Author Archives: Steven Nelson, Ian McBride, Adam Franco and Jonathan Maddix

Weekly Web Updates – May 8

An update on the state of the Drupal project, from last week’s conference, can be seen here. Highlights are that the six month release cycle is working well and that the next version of Drupal will maintain backwards compatibility, enabling easier upgrades.

There is an ongoing discussion of updating the Drupal project mission statement to reflect the new vision that “Drupal is for ambitious digital experiences”, which could help us explain when to use that tool compared to others we offer.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Re-saved the configuration of all reference fields on the Museum of Art Drupal site to ensure that new content can be saved when the field is empty.
  • Added a new view display which will show only five related stories, rather than the 10 shown by default on the MIIS Drupal site program pages.
  • The MiddSTART site now has an “anticipated funds” field for projects, so that funding which has not yet reached the Banner reports can be displayed on the site.
  • Course Hub term builders now have expanded permissions allowing them to create resources.
  • Fixed Course Hub issue that was preventing links to non-standard terms from working correctly.
  • Fixed WYSIWYG editor issue triggered by a recent update.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • Archiving Moodle.
  • 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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – May 1

Updates

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • 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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – April 24, 2017

Several of us will be in Baltimore this week attending DrupalCon 2017. The keynote sessions are typically streamed live and videos of the session talks are usually posted by the end of the day.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Reference fields on the Museum of Art site were migrated to Drupal’s entityreference module. The old references module was uninstalled from the Course Hub and Drupal forms sites, removing the ability to add tags to images on those sites.
  • Fixed an issue where the “click to expand” links on the top right of news story images weren’t working in the Middlebury Drupal site.
  • A few additional fixes to ensure that HTML in excerpts on the MiddSTART and MiddGOAL sites is not corrupted when loaded in the WYSIWYG editor.
  • The Panopto Embed plugin is now enabled by default on sites.miis.edu.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • 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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – April 17, 2017

There is a SiteImprove extension for Chrome that can help editors catch broken links in their Drupal sites. We are reviewing a module to add this directly into Drupal for people who use other browsers.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Staff who take summer courses in the Language Schools will now display with their staff contact information during the both the summer and academic year on the Online Directory.
  • Pages in Drupal with multiple sidebar sub-pages will now show the “[Edit]” and “[Edit hidden]” links at the top of the sidebar region so that extra sidebar page can be removed.
  • Fixed an issue with HTML excerpts on the MiddSTART site.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • 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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – April 10, 2017

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • The Classifieds site was taking too long to sync accounts, causing some people to be dropped from the site. We’ve changed the process so that it moves in users one group at a time, allowing the full list of accounts to get added.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • 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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – April 3, 2017

The embed code on MiddMedia no longer includes a Flash player option. We will be retiring the Adobe Flash Media Server and moving to strictly HTML5 video, which works on all modern browsers, mobile browsers, and Internet Explorer 9+.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • The event content type on the Middlebury Drupal site now has an “anchor” field allowing direct links to events when they are shown in a list view.
  • Several minor updates to the inquiry form on the Language Schools site, including addition of fields for collecting current university and degree sought.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • 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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – March 27, 2017

We upgraded the server that runs omeka.middlebury.edu. This server is now using the Chef server configuration tool to manage settings so that we can ensure proper change management over its setup.

The WordPress project is conducting a poll about the editor you use when writing posts:

We’ve upgraded the Google Custom Search engine used on our Drupal sites to version 2 of their API, now that version 1 is no longer supported. A few styles were cleaned up, including removal of the double underlines for links in search results, but there should be no major changes with this upgrade. Please let us know if you experience issues with search on our Drupal sites.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Removed the field labels for the caption and subtitle fields on the Davis UWC profiles.
  • The “simple HTML” text format in the Middlebury Drupal site, used for event blurbs, now allows setting text styles, such as “fine print”.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • 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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – March 20, 2017

During the closure of the college due to weather last week we had an opportunity to test out the emergency alert banner on the website, which worked. We’ve added some padding to it to ensure the the messages are easier to read.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Added an instruction to the robots.txt file for the Middlebury Drupal site asking search engines not to index the HR job descriptions archive there, since we prefer the version of those items located on the hiring site.

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).