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.

Also some usability enhancements have been made on the administration back-end to make GO administration smoother.

Overview

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.

Box Office

• Addition of separate billing and shipping addresses when ordering tickets or gift items from the box office, especially useful for parents purchasing items for students.
• Improved the user interface to make purchasing as a returning customer and identifying seat locations in the seating chart simpler.

CAS – Single Sign On

The Central Authentication System (CAS) was introduced last year and allows you to move between many of our web applications after you’ve signed in once. GO and the main college website were already using CAS this time last year but since then it’s been added to many other applications, including:

• Course Catalog
• MediaWiki
• MiddMedia
• WordPress

Course Catalog

Over the past two years we developed the Course Catalog application at catalog.middlebury.edu to serve as a clearing house for accessing course information on the web due to the limitations on searching for this information via BannerWeb. The Course Catalog application allows users to search for courses based on a wide variety of criteria (including keyword searching) and properly displays and links-together cross-listed courses. The Course Catalog application also feeds course information to the department pages and faculty profiles in the main Drupal site.

New for this year, the Course Catalog has been extended to add a Schedule Planning tool that allows students to bookmark courses they are interested in, then group them together into weekly schedules to ensure that they do not have timing conflicts and that lab and discussion sections are chosen. These schedules can be printed or emailed to one’s advisor.

• Added the Schedule Planning tool.
• Users can now bookmark courses that they find interesting.
• Updated the theme to match the new website. Added a custom theme for the MIIS catalog.
• The printed Catalog is now created via an export from the Course Catalog application rather than being copy-pasted from the site by hand.
• PDF snapshots of the Catalog are now automatically generated as course descriptions and requirements get edited over the year.
• Lots of small improvements to the display of course data in search results and while browsing.
• Can now search for courses by campus — needed for Language Schools that have more than one site.
• Greatly improved the speed of the application.
• Improved the feed of courses to faculty profiles to ensure that cross-listed courses are ordered properly.
• New admin forms that allow the Registrar to suppress incomplete information about upcoming terms during data-entry.

Drupal

• Alerts: Though it hasn’t been needed yet, there is now a special alert bar that will appear on the site in the case of a campus emergency.
• Athletics Database: Many improvements, including results automatically posted to Twitter and a site that tracks the live feeds for each event.
• Calendars: Added a content type to allow offices to embed promotional calendars of their events on their department page. Updated event calendar interface to make it easier to use and added Featured Events. Clicking on items in the calendar view open in the same window (preserves page continuity). Daily breakout of events is much more pleasing to look at.
• Editing: Upgraded the WYSIWYG editor to resolve issues in Safari and Internet Explorer as well as allow pasting from MS Word without needing to use the button.
• External Links: Links to external sites will now open in a new browser window or tab automatically, though editors can choose to override this for specific links.
• Locations: You can add geo-locational information to any piece of content on the site by expanding the Locations section when editing.
• Meta Tags: A description of the content is now automatically added to each node, improving search results. Editors can customize the description and keywords.
• MiddLab: Added a content type to allow offices to embed a sidebar feature to display MiddLab projects happening in their area.
• Previews: Added a “Preview Live Site” checkbox to the Edit Console and a “Preview” button to the editing form.
• Printing: A special stylesheet allows you to print just the content of the page including contact information in the Address area.
• Search: Converted the main site search engine to use a Google Custom Search Engine to improve results, increasing our index from 175,000 pages to over 360,000 pages. You can also ask us to create a custom search engine for your part of the site. This complements the large review of Search functionality we conducted immediately after the site launch.
• Sharing: Added sharing buttons to news articles to let you send emails to friends, or post the stories to Facebook and Twitter.
• Webform: Many new features including multi-page forms, validating responses, and email templates.
• Video: Videos from MiddMedia and YouTube now use the HTML5 player in supported browsers and devices allowing you to watch them on iPhones and iPads. You can now add YouTube playlists. We also now support the use of autoplay, autorewind, loop and image attributes in videos.
• LIS Pages: Problems with this Page? link on LIS pages allows you to report an issue with the content on a page such as a spelling error, incorrect information, a broken link, etc. The submissions are reviewed by our newly assigned content managers.

GO

The GO shortcut/permalink application has become quite central to the web infrastructure of the college since its launch several years ago. It eased the launch of the new site by allowing links in content to be easily updated en-mass. In the past year GO has become central to our search strategy as GO shortcuts are now provided as suggestions and automatic-redirects when you enter search terms on the main site.

• Totally new editing interface.
• Verbose, color coded, messages to indicate successful or unsuccessful completion of actions.
• Additional input validation to preserve shortcut integrity and prevent abuse.
• Ability for community to flag GO links as inappropriate.
• New “Info” pages for every shortcut allow everyone to see detailed information about the shortcut such as who maintains it, what its aliases are, and where it goes.
• All GO shortcuts are now shown publicly in the GOtionary (with the exception of a few internal shortcuts) to improve the transparency of the system.
• Enhanced admin interface for flag admins and the new super admin role.
• Can now switch between the Middlebury and  MIIS GOtionaries.

MiddMedia

• New “Midd” theme integrates more closely with the current Middlebury theme.
• Add to MiddTube button allows users to check off the videos they would like to batch add to MiddTube as video posts.
• We’ve upgraded to Flash Media Server 4, with a lot of new features that we’ll be rolling out and supporting in the coming months.

