Quarterly Communications

What’s New

Update to sites.miis.edu

• WordPress hosting moved and features added: All sites.middlebury.edu and sites.miis.edu sites have now been migrated to our WordPress hosting vendor, CampusPress. This provides a lot of new and updated WordPress features and we encourage people running WordPress sites or those interested in setting up their own website to investigate this service and its many options.

Updates to our Drupal Websites

• Show more on your Event Lists: the Curated and Dynamic Event Calendar List components now support showing the entire body of content for the event, rather than just the teaser. This was added for lists of film screenings where the body of the event includes important information like a synopsis and trailer video, but can be used for any type of event list. Additionally, we now display the admission price, if applicable, for event using these components.
• Date Ranges for Event Lists: the Dynamic Event Calendar List now has a Start and End Date field that can be used to scope the list of events to a specific time period. This is useful if your area hosted a series of events like a symposium that you want to highlight on your site and don’t want updated with other event information.
• Chaptered Navigation for Stories: the Story content type now has access to the “Chaptered” checkbox that was already on Basic Content. When checked, this creates a table of contents to the right side of the page with links to each “Heading 2” line in the Story.
• Course Lists available on all sites: you can now add a Course List or Curated Course List to any of our sites. This allows you to display lists of courses from a school associated with the site. 
• Improved Syncing of Content: syncing enrollments and users on the Course Hub, and profile and event information on our other sites, uses an improved queue systems that ensures these processes run on schedule and complete without error, while providing reporting to admin users.

New Websites

We partnered with the following offices and departments to help improve their websites: Humanities for All Times, Measles Information, Prism Center for Queer and Trans Life, Class Deans, Academic Resources at the Middlebury Institute, Military Spouses, Facts and Faces at the Middlebury Institute.

Reporting Issues with a Website

We added a button in the institutional footer that makes it easier to report an issue with one of our websites. We know that sometimes you are looking for information on a site you don’t have access to edit and run into a broken link or similar issue and would like to let someone know so it can be fixed, but it’s not clear who to contact. This button will provide a central clearing house for those queries.

Ongoing SiteImprove Workshops

We continue to offer workshops to help our Drupal editors make better use of SiteImprove, an important tool that can help us all easily and effectively improve our Drupal websites. Let us know if you and other editors in your group would like to set up a workshop!

As an aside, we’re seeing an increase in broken links being reported on the sites. Please make sure you are taking a look at your report, and let us know if you need a refresher session on SiteImprove.

What’s Next

Every quarter we publish our updated Web Roadmap of changes we expect to make within that time period. We also summarize changes we anticipate happening in the upcoming calendar year, and beyond. See what we have planned for our public websites and other applications.

Education and Training

Education

Did you know that we’re continually adding and updating our library of Drupal support material? This documentation is an excellent resource to help you improve your Drupal expertise.

Submitting a Ticket

If you can’t find what you need in our documentation, we are here to support you—just request help and we’ll be in touch within one business day.

Training

We offer several options for workshops. From Drupal training to using SiteImprove. Check out the latest. 

HighEdWeb Membership

Middlebury recently joined HighEdWeb with an institutional membership. Membership benefits are available to anyone with a middlebury.edu email address. Join now through our Middlebury membership. Benefits for you include access to the following:

• Professional Development Library 
• Community groups and networking
• Discounts on professional development
• Career and team-building opportunities

Updates

Drupal

General Changes

• Stories can now use the “Chaptered” navigation option which adds links on the right to any Heading 2 on the page.
• You can now choose to show the full event body content on Curated and Dynamic Event Calendar Lists. This was requested for lists of film screenings where the body of the event includes important information, such as a synopsis and trailer, not included in the teaser.
• The Course List and Curated Course List components are now available on all sites. Each site can show courses from one of our catalogs. On most sites this will be the undergraduate college (MCUG) catalog, but on sites where it makes sense it will be a different catalog, such as with language schools (MCLS).
• The “author” and “og:author” meta tags will now have the value of the “Byline” field as their default value on the Story content type and collection content types based on Story. These tags no longer have a default value on other content types which do not have byline fields, but a value can be manually added to any piece of content while editing.
• The CTA Group component can now be used on Basic Content.
• The Dynamic Event Calendar List component now has a date range field that allows you to scope the list of events show to a specific timeframe.
• The “Add another component” button was larger than it is supposed to be.
• The admission price information is now displayed as part of the event teaser on dynamic and curated event lists.
• Added a colon to the formatted date and time of the metadata included on Event pages to fix an issue where Google was not parsing the timezone correctly for its search result pages.
• Resolved compatibility issues between the scheduler and scheduler_content_moderation_integration modules which prevented the scheduling of stories.
• Resolved an issue that was preventing profiles from updating with new course lists and FAQ “New” badges from updating.
• The process that fetches information from the Online Directory to keep profiles up-to-date now uses the same Advanced Queue system in place for enrollment syncs on the Course Hub and is able to access the Directory API through the new authentication layer.
• Allow embeds from hudl.com.
• Removed the “Was this page helpful?” and associated helpfulness module. This component was only being used by one of our sites and had not collected any useful information for several years. It was being targeted by people trying to inject spam or hack our sites.
• Removed the allowed_formats and block_content_permissions modules whose functions are now included in Drupal core.
• Removed the imageapi_optimize module which does not work in our new hosting environment.
• Improved the build process for the site on deployment by directly fetching frontend assets from GitHub and only including the Google API services we need to access Google Drive.

