WordPress is used by many for course sites.  Abilene Christian University has integrated it with Banner making it easy for their faculty to create class blogs that automatically include students.  The College of Wooster has an instance of WordPress referred to as Voices, that includes BuddyPress and bbPress, popular WordPress plugins and associated platforms that add functionality for creating groups and forums and aggregating activity streams across various sites.   Mark Frydenberg from Bentley University teaches his students how to maintain a WordPress site, requiring each student to take on the role of site administrator and tasking them with changing the site theme, adding plugins and managing roles.

Some institutions are using WordPress for e-portfolios.  Macaulay Honors College has over 1,500 sites in EPorfolios@Macaulay, which also makes use of BuddyPress to create various groups that they plan to include in their upcoming WordPress student portal, My.Macaulay.  Some institutions even use WordPress for the college website including Bates, Lafayette and Wheaton.

The Web Application Development Team has been hard at work making enhancements to the MiddMedia application in order to better support mobile platforms, the current HTML5 standards, and our users. Below are some of the enhancements that have been made in the past month.

• As part of the recent HTML5 standard, modern browsers support the native playback of video files using an HTML5 video tag. All videos uploaded to MiddMedia are now encoded in both H.264 and WebM formats so that they can be played natively in browsers that support H.264 (IE 9, Safari, iOS) and WebM (Firefox 4, Chrome, Opera, Android), and allow better support for mobile browsers.
• When uploading a video, you can now select the quality that will be used when the video is transcoded (original, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p). Previously a single standard of around 480p was used unless the videos were encoded in Mp4 or Flv to start with. Now you may choose additional high-def qualities (NOTE: Does not upscale video), or original to preserve quality as closely as possible during encoding to multiple formats.
• Embed code references the Mp4 and WebM versions of the videos for HTML5 compliant browsers. All others will fall back to a Flash player (the recently updated Strobe Player). Videos embedded in the Drupal site with the video short code also display in this manner. Instructions on embeding videos from MiddMedia in Drupal are available here.
• Added basic support for M4a files. Users can now upload M4a audio files to MiddMedia. Quicktime may be required to preview them in the MiddMedia application. The WordPress MiddMedia plug-in allows you to embed m4a files in WordPress blogs/pages. You can add these to your posts as you normally would for other audio/video files. When the post is displayed, you will see the m4a with images in a video player if you are using Safari, or a link to the m4a file that users with other browsers can download and play in an application like iTunes or QuickTime. NOTE: To ensure your audio files will be accessible to the broadest range of listeners and devices, we recommend using the .mp3 format unless you have a special use case that requires m4a.
• A new show/hide feature will allow users to toggle show/hide behavior for folders in MiddMedia. For users who only have access to a single personal folder this feature will not be of much use, but for users with access to several shared directories this will help with navigation of multiple folders with many videos.

We hope you enjoy the new enhancements!

Tip of the week: If you’re able to access an image or file on our Drupal site only when you’re logged in, the file is probably in a Recycle Bin on a site you have access to edit. You can find the file in the Recycle Bin and click Restore to return it to a publicly visible page.

Campus Map

• A new “alpha” version of the Campus Map can be found on our site. We’ve added integration with foursquare, outlines of each building, and soon many more features like course listings, directory listings for buildings and 3D models of buildings on campus.
• If you want to check out some 3D models of Bread Loaf, fire up Google Earth and zoom on over there.

Course Catalog

• The Course Catalog can now be searched by building code, allowing us to display the courses taught in each building through the Campus Map.

Drupal

• News and Profile items now use a popup browsing window to select their associated images, instead of the autocomplete textbox. This shows the editor where their selected file is located in the site tree.
• An issue with the video player controls has been resolved.
• Modules updated this week: mimemail, monster_menus, rss_page, media.

MediaWiki

• The LIS Wiki now uses a Google Custom Search engine for its search results instead of the default MediaWiki search feature.
• Additionally, the LIS Wiki’s skin has been updated to use the core Middlebury site design and styles, which should make the transition from our site to our wiki less jarring.
• The Midd MediaWiki skin also includes custom CSS for mobile devices that make the wiki easier to read and navigate on those devices.
• The wiki is no longer running under HTTPS.
• MediaWiki version update: 1.16.5

Drupal

• Did you know that you can “geo tag” any content on our site? It’s true! When you’re editing, you’ll see a field labeled “Location”. If you expand this, you can add an address to the content you’re creating. Most addresses can be automatically translated into a latitude and longitude by our system, allowing us to create maps highlighting that content. We’re going back and adding locations to stories to make our Middlebury Around the World page more interesting, but keep this in mind as you edit the site.
• The Preview button has been temporary disabled while we fix an issue where all permissions would get wiped out when you previewed your changes to content. We know what was causing this to happen and will have a fix shortly after a few of the edge cases are dealt with.
• Videos from MiddMedia in most of our supported web browsers now play using the native HTML5 video player. Browsers that support this feature include Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, Chrome, Safari, Opera and the mobile browsers for iOS and Android devices. If you are using Firefox 3 (including 3.5 and 3.6), Internet Explorer 7, or Internet Explorer 8 you will still see the Flash player as these browsers do not support HTML5 video.
• Additionally, MiddMedia videos on the site will now use the “full frame” poster image by default, which doesn’t include the “play” icon, but you can toggle between playing and pausing a video by clicking on it.
• When creating a Story, there are now buttons to select the image instead of autocomplete text boxes. Clicking the button brings up the site tree so you can select your image (with a preview) from the page where you saved it instead of blindly hoping the “smiling_students01.jpg” is your image. This feature will be rolled out to more content types shortly.
• XML sitemaps are now available for all of our Drupal-based sites. These files help search engines find content on our site. Middlebury’s sitemap is at http://www.middlebury.edu/sitemap.xml
• Modules updated this week: Custom Permissions, Monster Menus, Media, RSS Page

