Weekly Web Updates – April 27 📬 🎁 😻

WordPress 4.2

  • You can now switch themes in the Customizer, making it easier to compare how new themes will look on your site.
  • Added Tumblr and Kickstarter to the list of services that can be embedded by just pasting a URL into the editor.
  • Extended character support, including native support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters as well as mathematical and musical symbols. Also, emoji 👻

WordPress / Google Calendar support

In the past our sites.middlebury.edu and sites.middlebury.edu WordPress systems have offered a variety of plugins to support embedding Google Calendars in posts and sidebar widgets. Over time the authors of these plugins have moved on and not updated them to work with the latest versions of WordPress, leaving us with broken calendar support.

We are pleased to announce that we have now retired the old plugins and have replaced them with a streamlined pair of plugins, a Google Calendar Shortcode plugin that allows embedding of calendars in posts and pages and a Google Calendar Widget plugin that provides a sidebar widget which displays an “agenda” view of upcoming events from a calendar. These plugins can be enabled and used on any site in our systems.

See the LIS Wiki for instructions and more information on how use these plugins. For users of the old plugins, we will be going through your sites over the next few days and updating them to use the new plugins.

 Updates

Tweaks and Fixes

  • Google claims that the issue with embedded Google Calendars being blank has been fixed. Let us know if you notice this occurring again.
  • In Drupal, on the Middlebury site, RSS feeds and forms on pages with blank sidebars will now use the full width of the content region, rather than being confined to 450px. This mirrors an earlier fix for promotional calendars.
  • Also on the Middlebury Drupal site, Facebook buttons and boxes in sidebars won’t have a dotted line border around or beneath them any more.
  • Choosing to hide one field in a profile on the Middlebury Drupal site, such as fax number, will no longer also cause the photo to be hidden.