Author Archives: Ian McBride

About Ian McBride

I'm a web developer at Middlebury.

WordPress Upgraded to Version 5.0.3

We have completed the upgrade of WordPress, which is used for sites.middlebury.edu and sites.middlebury.edu to version 5.0.3. WordPress 5 is a complete redevelopment of the editor, named “Gutenberg”, which now features a new “block” system for working with media assets and complex markup.

Here is a Lynda course on WordPress 5 to help you get started with this new editor. Skip ahead to section 2, Content Management, as the introductory sections don’t apply to our environment. There is more information about the new features of WordPress 5 in the official announcement blog post. This version also includes a new theme, Twenty Nineteen, which is available for you to use.

Workaround: Get the Classic Editor Back

The new Block Editor has a block for the Classic Editor. Here’s how to add it to your post.

Drupal Security Update – Wednesday, August 1 Finished

Thank you for your patience as we applied this critical security update. Technical details are available on the Drupal project website. All sites now have this update applied and should be considered stable.

The issue only affected Drupal 8, which is currently used for:

  • https://www.middlebury.edu/institute
  • https://servicecatalog.middlebury.edu

Other sites were not affected by this issue.

Drupal Security Update – Wednesday, August 1

This Wednesday, April 25, we will apply a security update to two Drupal 8 sites shortly after it is released. This will occur between 12:00 and 3:00pm EDT, which is 9:00am-12:00pm PDT. The Drupal project has posted a pre-release announcement of this update.

We do not anticipate any service interruption while the update is applied. Still, we advise you to have saved work in the sites prior to the scheduled update. We will post an announcement here when the update has been successfully applied, which will contain more information about the issue.

These are the sites affected:

  • https://www.middlebury.edu/institute
  • https://servicecatalog.middlebury.edu

Drupal Security Update – Wednesday, April 25

This Wednesday, April 25, we will apply a security update to all Drupal sites shortly after it is released. This will occur between 16:00 and 18:00 UTC, which is 12:00-2:00pm EDT or 9:00-11:00am PDT. The Drupal project has posted a pre-release announcement of this update.

We do not anticipate any service interruption while the update is applied. Still, we advise you to have saved work in the sites prior to the scheduled update. We will post an announcement here when the update has been successfully applied, which will contain more information about the issue.

These are the sites affected:

  • http://www.middlebury.edu
  • https://www.middlebury.edu/institute (Drupal 8)
  • http://courses.middlebury.edu
  • http://courses.miis.edu
  • https://forms.middlebury.edu
  • https://forms.miis.edu
  • http://menus.middlebury.edu
  • http://museum.middlebury.edu
  • http://nchousing.middlebury.edu
  • http://25threunion.middlebury.edu
  • http://newlibstuff.middlebury.edu
  • http://drupaltraining.middlebury.edu
  • http://www.davisprojectsforpeace.org
  • http://www.davisfellowsforpeace.org
  • http://www.davisuwcscholars.org

Drupal Security Update – Wednesday, March 28 Finished

Thank you for your patience as we applied this critical security update. Technical details are available on the Drupal project website. All sites now have this update applied and should be considered stable.

Update 3:54pm: There’s a missing dependency on the new Middlebury Institute website that we’re working to resolve, so the site may not be available, but should be secure.

Update 4:22pm: The Institute site should be available again.

Drupal Security Update – Wednesday, March 28

UPDATE, Monday, March 26: We do not anticipate any downtime during this change. We will apply a separate, non-security, maintenance update to the Middlebury Institute website Thursday morning at 9am EDT, 6am PDT, which will make the site unavailable for editors for a few minutes.

Next Wednesday, March 28, we will apply a security update to all Drupal sites shortly after it is released. This will occur between 18:00 and 19:30 UTC, which is 2:00-3:30pm EDT or 11:00am-12:30pm PDT. The Drupal project has posted a pre-release announcement of this update.

We do not anticipate any service interruption for people who are not logged in to our sites. It is unlikely that there will be an interruption for people logged in to our Drupal 7 sites, but more likely there will be a short interruption for people logged in to the Middlebury Institute’s Drupal 8 site. We advise you to have saved work in the sites prior to the scheduled update. We will post an announcement here when the update has been successfully applied, which will contain more information about the issue.

These are the sites affected:

  • http://www.middlebury.edu
  • https://www.middlebury.edu/institute (Drupal 8)
  • http://courses.middlebury.edu
  • http://courses.miis.edu
  • https://forms.middlebury.edu
  • https://forms.miis.edu
  • http://menus.middlebury.edu
  • http://museum.middlebury.edu
  • http://nchousing.middlebury.edu
  • http://25threunion.middlebury.edu
  • http://newlibstuff.middlebury.edu
  • http://drupaltraining.middlebury.edu
  • http://www.davisprojectsforpeace.org
  • http://www.davisfellowsforpeace.org
  • http://www.davisuwcscholars.org

Weekly Web Updates – December 19, 2016

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Improved the video shortcode processing in Drupal to handle additional forms of Vimeo URLs.
  • We’ve added Varnish caching in front of the New Library Items site, which should cause it to load much faster if it’s been visited recently.
  • There is a new “trainee” role in the Drupal Training website, which includes everyone with an account to better ensure that permission to use the site is limited to people signed in through CAS.
  • We have limited the allowed file types for uploaded files in Drupal to include common image and document formats.
  • Older versions of the Middlebury Student Life site should no longer get indexed by search engines. We are working on removing old copies of their content in a way that does not impact the live site.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • A small redesign of the Middlebury News Room to bring it more inline with the newsletter.
  • Building out the configuration of our Omeka, CAS and Course Catalog servers in Chef, which is a configuration management system. We have already completed this work for our Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, and GO services.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Providing Course Hub access for Schools Abroad courses.