Author Archives: Adam Franco

Weekly Web Updates – August 21

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Updated the styles for left and right aligned Vimeo video embeds in Drupal to resolve an issue that was causing them to disappear in the latest version of Chrome.
  • Fixed an issue that preventing the WYSIWYG editor from appearing in WordPress if the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin was enabled.
  • The bbPress plugin for WordPress no longer permits sites to allow anonymous posting.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • Creating a new automatically generated course catalog.
  • 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.

Weekly Web Updates – August 7th

Updates

  • WordPress core (4.8.1).
  • WordPress Redirection plugin.
  • WordPress JetPack plugin.
  • WordPress NextGen Gallary plugin.
  • WordPress Akismet plugin

Fixes and Tweaks

  • GO redirects to BannerWeb now won’t include GoogleAnalytics tracking codes that might cause errors in BannerWeb.
  • Assisted in deploying the new Middlebury Magazine site to its new URL.
  • Improved image caching for the Drupal sites.

Ongoing Work

  • Creating a new website for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • Creating a new automatically generated course catalog.
  • 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.

Weekly Web Updates – July 31

We’ve added the Mathematica Toolbox plugin to WordPress, which allows you to embed animations and graphics from that application. We have also added the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, which lets you create podcast feeds that will work in iTunes and embed playlists of your podcast in your posts. This replaces the TSG Podcasting plugin, which can no longer be enabled.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • If you are using the FlatOn theme in WordPress and set your homepage to be a single page, rather than a list of posts, the theme will now display that page without all the boilerplate content that the theme used to add.
  • Users of the L&ITS Wiki are now able to delete pages.
  • When viewing a single event in the Arts section of the Middlebury Drupal site, the featured image no longer wraps below the sidebar. Additional fixes made to the ArtsMail newsletter, removing the Google Tag Manager code and moving body content back into the short description.
  • Annual update to the Language Schools interest form to enable an additional graduation year.

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.

Weekly Web Updates – July 24

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.

Weekly Web Updates – July 17

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Fixed an issue with timezone conversion on the Arts Calendar listing views caused because dates and times are stored in the database as ES/DT but converted to GMT when used in comparisons, causing some events to appear in the wrong months.

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.

Weekly Web Updates – July 3

We’ve added a “Middlebury Google Fusion Tables” plugin to WordPress that allows you to embed content from that service.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

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.

Weekly Web Updates – July 3

Our colleagues in Communications found this really great guide to WCAG 2.0 Accessibility requirements. Each items has a short article explaining the standard in simple English with suggestions.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • References to the “News Room” were changed to the “Newsroom” in the global header and all locations on the Middlebury and MIIS Drupal sites.
  • Fixed an issue where the MIIS homepage was printing extra stories that were hidden, but may still have caused browsers to download extra assets.

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.