We have finished moving from MySQL to MariaDB as the database backend for the Drupal, Course Catalog, CAS, and GO systems. The new database cluster is set up to enable automatic failover to a secondary server should the primary database fail. We’ve now had an opportunity to test this out a couple times and it works quite well, giving us additional stability for these services.

There were a few issues with the initial cutover which are now resolved. Our apologies for these problems and thanks for your patience as we make these changes.

Updates

• Drupal admin_toolbar 8.x-1.20
• Drupal config_devel 8.x-1.1
• Drupal field_permissions 8.x-1.0-beta4
• Drupal media_entity_document 8.x-1.1
• Drupal migrate_upgrade 8.x-3.0-rc2
• Drupal twig_tweak 8.x-1.9
• WordPress bbPress 2.5.14
• WordPress FeedWordPress 2017.0913
• WordPress Responsive theme 3.3
• WordPress Social Icons Widget by WPZOOM 3.0.2

Fixes and Tweaks

• The Handbook has been updated for 2017 and we’ve added in several redirects to ensure links to major sections of the old handbook still work.
• Long datelines in Arts events will no longer cause the event information to drop below the right sidebar.
• We’ve updated the Help documentation for the online Directory to reflect the current state of the system, removing several sections which no longer apply and noting that commons affiliation is now shown publicly.
• The embed URL for the Middlebury TimelineJS WordPress plugin is updated so it works with the new version of that service.

Ongoing Work

• Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
• Creating a new automatically generated course catalog.
• Building out the configuration of our CAS servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, GO, Omeka, and the Course Catalog services.
• Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.