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Information Technology Services

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Spring 2022 Quarterly Web Update from Web Services

| by Aaron Smith, Adam Franco, Pooja Gunturu, and Ian McBride

For Staff, Service Improvements

Greetings Middlebury Community,

We are writing to update you on our continued and exciting progress with all of Middlebury’s Drupal websites. Our goal, as always, is to be as supportive and responsive as possible to all your web needs, and we encourage you to reach out to us with any questions.

Look for our next update next fall!

In this update, we will address the following:

  • New Features
    • Adding Scholarly Identities on Profiles
    • Using Custom Footers
    • Listing Multiple Advisors in Course Hub
  • Newly Launched Sites
    • We are nearly finished with all of our academic departments, and planning to launch the college and institution homepages in the coming months.
  • Drupal Updates
    • From module updates to specific improvements in the Schools and Offices.
  • WordPress Updates
    • New themes and plug-in updates

New Features

See our other ITS news articles about each of these:

New Sites

Updates

Drupal

Module Updates

General Changes

  • Course listings on instructor profiles and department sites are now sorted by their subject code and course number to make them easier to parse and group similar courses.
  • Improved the speed with which course listings are refreshed from the Catalog.
  • Removed a typographic setting that set the font size of consecutive capital letters (like “VT”) to have a font size slightly smaller than normal.
  • Top Level pages will no longer show an empty horizontal nav bar below the featured image if there are no navigation items.
  • Added a new “Curated Course List” component to support IGS, ES, and other interdisciplinary programs.
  • Fixed a bug in the course lists where duplicated courses weren’t collapsed by default.
  • Resolved an issue where the editable CTA footer block’s editing controls were not visible.
  • Removed asset-packagist.org as a source of third party code libraries.
  • The media file field on the Audio component is now optional so that it may serve mp3s from third party URLs in the cases where that is necessary, primarily for Panopto.
  • Enabled the PHP OPcache on all Drupal servers to enhance performance.

Course Hub

  • Replaced Course Warning email with CARE form instructions for undergrad. The Dean of Students office is now using the “Symplicity Advocate” system for tracking course warnings in addition to other events related to student welfare. The Course Hub now directs instructors to submit course warnings via the new form.

Institute

  • Re-enabled the block_content_permissions module which allows certain user roles to manage the content of site-wide “blocks” such as the deadline calls to action on program pages. This malfunctioned during the Drupal 9 upgrade but appears to work again.
  • Set up a new site, deadline block, and Pardot form option for the Online IEM program.
  • Set up a new site for TILM.
  • Added a new option to the Pardot form component for Joint MPA/International Education Management.
  • The Pardot form component now allows the editor to select more than one program of interest, which will display as a dropdown on the form allowing the user to select their program. Additionally, the program names are stored as tags so that editors can update them if needed without contacting ITS.
  • Added a “honeypot” field to the Pardot form component to prevent spam submissions.
  • Resolved an issue with certain program pages not being editable due to stray database entries from the removal of two joint program menus.

News and Announcements

  • Added images to the RSS feed produced by the site and removed authors.
  • Ensure that the Text component is the first one selected in the list when editing Stories.
  • Added a Search form to the top of the main navigation element.

Offices and Services

  • Fixed an issue where links to PDF documents in Text components were not linking to the document due to the misconfiguration of a text filter.
  • Migrated all remaining content from the Davis Project for Peace site into their new office website and included a sortable list of the project data.
  • Separately from the above PDF linking issue, resolved the linking to newly upload Project for Peace proposal PDFs which rendered incorrectly due to differences in storage.
  • Corrected an issue where new Project for Peace pages could not be published because the Draft/Published/Archived workflow dropdown was not included on their edit form.

Schools Abroad

  • Set up a new site for the School Abroad in Puerto Rico.

College

  • Set up a new site for Commencement 2022.
  • Added redirects from the old site to several new academic department sites for their faculty profiles which were not included in the initial migration.

WordPress

New themes and Plugins

Plugin and Theme Updates

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Information Technology Services

Davis Family Library 202
Middlebury, VT 05753