We are happy to announce that the Course Hub has gained a new feature: profiles for users with the ability to record your name pronunciation in both audio and text. Further detailed in the ITS knowledge base, this feature will present name pronunciation and preferred pronouns to instructors in the Course Hub’s class-rosters. Likewise, instructor name pronunciation will be shown to students on course-overview pages.
The Directory will now display students’ Dean assignment in place of their old Commons assignment. This can be viewed in the rightmost column where Department is displayed for faculty and staff records, or on individual listings. The Dean assignment is only shown when using the Directory on campus, over the VPN, or if you log in to the Directory using the “Log In” link at the top right.
The event schedule component on Drupal 8 sites now allows you to add a featured image, a call to action button, and associate multiple people with the event.
WordPress change announcement: In the coming week we will change sites.middlebury.edu and sites.miis.edu to use encrypted HTTPS for all browsing rather than letting sites be browsed under both HTTPS and unencrypted HTTP connections. This change will improve security for all users and is a prerequisite for an improved single-sign-on process.
All URLs will be automatically redirected to HTTPS version and the impact on the vast majority of sites should should be minimal. That said, with over 5,000 sites in the system there are likely cases where some browsers will block the inclusion of some content has been hard-coded to load using an HTTP URL. In these cases, the resolution is to update the embedded content to use https:// URLs instead of http:// URLs. Because of the scale of content in this system it is not possible for us to exhaustively audit all sites and pages. Users can test their own sites by navigating to the site and changing the address in their browser’s URL bar from http://sites.middlebury.edu/… to https://sites.middlebury.edu/… Please report any issues found or questions via a Help Desk ticket.
This week we launched the new Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences website. This is the final website launch for a school or affiliated program. The remainder of our content will be part of the undergraduate college or institutional offices sites. There is also a new site for the return to campus this Fall.
