We are working on upgrading our systems to PHP 7.1 and, as part of this work cleaning up older plugins and modules which are no longer being used, no longer maintained, or otherwise broken. The Facebook plugin for WordPress has not been supported by Facebook for several years and we recommend that people use the Jetpack plugin to integrate their WordPress site with Facebook.

Other plugins which were not active on any sites and were removed this week include Facebook Like Box and GeoPress.

We’ve now completed work on a system that generates automated exports of the Course Catalog that match the contents of the current manually-edited print catalog. Look for further announcements about this project in coming weeks.

Updates

• Drupal addtoany 8.x-1.9
• Drupal block_visibilty_groups 8.x-1.2
• Drupal charts 7.x-2.0
• Drupal pathauto 8.x-1.1
• Drupal twig_tweak 8.x-2.0-rc3
• Drupal workbench_access 8.x-1.0-alpha8
• WordPress Avata theme 1.5.0
• WordPress BadgeOS 1.4.11
• WordPress Disqus for WordPress 3.0.15
• WordPress Espied theme 1.2.3
• WordPress Illustratr theme 1.3.3
• WordPress Instagram Feed 1.6.2
• WordPress Jetpack 5.9
• WordPress Restricted Site Access 6.1.0
• WordPress Seriously Simple Podcasting 1.19.6
• WordPress Sketch theme 1.2.4
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.6.12
• WordPress WPtouch 4.3.27

Fixes and Tweaks

• Users logging into Omeka sites will no longer be dumped immediately into the dashboard. Instead, they remain on the site and can browse items before clicking through to the dashboard.
• Adjusted styles on the Language Schools website so that FAQs use the same colors as course listings.
• The copyright line in the Drupal 7 responsive design will now always display the current year.
• Meta tags on the homepage on the Middlebury Institute site adjusted to ensure that only the name of the Institute appears in search results.
• We now have an application for automatically creating recurring project cards in GitHub’s Kanban-style board system.

Ongoing Work

• Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
• Building out the configuration of our CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, Omeka, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.