Library Systems

• As announced previously on the LIS blog, the Library Quick Search widget on the Library home page now includes a search form for Summon, a tool that searches across Midd’s many different collections at once.  New tabs, and other changes based on feedback and user study were also rolled out.

MiddMedia

• All videos uploaded to MiddMedia are now encoded in both H.264 and WebM formats so that they can be played natively in browsers that support H.264 (IE 9, Safari, iOS) and WebM (Firefox 4, Chrome, Opera, Android).
• When uploading a video, you can now select the quality that will be used when the video is transcoded (original, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p).

WordPress

• We’ve added localization files for French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, and Hebrew as part of the work to translate and localize our WordPress themes.
• We’ve added domain mapping support so that blogs like http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag could be served up using their own domain names like http://www.middmag.com.
• WordPress version update: 3.1.3
• Plugins updated this week: Email Users

Drupal

• The “Edit”, “Delete” and “Revisions” links now include the title of the content you’ll be performing those actions on. For example, if you have a node titled “Drupal Help” the link to edit that node is now Edit “Drupal Help”. These links appear below the content as they always have.
• The “Edit” links for sidebars, site banners, carousels, and juice bars now include the title of the page. For example, if your sidebar is titled “Right Sidebar” the link to edit that content will be Edit “Right Sidebar”. These links appear above the content as they always have.
• Remember: if you want to hide these links while you work on content, try out the New Edit Console which lets you decide to hide links in specific regions of the page.
• The MIIS site now also has a Carousel region, using the same styles as the Middlebury website.
• The “Revision Log” window is now collapsed by default on the editing form.
• If you’re the manager of a permissions group, there is now a link to “Edit this group” above the members of the group on any permissions form. This link takes you to the AD group manager interface.
• Several issues with image and file uploads have been resolved. If you were having trouble overwriting file revisions or uploading new files with the same name as other files, we believe that you’ll now be able to do those things without a problem.
• We’ve upgraded Drupal from 6.20 to 6.22 which includes all the changes in 6.21 as well. We’ve also updated our Monster Menus module to match the version Amherst currently has in production.

Recently, several people have had issues uploading files to Drupal using Firefox. What happens is that, when you use Firefox to download a file, like a PDF, the server you download it from tells Firefox what type of file you’re downloading. Firefox then associates that file type with the file extension. A server might tell you that a PDF is the file type “application/x-download” instead of “application/pdf” and from then on Firefox will think that all PDFs are “application/x-download”s. This causes problems when you then try to upload a PDF to our site and your browser tells our server than you’re sending us a “application/x-download”, which we don’t want you to upload.

To resolve this, you need to delete a file called “mimeTypes.rdf” from your Firefox profile folder. See this guide to locating your profile folder. You only need to do this if you start experiencing this issue.

Drupal

• There are now named anchors above every node on the site. If you have a page with a bunch of nodes, you can link to a specific one by adding #node-XXXXXX to the URL where XXXXXX is the node ID, usually a six-digit number that is in the URL when you’re editing the node.
• The Google Calendar content type now supports multiple calendars and will let you select from a drop down list to choose which calendar you want to view. Items in the month display now line wrap to show you the full title. These changes were done to help support adding Library hours to our website.
• A meta description is now automatically created for every news article on the site so that when you link to a news article on Facebook the description of the link will be taken from the beginning text of the article.
• We’ve replaced the ShareThis link at the bottom of our news articles with large buttons that look nicer. This also corrects an issue where people visiting our site using Firefox 3.5 were not able to load news articles. We encourage people to upgrade to the latest version of their browsers for best support.

Course Hub

• If a course site is empty, the description from Banner is now displayed on the front page. (suggested by Shel)
• The list of updates is now styled to be more constrained table-layout — along the lines of a Twitter feed or a Facebook wall. The most common feedback we received from faculty about the Course Hub was that the update list was “messy looking”. This styling change is a big improvement on that front.

GO

• A fix so it’s now not possible to make a code with the same name as an existing alias.

