To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.
Drupal
- News items in RSS feeds are themed as they are on the website. This support will be expanded to other content types over time. Images from News items are added as enclosures in the RSS feed. See the Middlebury News archive feed for an example.
- We’ve added a module to allow conditional email recipients for forms. When creating an email for your form, you can specify that the email will be sent based on the value of one of the fields.
- Modules update: feeds
- Drupal version update: Pressflow 6.22.104 (fixes an issue where URLs for files and images were relative to the site, rather than including the host name).
MiddMedia
- Added support for m4a files. Users can now upload m4a audio files. The application will preview them (with any associated images) and will generate embed code for them. Quicktime is required to preview these files.
- Embed code generated for video files now uses HTML5 embed tags that reference the mp4 and webm versions of the videos for HTML5 compliant browsers. All others will fall back to a Flash player (currently Strobe player).
- Constrained widths of elements of the main file listing table. Before long file names could force the table below the sidebar. Now the elements should remain positioned correctly despite the size of the contents.
SubjectsPlus
- Created a “Summon” pluslet. It is now available for use in subject guides from the “add a pluslet” drag and drop interface.
WordPress
- Added support for embedding m4a files from MiddMedia. Safari users will see the m4a in an HTML5 video player, allowing you to display chapter images. Users of other browsers will see a download link, allowing them to open the file in a desktop application, like iTunes or in the browser window if they have the QuickTime plugin installed.
- Added WP RSS Images plugin which adds image enclosures to the blog’s RSS feed. If you set a Featured Image on the post, it will be added as an enclosure in the feed. See the Middlebury Magazine feed for an example.
- Added the OnSwipe plugin which enables a special WordPress theme for iPads. See MiddBlog for an example.
- We have removed the cforms plugin that allowed you to create custom forms in WordPress. This has been replaced by webforms in Drupal.
- The BLOGS DOT MIDDLEBURY bar at the top of the page will not be displayed for blogs whose URL does not include sites.middlebury.edu. We have the ability, using a domain mapping plugin, to host sites on our instance of WordPress that display a different domain name in the address bar. Since these don’t appear as part of sites.middlebury.edu, that bar doesn’t get displayed.
- Plugins updated: wptouch, geo-mashup
- WordPress version update: 3.1.4 (security release)