Weekly Web Updates – March 26, 2018

Please see our recent post about the Drupal security release scheduled for Wednesday, March 28. We have updated the announcement to note that we do not anticipate any downtime for the service on Wednesday. We will be doing a non-security update Thursday morning which will make the Middlebury Institute site unavailable to editors for a few minutes.

New WordPress Plugin

We’ve added the FooGallery and FooBox Image Lightbox plugins. These add support for more advanced image galleries than are available in the regular WordPress and the Jetpack plugin. We’d like your feedback on this, particularly if you’re using the NextGEN Gallery plugin. FooGallery also includes a feature allowing you to migrate your existing NextGEN galleries.

Removed WordPress Plugins

In continuing our upgrade of systems to PHP 7.1, we discovered several more WordPress plugins that are no longer in use or no longer working and removed them. These include:

  • WordPress Mass Mailer
  • WordPress Storify
  • WordPress Tell-a-Friend
  • WordPress Twitter Shortcode
  • WordPress Visualkicks Core

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • GO is now hosted on two servers with a keep-alive system to ensure this critical service is available.
  • We’ve made many accessibility fixes to the new Middlebury Institute website. There’s more work to be done, but SiteImprove now reports over 90% compliance.
  • Many of the applications we maintain (Drupal, Course Catalog, Go, and sites.middlebury.edu) are now hosted on new server infrastructure. The rest will be migrated in the coming weeks.
  • GO & the Course Catalog have been upgraded to run on PHP 7.1.

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.