There was an issue in the recent WordPress 4.7 update that caused problems with our custom permissions group syncing to that system. If you are the member of a group that is sync’d to WordPress but have different permissions than most members of that group (for example: administrators of the “Classifieds” blog), your permissions to the site may have been set to the lower-level permissions if you logged in to the site over the holiday break (this was fixed by 1pm on January 3rd). If that’s the case, let us know and we’ll restore your permissions.

We have added the Inline Footnotes and BE Subpages Widget plugins to WordPress.

Updates

• Drupal media 7.x-2.0-rc2
• Drupal metatag 7.x-1.19
• Drupal views_slideshow 7.x-3.3
• Drupal webform_validation 7.x-1.13
• Drupal wysiwyg 7.x-2.3
• WordPress Accelerate theme 1.2.9
• WordPress BE Subpages Widget 1.6
• WordPress CM Tooltip Glossary 3.4.4
• WordPress Hueman theme 3.3.4
• WordPress Inline Footnotes 1.1.0
• WordPress WP-PostRatings 1.84.1

Fixes and Tweaks

• The server hosting the Course Catalog was updated using the Chef server configuration tool to better provide system updates and versioning. Additionally, all requests to the Catalog are now handled over HTTPS.
• We applied a security update to the system that sends mail in WordPress which is causing issues with the email preview function in the Wysija / MailPoet plugin. The plugin author promises to have an update available shortly that will fix this.
• Improved the Online Directory’s handling of connections to the Active Directory to ensure that system resources are properly recycled after searches are run, preventing the server from spinning out of control.
• Increased the timeout and improved error handling for photo fetching to the Athletics History Wall to better ensure we import as many photos as possible.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• A small redesign of the Middlebury News Room to bring it more inline with the newsletter.
• A responsive design for the Dining Menus site.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Providing Course Hub access for Schools Abroad courses.