Course Hub/GoogleApps: Google recently changed its application authorization for web-applications connected to Drive, causing errors for instructors who try to create Google Drive resources from the Course Hub. We’ve submitted a reauthorization request however we are waiting on Google to approve it with no timeline for completion.

At this point, if users choose to authorize the unverified application then the Course Hub will be able to successfully create their class folders and assign the class-groups the correct permissions. However, bypassing security warnings is not a good practice and should not generally be recommended.

An alternative work-around for users who need to create Google Drive folders for their spring-semester classes:

1. Go to Google Drive at go/gdocs
2. Create a folder for the class.
3. Go to sharing settings for the folder and search for the class-groups and grant edit or view permission to the class group[s] as appropriate.
4. Copy the URL to the folder.
5. Go to the Course Hub and create a Link Resource pointing at the Google Drive folder so that students can easily find it.

Infrastructure: This week we completed the process of migrating all of our web applications to new server nodes running PHP 7.1 and no longer are running PHP 5.6, which reached its end-of-life in December. This was a long process of verifying compatibility, patching incompatible code where found, and rebuilding webserver nodes. The latter process of rebuilding webserver nodes was greatly aided by the use of the Chef configuration management system, greatly reducing the effort needed to build a new server with slightly different configuration.

Updates

• The Omeka exhibition service was migrated to a new host node running PHP 7.1.
• The Concerto media archive service was migrated to a new host node running PHP 7.1.
• Drupal field_collection 7.x-1.0-beta13
• Drupal recaptcha 7.x-2.3
• Drupal telephone_formatter 8.x-1.0
• WordPress akismet plugin 4.1.1
• WordPress embed-webmap plugin 2.0.4
• WordPress enable-media-replace plugin 3.2.8
• WordPress ml-slider plugin 3.11.1
• WordPress subscribe2 plugin 10.26
• WordPress wp-accessibility plugin 1.6.5

Fixes and Tweaks

• Course Hub: Updated Google Drive authentication URL to temporarily use old redirected URL to bypass 403 error.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new “Offices” site for institution-wide anchor functions.
• Creating new Drupal 8 sites for our schools and programs.
• Upgrading the Course Hub to Drupal 8.
• Improvements to the Service Catalog.