 23, 2017

We’ve upgraded the Google Custom Search engine used on our Drupal sites to version 2 of their API, now that version 1 is no longer supported. A few styles were cleaned up, including removal of the double underlines for links in search results, but there should be no major changes with this upgrade. Please let us know if you experience issues with search on our Drupal sites.

Updates

• WordPress Emma for WordPress 1.3.1
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.4.5
• WordPress WPtouch 4.3.14
• WordPress RokoPhoto Lite 1.1.8

Fixes and Tweaks

• Removed the field labels for the caption and subtitle fields on the Davis UWC profiles.
• The “simple HTML” text format in the Middlebury Drupal site, used for event blurbs, now allows setting text styles, such as “fine print”.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our  CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, Omeka, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

During the closure of the college due to weather last week we had an opportunity to test out the emergency alert banner on the website, which worked. We’ve added some padding to it to ensure the the messages are easier to read.

Updates

• Drupal varnish 7.x-1.4
• WordPress CM Tooltip Glossary 3.5.2
• WordPress Jetpack 4.7.1
• WordPress NextGEN Gallery 2.2.1
• WordPress Responsive theme 2.2

Fixes and Tweaks

• Added an instruction to the robots.txt file for the Middlebury Drupal site asking search engines not to index the HR job descriptions archive there, since we prefer the version of those items located on the hiring site.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

We believe any Course Hub syncing issues mentioned in last week’s updates have been resolved and set up additional monitoring capabilities in the Course Hub administration interface so the situation can be better monitored going forward.

Updates

• Drupal views_slideshow 7.x-3.8
• WordPress Appointments 2.0.5
• WordPress Hueman theme 3.3.7
• WordPress Jetpack 4.7
• WordPress Responsive theme 2.1.1
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.4.4
• WordPress WPtouch 4.3.13.1

Fixes and Tweaks

• Resolved an issue on the Museum of Art site preventing editors from updating one of the fields.
• Added additional sanitization of user input on the Online Directory to ensure application security.
• Applied a change to the Middlebury School of the Environment homepage from our colleagues in Communications & Marketing.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

The Course Hub now includes sites for the Middlebury Schools Abroad.

We’re continuing to investigate an issue where some members of groups are dropped from Course Hub sites when the sync process runs around midnight. We’ve stopped syncing the Hub during this window and bypassing the errors, but are still searching for the underlying cause of the issue.

Updates

• Drupal media 7.x-2.0-rc12
• Drupal memcache 7.x-1.6
• Drupal mimedetect 7.x-1.1
• Drupal monster_menus 7.x-1.27
• Drupal views_slideshow 7.x-3.7
• WordPress 4.7.3
• WordPress Appointments 2.0.4
• WordPress CommentPress Core 3.9.3
• WordPress Espied theme 1.2.2
• WordPress Hueman theme 3.3.6
• WordPress MailPoet Newsletters 2.7.8
• WordPress Responsive theme 2.1

Fixes and Tweaks

• We’ve added a clean print stylesheet to the Commencement schedule page.
• The Students list on the Davis UWC website is now cached for an hour, which should make it load more quickly for returning visitors.
• The Facebook and Twitter icons on the New England Review site are no longer loaded through separate requests to the server, which prevents the site from occasionally hanging and taking ten seconds to load.
• Profile photos on the Middlebury site will now load smaller versions of the image, preventing very large original images from slowing down page loads. These new thumbnail versions are larger than the displayed proportions of the profile images, so you should not notice any visible difference.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

There is now an interactive Campus Map for MIIS, which you can find in the Quick Links section of their site header.

Updates

• Drupal views 7.x-3.15
• Drupal views_bulk_operations 7.x-3.3
• WordPress Akismet 3.3
• WordPress NextGEN Gallery 2.1.79
• WordPress Post Types Order 1.9.3
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.4.3
• WordPress WPtouch 4.3.12

Fixes and Tweaks

• We applied several changes to update links in applications to point at the address of the new Banner servers, including GO, the Course Catalog, and a few WordPress sites like MiddCORE. Links in our Drupal sites were updated to route the URLs through GO.
• The processes which sync data from Banner to external databases for the Online Donor Roll, MiddSTART, MiddGOAL, the Course Catalog, and MyEmma were also updated to connect to the new Banner hosting.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).
• Providing Course Hub access for Schools Abroad courses.

