With our colleagues in Communications & Marketing, we’ve launched a small redesign of the Middlebury News Room site, with featured stories, and a sidebar of news blurbs about people, Middlebury in the News, and campus notes.

We have updated the WordPress Jetpack plugin to version 4.5 which has a lot of new functionality for its shortcode, carousel, and widgets features. You will not be able to enable the “WordAds” feature on the Middlebury site network. The Terms of Service for the plugin have also been updated and you should review them to see how information from your site is used when connected to WordPress.com.

Updates

• Drupal better_exposed_filters 7.x-3.3
• Drupal metatag 7.x-1.20
• Drupal title 7.x-1.0-alpha9
• Drupal views_slideshow 7.x-3.5
• WordPress Jetpack 4.5
• WordPress MailChimp List Subscribe Form 1.5.7
• WordPress MailPoet Newsletters 2.7.6
• WordPress NextGEN Gallery 2.1.69
• WordPress Parabola theme 2.1.2

Fixes and Tweaks

• News stories in RSS feeds from the Middlebury Drupal website will no longer have author or dc:creator elements. The byline information, if any, will be contained in the story content.
• Fixed an issue in the WordPress Parabola theme that prevented the site dashboard from loading correctly.
• Many small fixes to the Moodle-auth_casattras and Moodle Adaptive Quiz modules.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Building out the configuration of our Omeka, and CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
• Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).
• Providing Course Hub access for Schools Abroad courses.