This week we will be upgrading the Course Hub sites from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 before the beginning of the fall semesters. These upgrades will cause the Course Hub sites to be offline for approximately 2-3 hours while the database and configuration are upgraded.

The planned schedule is as follows:

• Tuesday, August 18th from 8am – 11am EDT (5am – 8am PDT) – http://courses.miis.edu/
• Thursday, August 20th from 7am – 10am EDT (4am – 7am PDT) – http://courses.middlebury.edu/

During these upgrades, direct access to Moodle, WordPress, SANSSpace, or other curricular tools will still work however new course spaces will not be able to be provisioned until the upgrades complete.

Since 2011 instructors have been able to view class rosters in the Course Hub, a feature many have used to help learn students’ names or quickly look up contact, Commons, or advisor information.

Web view of the course roster.

One thing we had not anticipated at the time is that instructors might print the roster to have a reference with them in class. Unfortunately, the rosters weren’t laid out with printing in mind and often flowed across pages in a not-very-compact way. Today, we are pleased to announce that class rosters now have improved styling that will lay-out the roster in a more compact grid when printing.

Old class roster print view.

New class roster print view

The Mozilla Foundation’s latest version of Firefox, version 34, has started running searches when you type go/mail into the address bar without prefixing with httpd:// or using the fully-qualified name go.middlebury.edu. This follows similar moves by Chrome and Safari to prefer searches over host-name lookups when there isn’t a fully-qualified domain name in the URL bar.

The good news is, that confirming the dialog to go to GO instead of to search will set a preference allowing GO shortcuts to continue to work:

If you forget to click the confirmation, it is possible to manually add the preference to make GO links work permanently. See the LIS Wiki for more details.