Our mobile / portal site is now on version 2 of the Kurogo framework, has a different design and some new features like integration with the campus map.

We made several updates to the Course Catalog service. It now supports courses that occur in just part of a term and have customized start/end dates, like PE classes and some off-campus programs. Additionally, we’ve updated the font used to render schedules. Course codes can now include lower-case letters and we’ve added a robots.txt file to the service making it easier for search engines to crawl.

The Appointments+ plugin for WordPress is a significant upgrade from the version we had been running (1.4.4). If you had tried this plugin before and it didn’t meet your needs, the new version may be worth a second look.

Updates

• Drupal captcha 7.x-1.4
• Drupal metatag 7.x-1.21
• Drupal paranoia 7.x-1.7
• Drupal views_slideshow 7.x-3.6
• WordPress Academica theme 2.0.2
• WordPress Appointments+ 2.0.3
• WordPress Responsive theme 2.0

Fixes and Tweaks

• Fixed an issue where a link to a file would break in the Drupal WYSIWYG editor if the child element was also a file. For example, when an embedded image links to a PDF.
• We’ve updated the Google Calendar content type on our Drupal sites to handle more forms of the remote calendar URL, particularly from gmail.com.
• The code shown when clicking the HTML button in the WYSIWYG editor on the MIIS Drupal site is now indented.
• The Commencement Archive has moved to the Special Collections site.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).
• Providing Course Hub access for Schools Abroad courses.

The client IP address will now be recorded in the Drupal Webform sites for form submissions from users who are not logged in. This information was previously left out due to the way our front-end caching system is configured.

Updates

• WordPress Authors 2.4.5
• WordPress CM Tooltip Glossary 3.5.0
• WordPress Enable Media Replace 3.0.6
• WordPress Jetpack 4.6
• WordPress Members 1.1.3
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.4.2
• WordPress WPtouch 4.3.11

Fixes and Tweaks

• Fixed an issue with the CategorySuggest MediaWiki plugin to ensure it works on the File Upload page.

Term end dates for Canvas sites created through the Course Hub are now twenty days past the official term end date to ensure that the site is accessible during that last day.

• Swapped the order of sidebar items on the Middlebury Newsroom to ensure Middlebury in the News appears first.
• Ensured the WYSIWYG configuration was correct on all the Drupal sites.
• Added role and aria-label markup to interface elements in the Middlebury Drupal site to improve our site accessibility.
• Removed a logo from the Middlebury Language Schools site footer.
• We are now logging all class-group additions and removals in the Hub to track down inconsistent enrollments reported by several users.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).
• Providing Course Hub access for Schools Abroad courses.

The Course Hub now offers the Academic Integrity Tutorial as a shared Canvas resource which can be added to courses by the instructors.

We discovered an issue with the Course Hub communicating with WordPress through the newer version of CAS and delayed the CAS upgrade announced last week until we’re able to resolve or work around the problem.

Updates

• Drupal 7.54
• Drupal better_exposed_filters 7.x-3.4
• Drupal media 7.x-2.0-rc5
• MediaWiki EmbedVideo 2.6.0
• Omeka 2.5
• Omeka Bulk Metadata Editor 2.3
• Omeka Docs Viewer 2.1
• Omeka Exhibit Builder 3.3.3
• Omeka Geolocation 2.2.5
• Omeka Scripto 2.2
• WordPress Magic Liquidizer Responsive Table
• WordPress MailPoet Newsletters 2.7.7
• WordPress NextGEN Gallery 2.1.77
• WordPress Sydney theme 1.35
• WordPress WP Gallery Custom Links 1.12

Fixes and Tweaks

• Fixed and issue that was preventing Canvas rosters for MIIS spring classes from updating in a timely fashion.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).
• Providing Course Hub access for Schools Abroad courses.