We believe any Course Hub syncing issues mentioned in last week’s updates have been resolved and set up additional monitoring capabilities in the Course Hub administration interface so the situation can be better monitored going forward.

Updates

• Drupal views_slideshow 7.x-3.8
• WordPress Appointments 2.0.5
• WordPress Hueman theme 3.3.7
• WordPress Jetpack 4.7
• WordPress Responsive theme 2.1.1
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.4.4
• WordPress WPtouch 4.3.13.1

Fixes and Tweaks

• Resolved an issue on the Museum of Art site preventing editors from updating one of the fields.
• Added additional sanitization of user input on the Online Directory to ensure application security.
• Applied a change to the Middlebury School of the Environment homepage from our colleagues in Communications & Marketing.

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).

The Course Hub now includes sites for the Middlebury Schools Abroad.

We’re continuing to investigate an issue where some members of groups are dropped from Course Hub sites when the sync process runs around midnight. We’ve stopped syncing the Hub during this window and bypassing the errors, but are still searching for the underlying cause of the issue.

Updates

• Drupal media 7.x-2.0-rc12
• Drupal memcache 7.x-1.6
• Drupal mimedetect 7.x-1.1
• Drupal monster_menus 7.x-1.27
• Drupal views_slideshow 7.x-3.7
• WordPress 4.7.3
• WordPress Appointments 2.0.4
• WordPress CommentPress Core 3.9.3
• WordPress Espied theme 1.2.2
• WordPress Hueman theme 3.3.6
• WordPress MailPoet Newsletters 2.7.8
• WordPress Responsive theme 2.1

Fixes and Tweaks

• We’ve added a clean print stylesheet to the Commencement schedule page.
• The Students list on the Davis UWC website is now cached for an hour, which should make it load more quickly for returning visitors.
• The Facebook and Twitter icons on the New England Review site are no longer loaded through separate requests to the server, which prevents the site from occasionally hanging and taking ten seconds to load.
• Profile photos on the Middlebury site will now load smaller versions of the image, preventing very large original images from slowing down page loads. These new thumbnail versions are larger than the displayed proportions of the profile images, so you should not notice any visible difference.

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).

There is now an interactive Campus Map for MIIS, which you can find in the Quick Links section of their site header.

Updates

• Drupal views 7.x-3.15
• Drupal views_bulk_operations 7.x-3.3
• WordPress Akismet 3.3
• WordPress NextGEN Gallery 2.1.79
• WordPress Post Types Order 1.9.3
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.4.3
• WordPress WPtouch 4.3.12

Fixes and Tweaks

• We applied several changes to update links in applications to point at the address of the new Banner servers, including GO, the Course Catalog, and a few WordPress sites like MiddCORE. Links in our Drupal sites were updated to route the URLs through GO.
• The processes which sync data from Banner to external databases for the Online Donor Roll, MiddSTART, MiddGOAL, the Course Catalog, and MyEmma were also updated to connect to the new Banner hosting.

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.

Our mobile / portal site is now on version 2 of the Kurogo framework, has a different design and some new features like integration with the campus map.

We made several updates to the Course Catalog service. It now supports courses that occur in just part of a term and have customized start/end dates, like PE classes and some off-campus programs. Additionally, we’ve updated the font used to render schedules. Course codes can now include lower-case letters and we’ve added a robots.txt file to the service making it easier for search engines to crawl.

The Appointments+ plugin for WordPress is a significant upgrade from the version we had been running (1.4.4). If you had tried this plugin before and it didn’t meet your needs, the new version may be worth a second look.

Updates

• Drupal captcha 7.x-1.4
• Drupal metatag 7.x-1.21
• Drupal paranoia 7.x-1.7
• Drupal views_slideshow 7.x-3.6
• WordPress Academica theme 2.0.2
• WordPress Appointments+ 2.0.3
• WordPress Responsive theme 2.0

Fixes and Tweaks

• Fixed an issue where a link to a file would break in the Drupal WYSIWYG editor if the child element was also a file. For example, when an embedded image links to a PDF.
• We’ve updated the Google Calendar content type on our Drupal sites to handle more forms of the remote calendar URL, particularly from gmail.com.
• The code shown when clicking the HTML button in the WYSIWYG editor on the MIIS Drupal site is now indented.
• The Commencement Archive has moved to the Special Collections 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).
• Providing Course Hub access for Schools Abroad courses.

