Weekly Web Updates – December 10, 2018

WordPress 5.0 was released this week, but we have not yet applied this update to the sites.middlebury.edu and sites.middlebury.edu network. This release includes a significant change to the editing experience and we want to get feedback from the community before making this change. We have set up a copy of the live site on one of our development machines which you can use while on-campus or using a VPN client. As this is a development copy, it’s not as fast as the live site and you may encounter some glitches or things which didn’t copy over from the live site.

Please try the new editor on the copy of some of your sites and let us know how it works. We’re especially interested in whether there are technical issues we need to remediate before applying this to the live site, but are also interested in hearing from you about its ease of use and accessibility concerns.

Updates

  • WordPress appointments plugin 2.4.1
  • WordPress jetpack plugin 6.8.1
  • WordPress liveblog plugin 1.9.4
  • WordPress ml-slider plugin 3.10.3
  • WordPress social-icons-widget-by-wpzoom plugin 3.0.13
  • WordPress the-events-calendar plugin 4.7.1
  • WordPress accelerate theme 1.3.8
  • WordPress garfunkel theme 1.17
  • WordPress hemingway theme 1.70
  • WordPress sydney theme 1.53
  • WordPress twentyeleven theme 2.9
  • WordPress twentyfifteen theme 2.1
  • WordPress twentyfourteen theme 2.3
  • WordPress twentyseventeen theme 1.8
  • WordPress twentysixteen theme 1.6
  • WordPress twentyten theme 2.6
  • WordPress twentythirteen theme 2.5
  • WordPress twentytwelve theme 2.6

Fixes and Tweaks

  • We’re investigating an issue which may have caused the All Faculty and All Staff groups to be dropped from the permissions list on some Drupal pages and forms, preventing people in those groups from being able to log in and access the content. We have restored permissions to several pages and expanded the documentation on how to add these permissions for those who need to going forward.
  • Added new inquiry call to action menu items for the Middlebury Institute academic programs.
  • As we previously announced, MiddMedia will no longer allow new video and audio uploads. Panopto is available and can be used for most of the needs MiddMedia was meeting. Existing videos in MiddMedia will remain available until January 1, 2020 and you can log into the service and delete media you no longer need.

Ongoing Work

  • Sunsetting MiddMedia.
  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Creating a new “Offices” site for institution-wide anchor functions.
  • 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.
  • Providing O365 Groups to classes via the Course Hub.