WordPress Comment Spam

We are testing a change to our filtering this week that may result in an increase in the number of spam comments posted to your site. If you notice an increase, please let us know. This test will run though Friday, August 26 at the latest.

Drupal Permissions Changes

Since September 2015, there has been an issue where applying permissions to sub-pages in our Drupal sites would occasionally remove custom permissions at lower levels. We’ve corrected this so that changing page permissions now works as intended and have reviewed our Helpdesk tickets since last September to ensure that the permissions of everyone who reported a problem are back in place.

WordPress 4.6

• Native fonts: The WordPress dashboard now takes advantage of the fonts you already have, making it load faster and letting you feel more at home on whatever device you use.
• Inline link checker: Ever accidentally made a link to https://wordpress.org/example.org? Now WordPress automatically checks to make sure you didn’t.
• Content recovery: As you type, WordPress saves your content to the browser. Recovering saved content is even easier with WordPress 4.6.

Course Hub “Panopto” Resource

In preparation for Middlebury’s pilot of the Panopto video recording and streaming service, we have built a Panopto integration into the Course Hub which allows instructors to provision course folders and appropriate groups with just a few clicks.

Updates

• Drupal ctools 7.x-1.10
• Drupal paranoia 7.x-1.6
• WordPress 4.6
• WordPress Full Throttle Calendar 1.6.1
• WordPress Importer 0.6.2 and 0.6.3
• WordPress MailChimp 1.5.2
• WordPress MailPoet Newsletters 2.7.5
• WordPress Jetpack 4.2 and 4.2.1
• WordPress Responsive theme 1.9.8.6 and 1.9.8.7
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.2.5
• WordPress Twenty Eleven theme 2.5
• WordPress Twenty Fifteen theme 1.6
• WordPress Twenty Fourteen theme 1.8
• WordPress Twenty Sixteen theme 1.3
• WordPress Twenty Ten theme 2.2
• WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme 2.0
• WordPress Twenty Twelve theme 2.1

Fixes and Tweaks

• The link to WebMail in the MIIS site header was changed to go/newmail as all MIIS faculty, staff and student mailboxes have been moved to the new cloud-based email system.
• Reverted a code style change that caused the input fields in the WordPress MailChimp widget to disappear.
• The “download” attribute is now supported for link elements in the Middlebury Drupal site. This can only be added using the HTML button in the editor at this time. The attribute means that the image or document file linked to will be downloaded rather than opened in the browser window. This only works in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and the Android browser at this time.
• Fixed an issue with Panopto SAML2 authentication to ADFS caused by the roll-over of ADFS’s “signing cert”. Updating this cert configuration will be an annual task in the future.