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Moodle and Course Hub Work Sessions

September 2, 2011 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

The Curricular Technology team has organized a number of workshops on the Course Hub, Moodle and WordPress which have been very well attended and have provided us with great feedback.

We have also just scheduled a number of work sessions next week, specifically for faculty and staff who have already started to create sites in these new platforms and have specific questions or just want to collaborate with colleagues and LIS staff.   Here’s the schedule of these new work sessions:

  • 10:00-11:00 am Weds, Sept 7th, Library 105
  • 2:00-4:00 pm Weds, Sept 8th, Library 105
  • 10:00-12:00 pm Weds, Sept 9th, Library 105

For the full schedule of workshops, see:
Segue from Segue > Workshops

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WordPress for Course Sites

August 23, 2011 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

(Cross-posting from WordPress @ Middlebury):

WordPress and Moodle are the primary alternatives to Segue for course sites at Middlebury.  A number of workshops have been scheduled on how to use WordPress for course sites and how it is integrated with the Course Hub.

  • 11:00 am -12:00 pm, Wednesday, August 31, Library 105
  • 11:00 am -12:00 pm, Thursday, Sept 1, Library 105
  • 4:00-5:00 pm, Tuesday, Sept 6, Library 105
  • 3:00-4:00 pm, Wednesday, Sept 7, Library 105

To attend one of these sessions, please fill out our sign up form, see:
WordPress / Course Hub Workshop Sign Up

These sessions have been scheduled before or after similar sessions on Moodle, Middlebury’s new learning management system (LMS).  To learn more about how these platform compare, see: Curricular Technologies Platform Overview. If you’d like to attend one of the Moodle sessions, there is still time to sign up: Click to sign up for a Moodle Workshop.

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Moodle/WordPress training workshops – Language Schools 2011

June 20, 2011 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere, updates

Dear Language Schools Faculty,

As you know, the current summer is the final semester in which you will be able to add new content to Segue. (After the end of this summer, Segue will become “Read-only”.)  Middlebury is in the process of transitioning away from Segue to other courseware.  In preparation for this, LIS is offering a series of training workshops for Language School faculty.  Moodle and WordPress will be covered in the sessions.  We will discuss background and theory (when to use what, how to transfer content, etc.), as well as offer hands-on training.

Several workshops will be offered in the Davis Family Library 105.

Week of July 4
Week of July 11
Week of July 25

Please use the signup sheet linked below. Exact times are listed on the signup sheet. There are 19 computers in the lab.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/middlebury.edu/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dG5TVUZFM1lZLVlTT2c1cHVVMmoxZWc6MQ#gid=0

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Weekly Web Development Round-up May 30-June 3, 2011

June 3, 2011 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

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.

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

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Weekly Web Development Round-up April 11-15, 2011

April 15, 2011 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

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.

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

Links

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

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Subscribe to feeds on private blogs

April 1, 2011 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

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.

Oops, I emailed my private feed link to everyone!

If you accidentally share your personal feed link with others, you can go to your profile page and revoke your key for the blog in question.

Profile Screen Shot, showing the ability to revoke keys.

Note that you will need to resubscribe to the feeds yourself if you revoke a key.

FAQs

  • If someone finds out my key, can they use it to access my other sites?
    No, keys are per-user and per-site.
  • I removed a user from my private site, will they still see updates?
    No, the feed keys just authenticate the user, they still are checked against the subscriber list before showing them content.
  • Will my feed key let me edit without logging in?
    No, the key only grants access to feeds, nothing more.
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WordPress feeds can now include pages

March 30, 2011 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

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.

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