The client IP address will now be recorded in the Drupal Webform sites for form submissions from users who are not logged in. This information was previously left out due to the way our front-end caching system is configured.

Updates

• WordPress Authors 2.4.5
• WordPress CM Tooltip Glossary 3.5.0
• WordPress Enable Media Replace 3.0.6
• WordPress Jetpack 4.6
• WordPress Members 1.1.3
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.4.2
• WordPress WPtouch 4.3.11

Fixes and Tweaks

• Fixed an issue with the CategorySuggest MediaWiki plugin to ensure it works on the File Upload page.

Term end dates for Canvas sites created through the Course Hub are now twenty days past the official term end date to ensure that the site is accessible during that last day.

• Swapped the order of sidebar items on the Middlebury Newsroom to ensure Middlebury in the News appears first.
• Ensured the WYSIWYG configuration was correct on all the Drupal sites.
• Added role and aria-label markup to interface elements in the Middlebury Drupal site to improve our site accessibility.
• Removed a logo from the Middlebury Language Schools site footer.
• We are now logging all class-group additions and removals in the Hub to track down inconsistent enrollments reported by several users.

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.

The Course Hub now offers the Academic Integrity Tutorial as a shared Canvas resource which can be added to courses by the instructors.

We discovered an issue with the Course Hub communicating with WordPress through the newer version of CAS and delayed the CAS upgrade announced last week until we’re able to resolve or work around the problem.

Updates

• Drupal 7.54
• Drupal better_exposed_filters 7.x-3.4
• Drupal media 7.x-2.0-rc5
• MediaWiki EmbedVideo 2.6.0
• Omeka 2.5
• Omeka Bulk Metadata Editor 2.3
• Omeka Docs Viewer 2.1
• Omeka Exhibit Builder 3.3.3
• Omeka Geolocation 2.2.5
• Omeka Scripto 2.2
• WordPress Magic Liquidizer Responsive Table
• WordPress MailPoet Newsletters 2.7.7
• WordPress NextGEN Gallery 2.1.77
• WordPress Sydney theme 1.35
• WordPress WP Gallery Custom Links 1.12

Fixes and Tweaks

• Fixed and issue that was preventing Canvas rosters for MIIS spring classes from updating in a timely fashion.

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.

We are planning to upgrade the CAS Single Sign On service on Thursday, February 2. Users of the service should notice no interruption, but if you logged in to the older version and have an active session on Thursday morning, then go to log in to another CAS-connected service after the upgrade, you will need to enter your credentials again.

The list of CAS-connected services includes Web Helpdesk, WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, GO, the Course Catalog, CollegiateLink, MiddMedia, Lynda, Moodle, Kurogo, CRFAccess, the ITS ChangeTracker, the Online Directory, TerraDotta, EZProxy, SANSSpace, Midd Guests, Canvas, the ITS Project Dashboard, Omeka, the AD Group Manager, SpringShare LibAuth, and the Advocate Judicial System.

Updates

• Drupal token 7.x-1.7
• Drupal viewfield 7.x-2.1
• WordPress 4.7.2
• WordPress CommentPress Core 3.9.1
• WordPress Liveblog 1.5.2
• WordPress The Events Calendar 4.4.1.1

Fixes and Tweaks

• The 2017-2018 export set is now available in the Course Catalog.
• We fixed an issue with the Course Hub that was preventing instructors from adding Hub-spaces for lab/discussion classes via the “Manage Course Hub Sites” link on their 2017-Spring dashboards.
• Improved the nightly sync process run by the Course Catalog so that it uses significantly fewer resources writing new course data to the database to prevent the process from failing.
• The JSON API for the Course Catalog now prints the current term first if given a catalog.
• We’ve removed the List Manager subscription form from the News Room website, which will be replaced with a MyEmma subscription form.

Ongoing Work

• Developing a shared resource for Canvas in the Course Hub which provides the Academic Integrity Tutorial.
• 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.

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.