Weekly Web Updates – June 18, 2018

WordPress Update

We have updated the servers hosting sites.middlebury.edu and sites.middlebury.edu to use PHP 7.1. In addition, we have added a caching server in front of these WordPress sites, like we have for the Drupal sites and the Course Catalog. This should dramatically improve page load time for unauthenticated users and will also speed things up for people who are logged in, since the cache server, rather than WordPress, will now be responsible for handling most unauthenticated traffic.

As with our Drupal sites, there may be a slight delay of a few minutes before a change you make to your WordPress site is reflected in the cached copy. This delay will not exceed five minutes.

CAS Upgrade

On Thursday June 14th we upgraded the CAS Central Authentication Service to version 5.29 and moved it to a new high-availability (HA) pair of virtual machines. This new structure is anticipated to enhance the stability of the CAS system and remove a database dependency that has made it unavailable several times over the past few years. This version also supports the new CAS 3.0 protocol with enhanced attribute release, providing the potential for easier integrations with 3rd-party applications.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • We’ve continued the consolidation of components on the Institute site by merging the Campus Spotlight, Center Spotlight, and Program Spotlight components into a single component named Spotlight with all the features of the three different options.
  • The Institute site’s Profile List component has been renamed Profile to indicate that it is for adding a single profile to the list of profiles in the Profile List content type.
  • Profile List headings in the institute site are now always an h2.

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Creating an online Services Catalog for ITS.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Creating a photo sharing platform for the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference