We’ve made several chances to the front-end performance of the Drupal cluster to reduce page load times. All static text files served, including favicons, are now compressed before being inserted into the front-end caches. Additionally, we now instruct client browsers to store the CSS and JavaScript files produced by Drupal for up to two weeks, rather than only five minutes. New URLs for these files are generated when we clear the site cache, which happens any time we deploy an update, which will cause browsers to fetch the new files. Images served by some high-level pages on the MIIS site were also optimized.
Updates
- Drupal token_language 8.x-1.x-dev
- Drupal viewsreference 8.x-1.0-rc2
- WordPress BadgeOS: 1.4.8.3.
- WordPress BBPress 2.5.13
- WordPress enable-media-replace 3.1
- WordPress wysija-newsletters 2.7.11.1
- WordPress post-expirator 2.3.1
- WordPress post-types-order 1.9.3.3
- WordPress the-events-calendar 4.5.8.1
- WordPress social-icons-widget-by-wpzoom 3.0.0
WordPress members 2.0
Fixes and Tweaks
- The “short description” of all events in the Arts section was moved to the body field so that the short description can be used to override the body for the ArtsMail email newsletter, which also had its template updated and a new view created to make it easier to assemble.
- Added a [mailchimp URL] shortcode to Drupal so that MailChimp campaign embeds can be added to the site.
- Moved the MiddSafe Advocates information to its new location in the Health and Wellness Education site and set up redirects for the old URLs.
- Fixed an issue were the Drupal login page would sometimes break if it thought it should display a carousel.
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.