Author Archives: Adam Franco

Weekly Web Updates – May 21, 2018

The WordPress project has just provided a new release focused on Privacy and GDPR compliance. Read all about it.

GDPR

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Fixed content-caching for the Institute site that broke last week and was preventing edits from being visible to anonymous users.

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Upgrading CAS to 5.2.9
  • Creating a photo sharing platform for the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference

Weekly Web Updates – May 14, 2018

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Reorganized the Institute site’s file structure for easier updates and improved security.

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Upgrading CAS to 5.2.3
  • Creating a photo sharing platform for the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference

Weekly Web Updates – May 7, 2018

Changes to the Google Maps API Licensing

Google has announced that after June 11 they will require additional verification and possibly cost for using the Google Maps API. If you signed up for an API key you should have received an email with information about this change. We recommend moving to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) plugin in our WordPress environment.

If you are using the Google Maps API and will need it to continue working after June 11, please contact us with the URL of the site where you’re using it.

Uploading Large Images to WordPress

We’ve recently received reports from several people having trouble uploading large images to our WordPress sites. If your image is larger than 4500×4500 pixels in dimension, our WordPress sites may not be able to generate a thumbnail of it with the resource limits we allow. The image will still appear in your media library and can be used in posts, but some features may not work without a thumbnail, like image gallery plugins.

After the end of the current semester, we’ll be working on some performance improvements to WordPress that may allow us to increase the resources available. Until then, we recommend resizing your image to less than 4500×4500 pixels in dimension before uploading it to WordPress.

Updates

These updates were applied in development, put are waiting until Thursday, May 10 for a database update to be applied to production.

Fixes and Tweaks

  • MediaWiki was moved to a new server with PHP 7.1 installed.
  • SiteImprove had trouble crawling our site on Tuesday, April 17 and has had intermittent crawling since then. We’ve worked with them to increase their crawl rate and fix issues. SiteImprove reports should be going out as normal now.
  • We’ve fixed a glitch that was preventing course groups in the Course Hubs from updating from Banner so add/drops should be flowing through to the Hubs again.
  • Added CAS support for PeopleGrove.

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Upgrading CAS to 5.2.3

Weekly Web Updates – April 30, 2018

This week we applied another round of critical security updates to both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.  There is more information about the upgrades here.

This week we experienced issues with the printable course catalog going offline.  A temporary fix has been issued but we are waiting for the end of class registration to tamper with the live version.

Updates

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Upgrading CAS to 5.2.3

Weekly Web Updates – April 23, 2018

On Monday, April 16, the shared drive used to store files for our Drupal sites filled up, preventing new files from being uploaded and causing logins to the Course Hub sites to fail. We’ve added monitoring to ensure that we’re alerted ahead of time that this resource is close to filling up so it can be expanded again, if needed, without causing a service interruption.

Updates

* We use the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor in Drupal 7, rather than CKEditor, so the Drupal 7 version of this release did not apply to our environment.

Fixes and Tweaks

  • We removed the middlebury-preformatted WordPress plugin and the altitude-pro theme, neither of which were in active use.
  • The Arts calendar view now uses image thumbnails to improve page load time.
  • The robots.txt file for the new Institute site was merged into the robots.txt file that lives in the root of the main Middlebury website, to ensure both sets of directives are honored.
  • Helped ensure that a course from the Arts Division appears in the Theatre section of the Course Catalog.

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Upgrading CAS to 5.2.3

Weekly Web Updates – April 9, 2018

Removed WordPress Themes

In our efforts to upgrade WordPress to run on PHP 7.1 we continue to identify and remove unworking or unused plugins and themes.  This week we removed the following themes:

  • aluminiumism
  • clipboard
  • dfblog
  • garland
  • grey
  • neonsential
  • rockinnewspaper
  • shapeshifter-2

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

 

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Upgrading CAS to 5.2.3

Weekly Web Updates – April 2, 2018

Drupal 8.5.1 & 7.58

The Institute site has been upgraded to Drupal 8.5.1, addressing a security vulnerability.  For full documentation of changes, please see Drupal’s development log.  All systems utilizing Drupal 7 have been updated to 7.58, which addresses the same security concern.  More information is available here.

New WordPress Plugin

We have added the WordPress plugin WP Accessibility which adds a number of helpful accessibility features with a minimum amount of setup or expert knowledge. Some features include:

  • Add a toolbar toggling between high contrast, large print, and desaturated (grayscale) views of your theme.
  • Enable skip links with WebKit support by adding JavaScript support to move keyboard focus.
  • Add a long description to images. Use the image’s “Description” field to add long descriptions.

Removed WordPress Plugins

In continuing our upgrade of systems to PHP 7.1, we discovered several more WordPress plugins that are no longer in use or no longer working and removed them. These include:

  • WordPress Twitter Widget Pro
  • WordPress Status Updater
  • WordPress Middlebury Photo of the Week
  • WordPress Dipity Embedder
  • WordPress Delicious For WordPress
  • WordPress Custom Image Sizes
  • WordPress Audio Player

Removed Drupal Modules

As part of the upgrade to Drupal 8.5.1, the following plugins were deemed unneeded and removed.

  • Drupal Module Upgrader

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Searching the online directory by phone extension now produces more accurate results.

Ongoing Work

  • Fixes and tweaks for the new Institute site https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
  • Upgrading applications to run on PHP 7.1.
  • Upgrading the Drupal sites for the Davis programs, Dining Menus, and Museum of Art to Drupal 8.
  • Upgrading CAS to 5.2.3