Author Archives: Steven Nelson

Weekly Web Updates – May 15

We now support SoundCloud embeds in our Drupal sites using the shortcode used for other multimedia embeds.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Ensured that the R25 Promotional Calendar content is still displayed in sidebars where it is the only piece of content.
  • The college shield is now used in lieu of a photo on profiles when the user isn’t found in the directory (had been incorrectly using the old college seal in this case).

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 8

An update on the state of the Drupal project, from last week’s conference, can be seen here. Highlights are that the six month release cycle is working well and that the next version of Drupal will maintain backwards compatibility, enabling easier upgrades.

There is an ongoing discussion of updating the Drupal project mission statement to reflect the new vision that “Drupal is for ambitious digital experiences”, which could help us explain when to use that tool compared to others we offer.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Re-saved the configuration of all reference fields on the Museum of Art Drupal site to ensure that new content can be saved when the field is empty.
  • Added a new view display which will show only five related stories, rather than the 10 shown by default on the MIIS Drupal site program pages.
  • The MiddSTART site now has an “anticipated funds” field for projects, so that funding which has not yet reached the Banner reports can be displayed on the site.
  • Course Hub term builders now have expanded permissions allowing them to create resources.
  • Fixed Course Hub issue that was preventing links to non-standard terms from working correctly.
  • Fixed WYSIWYG editor issue triggered by a recent update.

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 1

Updates

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

Weekly Web Updates – June 27, 2016

Our team spent much of last week finding and fixing a number of errors related to the Drupal production environment migration to Chef.  If any additional errors pop up that we might not have caught, please let us know via the Helpdesk.

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • A “More Link” field has been added to the rss_page content type on www.middlebury.edu.
  • We copied over some missing rewrite rules for www.miis.edu from our old Drupal cluster.
  • The URL fragment has changed from “studentlife” to “student-life” on forms.middlebury.edu.
  • The case in FetchProxy where multiple entries existed for the same header is now being properly handled.
  • After our production environment switch, Course Hub roster photos were failing to sync. This has now been fixed.
  • Fixed an issue in the Course Hub that prevented instructors from being able to create spaces for lab/discussion sections.
  • An Runtime Error has been resolved on directory.middlebury.edu, when attempting to view a list of results in which one row did not contain an email field.
  • The WordPress language files have been updated.

Weekly Web Updates – May 23, 2016

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • A problem with Drupal’s video_filter module failing to correctly parse YouTube pop-up overlays on our Drupal sites has been resolved.
  • The Open Video Overlay class is now available when creating hyperlinks on www.middlebury.edu.
  • The photo enlarge functionality on www.miis.edu upper right images has been fixed, and captions will now appear underneath the popped up image, if the image title or description fields are set.
  • The list of GO links sorted by destination now sorts by destination, instead of the code’s description. The code’s destination also now prints next to the first alias.
  • When running the Course Hub’s site building/update functionality, custom page settings granting extra resources to certain programs piloting those resources will now be properly retained.

Weekly Web Updates – April 18, 2016

WordPress 4.5

The key features of this release include:

  • A less distracting inline link interface
  • Formatting shortcuts for horizontal lines and <code> tags
  • Live responsive previews when customizing themes
  • Custom logo support
  • Smart image resizing; images now load up to 50% faster

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • An excess memory usage problem caused by excessive fetching of revisions within Jetpack’s custom CSS module has been resolved.
  • PIDM and 8-digit ID’s have been exposed via CAS and CAS_Directory for use in the Course Hub.
  • Guests can now be granted the ability to log into some Drupal sites [Course Hub] without requiring that all guests have their accounts auto-created.
  • The CAS user sync now works when users’ languages are greater than five characters.

Weekly Web Updates – August 31, 2015

New Features

  • The WordPress Next Page plugin has been added to provide shortcodes and template tags for next/previous navigation in pages. The plugin includes a shortcode and tag for the parent page, allowing Drupal-like book navigation.
  • A new Omeka plugin for displaying a login bar on the top of Omeka sites has been added and is available for use.

Updates

Tweaks and Fixes

Several changes were made to the Middlebury Institute site, including:

  • The home page has an updated set of slider items.
  • A “read more” link was added below the news stories region on the home page.
  • The site has updated MBA redirects to match explicit paths, rather than “starts with”.
  • Additional top-margin space on 3rd level menus has been added.

Other fixes this week:

  • The Term filter on Study Abroad’s Course Information Database has been removed because it wasn’t relevant for most searches.
  • We added filters to sort Alumni Profiles by Major and/or Class Year.
  • A fatal error that was occurring on Course Hub dashboards when one of the courses had a Syllabus link has been fixed.