Drupal:

• A bug that caused file upload replacements to fail has been resolved. You can now replace an existing file by editing its file upload node and uploading a new version of the file, even one with the same filename.
• TIFF images have been added to the list of allowed file types.
• Added a Google Calendar content type that can be used to embed Google Calendars on pages of the site. MIIS has been using this for their events calendar for some time.
• The cache files for RSS feeds are now kept in the same location as other cache files, meaning that the feeds will be refreshed with the same periodicity as other features on the site.
• The full URL of the result page will now be shown below each search result. This was a suggestion we received from the Site Search Satisfaction Survey.
• We’re now keeping usage data on site search so we can better analyse how its various features are working.
• Updated the calendar template so that promotional calendars work properly when linking to the originating calendar.
• On the “business card” style list of profiles, the person’s name will now link to their specific profile instead of the page their profile appears on to handle the case where multiple profiles appear on a single page.

GO:

• The “my codes” area now lists your codes alphabetically for easier management. Thanks to Chris Norris for this suggestion.
• “Superadmins” now have additional features available when moderating flagged codes and for determining whether or not a code appears in the site search suggestions.

MiddLab:

Lots of new student project in MiddLab this week from the Spring Symposium. You can follow MiddLab on Twitter and get alerted to new projects as they are added.

• The Raja of Sattara and British Power in 19th Century India
  
• Understanding the Purpose of Modern Adaptations of Classic Works of Dramatic Literature: A Case Study of Anton Chekhov
• Marching on Rome: The Public and the Private in Civil Strife at Rome
• Monitoring Carbon Uptake on College Lands
• “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!”: The American Social Order through the Lens of the Jerry Springer Show
• Creating a National Ideal: How Baseball Drove Bushido in 20th Century Japan
• Millborne Farms: A Case Study of Modern Dairy Farming in Vermont
• The Role of Nuclear Energy in India’s Future with Regards to CO2 Emissions
• Good Mother/Bad Mother: Cultural Motherhood from “Hansel and Gretel” to Coraline
• Poverty Alleviation North and South of the Himalayas: Why has China Alleviated More Poverty than India?
• Why National Memory Matters: A Study of National Identity and Historical Responsibility in Contemporary Germany and Italy

Directory:

• Updated the class photo roster application to work with the new class-group structure in the Active Directory. You will now see separate lists for instructors, students, and audits for each course.

Drupal:

• Internet Explorer 7 users saw a notice on our homepage about a script taking too long to load. The IE 7 rendering engine has problems displaying over 100 stories on our homepage, so people using that browser will now see a smaller, random selection. If you’re using any other browser you’ll still see all the stories.
• We’ve switched back from the OSMF player to FlowPlayer temporarily for videos. The OSMF player requires the user to have Flash Player 10 and the distribution image just includes Flash Player 9. We’re going to add a prompt to the OSMF player to let people know they need to upgrade, then put it back in production.
• Custom splash images now work in Drupal videos. To add a custom splash image to your video use the [video:url image:url] syntax.

GO:

• We’ve removed the Banner Web Scout which provided pseudo-load-balancing between the two BannerWeb servers through GO. All of the GO shortcuts for Banner now go directly to the primary server with no intermediate steps.

MiddLab:

• We’ve redesigned some aspects of the MiddLab theme to make the site easier to navigate and provide more space for project content and larger video players. Watch MiddLab next week as many new projects from the Spring Symposium will appear.

Drupal

• Webform emails have been fixed to correctly send as HTML. Each field will be shown on a single line (except multiline fields) with the field title bolded. If you want to get really fancy with your webform emails, you can create your own email templates.
• We’re now using the Open Source Media Framework’s Strobe Player to play videos on the site. This improves the playback performance with better support for buffering streaming videos, so the content will load faster for you.
• The “waveform” or “equalizer” feature on some of the top-level pages, like Student Life and Academics had so many stories that the title of the page wasn’t displaying. This is a good problem to have, and it’s now fixed in all browsers except Internet Explorer.
• The Online Donor Roll is now configured to automatically switch from using the Banner reporting database to the Banner production database in the event that the reporting database is not available.
• Lots of fixes to the New Edit Console, including a way to go back to the old Edit Console if you decide you don’t like it.

WordPress

• Upgraded WordPress to version 3.1.1 and upgraded the XML Google Maps plugin.
• Added the Stout Google Calendar plugin allow easier embedding of Google Calendars.
• Added the Plugin Stats and Theme Usage Info to allow admins to monitor plugin usage and remove unused ones.
• Posts with multiple authors (like this one) will now show information about all of the authors at the bottom of the post when you’re in a single post view. If you don’t appear in the list of authors on a post where you’re an author, you may need to configure your profile in WordPress.
• The FeedBurner FeedPress plugin will no longer redirect all of your tag feeds to the blogs main feed address. You can now use this plugin and tag feeds at the same time.

Other

• Audio file in the BBC SoundFX Library now play in all browsers.

Links

Interesting news and posts from around the web about web development this week.

• Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview available, extends native HTML5 support
  • Though there’s some dispute about this announcement
• YouTube goes Live
• Google Translate – Now with Voice Input
• Maqetta – Visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces – in the browser!
• HTTP re-engineered for Chrome resulting in a 50% page load speed boost
• End of Life for Flock
• Firefox 5 will have support for Webkit’s CSS Animations