Author Archives: Adam Franco

Weekly Web Updates – June 26

We’ve removed the Sydney theme from the list of those which can be enabled on the Middlebury site network. This theme requires a custom plugin for most of its advanced functionality to work and we recommend people use a different theme for their sites.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Updated the copyright statement and carbon neutrality banner in the Sustainability site footer.
  • Extended the local browser cache lifetime of items served by cdn.middlebury.edu to two weeks and minified the MIIS site’s CSS files.
  • Removed the list of admission prices from the Dining Menus site.

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 – June 19

We have disabled the creation of WebM videos when new video files are uploaded to MiddMedia. The server was experiencing issues transcoding video to that format. Firefox and other browsers now natively support H.264, removing the requirement for a WebM alternative file.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Members of the “ADA Compliance” group will now automatically get added to WordPress sites created through the Course Hub so they can assist in making course materials accessible.
  • HTML files are no longer allowed to be uploaded to Drupal webforms and we’ve further limited the allowed files types that can be collected through submissions to these forms.
  • Fixed an issue in the Drupal WYSIWYG editor caused by the introduction of a new field for handling external media URLs which we don’t use.

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 – June 12

WordPress 4.8 features new sidebar widgets for images, videos, audio, and rich text. We’ve added support for these in the past through custom plugins and shortcodes, but it’s now part of the native experience with an improved user interface.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Applied padding updates to the CCI WordPress homepage.
  • Resolved an issue with the Middlebury TimelineJS Shortcode WordPress plugin which was not allowing timelines with hyphens in their ids.
  • Relocated the editorial style guide to GitHub.

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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – May 29

 

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Only sites.middlebury.edu/dmt/ will redirect to the Digital Media Tutor blog, allowing other WordPress sites to be created which begin with the letters “dmt”.
  • Removed a login form for ILLiad from the Drupal site and replaced with a direct link to the ILLiad login page.

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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – May 29

We are continuing to investigate an issue with uploading files in MediaWiki using the Embedded file button in the WYSIWYG editor. There appears to be a bug in the user API in recent versions of MediaWiki causing this. In the meantime, you can upload files to wikis using the “Special:Upload” page.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • The Directory now correctly decodes LDAP-escaped characters stored in fields, such as website URLs.
  • MediaWiki will no longer throw a mixed content security warning due to loading favicons.
  • Fixed an issue editing in Drupal with Chrome where images were not selectable in the WYSIWYG editor and image dimensions were not populated in the Edit Image dialog.

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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Weekly Web Updates – May 22

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • GO links now work even if there is a Google Analytics “Linker” code appended to the URL.

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.
  • Integrating Panopto (streaming videos) and Canvas (LMS).

Google Apps now available through the Course Hub

We are pleased to announce that instructors can now create Google Apps folders for their classes via the Course Hub. The following short video shows the process:

The Course Hub will create the class folder and share it with the instructors, students, and audits groups for your course section. The Hub also makes it easy to set the default role for students/audits: either “Reader” which can only view documents and files or “Writer” which allows students/audits to create and upload documents and files.

As recently announced, we hope to provide a similar integration for Office 365/OneDrive in the coming months.