To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments. More
Today we released a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds of private blogs using any RSS reader.
When you are logged in and viewing a private blog, the RSS feed links will now contain a special key unique to you and the blog that gives your reader access to the feed. There is nothing special you need to do, just subscribe as usual and feeds from private blogs will now work without redirecting your reader to the login page.
During the past few years new versions of WordPress have made this system much easier to use — and our community has made use of these new abilities to make a wide range of sites structured in many ways.
Most of the content in WordPress sites are Posts, chronologically ordered entries that make up a ‘blog’ or news site. Pages on the other hand, are non-time-dependent content that can be arranged in a hierarchy. Traditionally, Pages in WordPress sites were used mostly for describing the blog, contact information, or other content that rarely changes and isn’t ‘newsworthy’. (more on Posts vs. Pages)
Recently, a number of sites have been making increasingly large use of Pages, such as to hold curricular resources that are then referenced from Posts describing assignments that use them. For sites that make significant use of Pages, site-owners can now enable the RSS Includes Pages plugin so that new pages are added to your site’s main feed. For course sites in WordPress, enabling this plugin will allow page additions to be fed into the Course Hub as updates.
We still recommend making use of Posts in WordPress sites to share new material with readers rather than heavily using Pages as Pages are still second-class citizens in many ways (such as support for tagging and categorization). With the new RSS Includes Pages plugin, Page-heavy sites can now feed new content to the Course Hub and others subscribed to their feeds.
Yesterday, we updated WordPress to v3.1. Most noticeable change in this update is the introduction of a new “admin” bar that appears after you log in. This admin bar includes quick links to all sites in which you are a registered user. Site authors will also see links to add new posts and editors will have quick links to comments. The other notable new feature is a “link browser” that allows you to search and quickly link to other posts/pages on your site.
Most importantly, this release includes over 800 bug fixes by over 180 developers from around the world. It has been downloaded over 1 million times in the last week.
Let us know if you have any questions about this update or experience any problems.
I’ll be doing a couple of workshops on WordPress this month, showing some of the ways this platform has been used for blogging, courses, research, projects and initiatives. Will give an overview of what’s possible with WordPress and then open up for discussion and questions.
Dates/Times/Location
For more information, see: WordPress @ Middlebury
What follows is a report on the state of notable web applications and sites in use at Middlebury including the College website, the Middlebury instance of WordPress (i.e. sites.middlebury.edu) and a variety of key web applications that provide services widely used by faculty, students and staff. More
I’ve coordinated with the Education and Training Team to offer some workshops on WordPress next week, here are details:
These workshops will give an overview of latest version of Translucence, the theme framework that powers many Midd blog themes and will showcase a variety of sites that have recently been created to highlight the many different ways that WordPress can be used.
For other upcoming workshops, see: How to Learn More » On-campus Workshops.
I met with the LIS Website team this week and proposed some minor changes to this blog the most obvious of which is an update in the theme design. The other change I’ve just introduced are some quick links in the navigation bar below the header.
I welcome feedback about the new theme. I have about half a dozen variations of this design, each with different images in the upper right corner which I’ll introduce over the next month or so as a way of refreshing the appearance of this blog. If you know of other images that you think would fit this space, send them along and I’ll add them to the rotation.
Segue from Segue Teaching with Technology LIS Staff Middlebury Community MiddPoints