Campaign Website

• Allowed the Your Impact newsroom to be sorted arbitrarily, rather than chronologically.

Course Hub

• Switch to a new system to queue syncs for enrollments and users to better guarantee the processes finish and can be reported on. There is now an admin report on syncs and the sync schedule is configurable.

Davis UWC Scholars

• Allow new items to be added to the Collection Authors vocabulary.
• Added a “Site Editor Log-in” link to the footer.

Middlebury Institute

• Changed all Area of Focus, Audience, Center, and Program content to Top Level and all Chart Page and Profile Listing content to Basic Content. Removed the deprecated content types.
• Reorganized the CTEC newsrooms, adding a separate vocabulary for CTEC Publications.
• Resolved an issue where the menu was not displayed correctly on MIIS pages using one of their special content types, such as Program or Center.

“Offices” Websites 

• Transformed office footers to use the new footer style and removed the old style.
• Removed the report and proposal PDFs and the names of students from the Projects for Peace site after numerous reports of students being harassed due to the mention of their participation.
• Fixed permissions so that editors can access, review, and revert revisions.
• Ensure that the contact information sidebar is not displayed on Athletics event form pages.
• Added new sites for Energy 2028, Measles, Special Events, and an Example Office.

Drupal Core Update

• Drupal 10.2.5, 10.2.6, 10.2.7, 10.3.0

Module Updates

• address 2.0.1
• allowed_formats 3.0.0
• anchor_link 3.0.0-beta1
• auto_entitylabel 8.x-3.2
• better_exposed_filters 6.0.5, 6.0.6
• chosen 4.0.1
• color_field 3.0.1
• config_filter 8.x-2.6
• config_ignore 8.x-3.3
• config_split 2.0.1
• ctools 4.0.4
• diff 8.x-1.3, 8.x-1.4
• draggableviews 2.1.4
• entity_embed 8.x-1.6
• eva 3.1.0
• file_mdm 3.1.0
• google_tag 2.0.5
• jquery_ui 8.x-1.7
• jquery_ui_datepicker 2.1.0
• jquery_ui_touch_punch 1.1.1
• layout_builder_browser 8.x-1.7
• layout_builder_restrictions 8.x-2.20, 3.0.0
• link_attributes 2.1.0
• linkit 6.1.4
• menu_block 8.x-1.11
• menu_select 2.0.0-rc4
• metatag 2.0.0
• monolog 3.0.3
• override_node_options 8.x-2.8
• pantheon_advanced_page_cache 2.2.0
• scheduler 2.0.2, 2.0.3
• security_review 3.0.1
• simple_sitemap 4.1.9
• token 8.x-1.14
• upgrade_status 4.3.1, 4.3.2
• views_bulk_operations 4.2.7
• views_menu_children_filter 3.0.0-rc4
• webprofiler 10.1.7, 10.1.8

WordPress

Going forward, WordPress updates will only apply to middleburymagazine.com. Our sites.middlebury.edu instance is now on CampusPress. View the CampusPress changelog.

• WordPress 6.5, 6.5.3, 6.5.4

WordPress Plugin and Theme Updates

• accelerate theme 1.5.2
• auto-post-thumbnail plugin 4.0.0
• beehive-analytics plugin 3.4.12
• co-authors-plus plugin 3.6.0, 3.6.1
• cryout-theme-settings plugin 0.5.15
• disqus-comment-system plugin 3.1.1
• enhanced-tooltipglossary plugin 4.3.0, 4.3.3, 4.3.6, 4.3.7
• feedwordpress plugin 2024.0511
• foogallery plugin 2.4.15, 2.4.16
• foobox-image-lightbox 2.7.28
• hueman theme 3.7.25
• instagram-feed plugin 6.3.1
• jetpack plugin 13.3, 13.3.1, 13.4.2, 13.4.3, 13.5
• ml-slider plugin 3.70.1, 3.70.2, 3.80.0
• nextgen-gallery plugin 3.59.1, 3.59.2, 3.59.3
• post-types-order plugin 2.2.1, 2.2.3
• responsive theme 5.0.3, 5.0.3.1, 5.0.4, 5.0.5, 5.0.6
• simplybook plugin 1.1, 1.2
• social-icons-widget-by-wpzoom plugin 4.2.18
• subscribe2 plugin 10.42
• sydney theme 2.36, 2.37, 2.38
• sydney-toolbox 1.28, 1.30, 1.31, 1.32
• the-events-calendar plugin 6.3.6, 6.3.7, 6.4.0, 6.4.0.1, 6.5.0, 6.5.0.1
• twentyeleven theme 4.6
• twentyfifteen theme 3.7
• twentyfourteen theme 3.9
• twentynineteen theme 2.8
• twentyseventeen theme 3.6
• twentysixteen theme 3.2
• twentyten theme 4.1
• twentythirteen theme 4.1
• twentytwelve theme 4.2
• twentytwenty theme 2.6
• wp-accessibility plugin 2.1.8, 2.1.9
• wptouch plugin 4.3.58, 4.3.59

Online Directory

• In order to reduce harassment, spam, and phishing attempts, the Directory now requires you to log in using a Middlebury account before using the system.

MediaWiki

• Shut down this service. Redirects are in place for the old L&ITS wiki content, as well as several other wikis. If you would like to set up a wiki, this is supported in SharePoint sites, as well as sites.middlebury.edu.