New Sites

We’ve been able to expand the Drupal and WordPress platforms to add a CMS experience for sites that were previously static HTML files and create new sites to show off and assist student research and projects.

• Davis United World College Scholars Program
• Projects for Peace
• MiddLab
• MiddSTART
• Middlebury College Museum of Art

SubjectsPlus

In December, we upgraded from version 0.7 to 0.9.  Changes include:

• Enhanced security.
• In addtion to Research by Subject, two new guide types are available: Research by Course and Research by Topic.
• Widget-based, drag-and-drop control panel for content creators.
• Multiple subject specialists (guide owners) now possible.
• Description field override.  This allows for a resource description to be customized for one or more guides, while still allowing the resource record to be shared among all the guides.  This cuts down on duplication of records and/or breaking others shared work.
• Cloning feature

What do we use this for, you ask?

• Databases A-Z list
• Research guides (access via sidebar at go/lib and go/subjectguides among other places.)
• globally adding EZproxy prefix for off-campus access.

Also a comment/reason is now required when flagging go links to give admins a clearer idea of why a link was flagged. Thanks to all who have helped us by flagging links so far.

Do you need to get a hold of someone about changing a GO shortcut or becoming an admin of the shortcut? Try contacting the shortcut administrator. We’ve made a 1min 30sec screencast on how to determine the administrator(s) of a GO shortcut.

NOTE: It is no longer possible to “hide” GO links. GO by its nature is a public application with publicly searchable and publicly usable links. “Hiding” a GO link is more or less a misnomer and is no longer supported. If you have hidden GO links they may be unhidden. If you feel you have a legitimate reason to hide GO links and you are concerned about this please feel free to contact go@middlebury.edu.

Also, the main Middlebury and Monterey Institute of International Studies sites now have print themes. Please enjoy the new printer friendly pages that are generated on print/print preview.

This feature is available from the info link featured next to each link in the Gotionary. Just look for this icon .

On the info page you’ll have access to a “flag as inappropriate” button:

If you’d like to flag a link as inappropriate, simply click the button. You’ll see the following message:

As per the message, one of our capable admins will review the link at a later time and take any necessary action.

We hope that this new feature helps make the GO application even more relevant and useful to the community. Your participation in managing GO links helps keep our online community healthy and active. Visit go here: http://go.middlebury.edu/

Today’s big improvement is that the GOtionary now provides info pages for every shortcut.

The info page will tell you who created and who administers the shortcut so that you know who to contact to when a link is broken. As well, the info page will now serve as the landing page when trying to access a broken GO shortcut, rather than being presented with a blank screen.

Head to the GOtionary to check it out.

Tomorrow morning we will be migrating GO from a multi-use Windows server to its own RedHat server. The primary impetus for this move is to resolve a PHP-on-Windows memory leak bug that has taken out GO for several minutes every few months. In addition to this bug fix, migrating GO to its new environment allows a few additional improvements at this time:

• GO will be on its own server, more isolated from interference from other applications
• GO will now fail-over to a secondary database should its primary database become unavailable.
• Improved user-information caching will dramatically speed up the self-service admin screens
• Redirects will now be re-written internally, requiring one less round-trip to the GO application for every redirect.
• go/shortcut should now work more reliably on the MIIS network without having to type the full go.miis.edu/shortcut URL in the address bar.

  Note: the full http://go.middlebury.edu/shortcut or http://go.miis.edu/shortcut URL should still be used when putting links in websites or email.

• The GOtionary will now live under go.middlebury.edu and go.miis.edu, allowing go.miis.edu to have its own logo.

We do not anticipate that this migration process will result in any downtime as the new GO server and the old GO server will both continue to operate at the same time, against the same database. After we switch the DNS records for go.middlebury.edu and go.miis.edu users will slowly move over to the new GO server as their computers look up the address of go.middlebury.edu again. For on-campus users this may happen quickly, while for off-campus users it may take several weeks. After the vast majority of users are accessing the new GO server (likely two weeks or so), we will turn off the old GO server.

Update 1 – June 23rd

We successfully migrated go.middlebury.edu to the new host and haven’t had any problems. We’ll be waiting for a while for go.miis.edu to switch over.

During the web-makeover project planning it was decided that we need to move forward with a new site architecture (where everything lives) and drop support for the old URLs from previous versions of the site that are 3-15+ years old. Most of the time links can and should be updated at their original locations, but if that is impossible (such as in a print mailing), you can now ensure that the correct link shows up on the main site’s 404 page.

Steps to add a link for a 404 page on the main site:

1. Create a nice GO shortcut to the new destination if one doesn’t exist.
   Go to the GOtrol Panel and create a new go shortcut to the new destination URL.
   If a go shortcut for this destination already exists, then you can skip this step.
2. In the GOtrol Panel, click on the ‘Create’ tab and add an alias for your shortcut from step one. The important thing here is that the alias ‘name’ is the path portion of the URL that is hitting the 404 page after the initial ‘/’.

   For example, if this URL is getting a 404 page:
   http://www.middlebury.edu/area/department/someimportantpage/default.htm
   then the alias name should be:
   area/department/someimportantpage/default.htm

   

3. Go back to the 404 page and verify that it now includes the GO link to your resource.
   

We still recommend that you update the pages that link to the site to use their new URLs or GO links, but if that is impossible, you now have a work-around to direct users to the appropriate place.