Weekly Web Updates – September 7, 2015

New Features

You can now add flashcards to your WordPress site. Enable the “Middlebury Flashcards” plugin on your site and then use this shortcode:

[flashcard front="bonjour" back="hello" width="130" height="130" font_size="20" text_color="#FFFFFF" bg_color="#000000"]

Only the “front” and “back” attributes are required. The values shown in the example will be used for the default values if those attributes are not supplied.

If you are using the “subscribe2″ plugin in WordPress you may have noticed that you get copied several times on the emails that are sent out when you publish a new post. This is because the plugin will use the”FROM” email as the “TO” address when sending to a large “BCC” list of subscribers. You can now change the default “FROM” address to “no-reply@” the current site domain.

If you’ve ever wanted to get an RSS feed of a single node on the Middlebury Drupal site, you can now do that using this address: http://www.middlebury.edu/middlebury-node-rss/%/rss.xml and replacing the ‘%’ character with the numeric ID of the node.

Updates

Tweaks and Fixes

  • When new course sites are created in Moodle via the Course Hub, we now set the start date of the course to the last Monday prior to the start date listed in Banner.
  • The Course Hub now handles any type of parsing error in the updates it gets from various resources and will not stop syncing updates after the first error. Additionally, the Course Hub’s sync process is now given sufficient time to complete.
  • The information shown in Middlebury Drupal profiles from the Online Directory was being cached “permanently” which meant it only got updated after we made a code change. It will now be updated every three hours, in line with our process to sync other user data from the Directory. Note that this means edits to your office hours may not show up right away, but will appear by the end of the day.
  • The “miis_alumni” view in Drupal, which is used on the MIIS website to display lists of stories related to alumni in various programs, can now be displayed with or without a pager element at the bottom of the list. This resolves a minor SEO issue where the view was included on pages with a lot of other content and the pager was creating a series of pages where most of the content was the same, in the eyes of search engine spiders.
  • The site slogan on the MIIS website was updated from “Be the Solution: Areas of Study” to “Professional Graduate Degrees for Global Action”.
  • Middlebury’s Study Abroad programs in the Course Information Database now include “Middlebury” in their program title.
  • When librarians save new versions of the Library Quick Search widget, the old version is now purged from the block, page, variable and theme caches in Drupal.
  • We have removed new visual styles applied to the President of the College site last month.
  • There’s a new version of the header graphic for the ArtsMail newsletter.

Accessibility Fixes

  • The image button for the List Manager subscription form in Drupal now uses the proper “alt” attribute to contain the text for the button, rather than the incorrect “value” attribute.
  • All instances of the “b” and “i” elements in Drupal theme code have been replaced with “strong” and “em”, respectively. In addition, any instances of those elements in user-supplied content will be replaced with “strong” or “em”.
  • If the image rollover for the links in the global Middlebury Drupal footer doesn’t load, the links will be underlined to visually indicate that they are links.
  • The HTML element in all of our Drupal sites will now include the “lang” attribute in addition to the “xml:lang” attribute. The latter is not recognized by all screenreader software.