Sites at Lafayette Rotating Header Image

Welcome to Sites!

Sites hosts personal, club, and organization home pages at Lafayette College. A sister installation, called Depts, is being setup for WordPress-powered departmental web sites.

All traffic to the WordPress pilot site — wordpress.lafayette.edu — and the myriad blogs and sites hosted there is being automatically redirected to sites.lafayette.edu. We plan to maintain this redirection through December 2009.

Sites Update 8/4/2010

We’ve upgraded a number of plugins on WordPress:

  • Authors
  • Contact Form 7
  • PowerPress
  • Sidebar Login
  • More Privacy Options

We also upgraded the Mandigo theme; this fixes a problem with the theme settings page not appearing.

If you encounter problems with your web site after the upgrade, please contact the Help Desk:

WordPress 3 upgrade update

We noticed a few things not playing nicely with our installation of WordPress 3 and the Mandigo theme. We are working on remedies.

NextGen Gallery when used with the Mandigo theme: The JavaScript Thumbnail effect for galleries is not working for any of the effects except “Shutter,” so gallery thumbnails when clicked will display the full version of the image instead of within the “lightbox” pop up window. Also, using any other setting other than “Shutter” will prevent Manigo drop-down menus from displaying. We recommend you set your NextGen effect setting to “Shutter” in the meantime.

Mandigo Theme: The Theme Options and HTML Area settings are not accessible at the moment.

Sites Update 7/19/2010

Sites has been upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. There are a few cosmetic changes — you’ll notice that web sites are now referred to as “sites” instead of “blogs” — as well as some new features.  We’ll be upgrading Sites to take advantage of these new features (including a new menu system and support for multiple taxonomies) later this month once we’ve had a chance to fully document them.

If you encounter problems with your web site after the upgrade, please contact the Help Desk:

Sites Update 6/9/2010

We’ve updated several plugins on Sites; these are primarily bug fix releases.

  • NextGEN Gallery
  • Powerpress
  • Sidebar Login
  • WordPress Admin Bar
  • Exclude Pages

If you encounter problems with your web site after the upgrade, please contact the Help Desk:

Sites Maintenance 4/21/2010

Sites will be down as part of an extended network maintenance from 1:15 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Wednesday, April 21, 2010.

Sites Update 3/31/2010

We’ve updated Sites at Lafayette to the latest version of WordPress. This was a maintenance upgrade, and doesn’t introduce any new capabilities. We’ve also updated to a new version of Powerpress, which is a podcasting plugin for wordpress. Again, this is primarily a maintenance release that fixes a few minor bugs.
If you encounter problems with your web site after the upgrade, please contact the Help Desk:

Sites Update 2/3/2010

We’ve updated Sites at Lafayette to the latest version of WordPress. This iteration introduces some new functionality:

  • Improved Multimedia Support: Insert YouTube, Hulu, and Flickr videos as well as Flickr photo galleries into a post without a plugin. To do this, simply post the web address of a video into a new post. Make sure the web address is on its own line, and then publish the post. More multimedia instructions are available on the ITS site.
  • Trash Bin: Instead of immediately deleting posts and pages, WordPress will now place them into a trash bin. Detailed instructions for deleting and restoring pages and posts is available on the ITS site.
  • Photo editing: You can now make basic edits to photos within WordPress. Documentation is coming for this new feature.

We’ve also updated a number of WordPress plugins. If you’re using NextGEN Gallery (the photo gallery tool) you need to do a quick update by logging in, clicking the “Gallery” link in the lefthand administration column, and then clicking the “Start upgrade now…” link. WordPress handles the rest.

Here’s the complete list of updated plugins:

  • Authors
  • Contact Form 7
  • Google Analytics
  • NextGEN Gallery
  • Page Links To
  • PowerPress
  • TinyMCE Advanced

If you encounter problems with your web site after the upgrade, please contact the Help Desk:

Site Maintenance 2/3/2010

Sites at Lafayette will be down for scheduled maintenance from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m., Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010.

ITS Coffee Break for 11/4

On this episode of the ITS Coffee Break, hosts Courtney Bentley and Ken Newquist discuss Chris Phillips’ essay “I Hear America Reading: Using Digital Audio to Teach American Poetry,” which appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Teaching American Literature, and they announce Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V, which will be held at Lafayette.

Tech News includes Windows 7 testing, the Droid smartphone, and DARPA’s new $40,000 balloon hunting challenge. In Help News, Ken and Courtney take a look at the Powerpress plugin for WordPress and announce a new smartboard workshop. Get the podcast.

Bug with Numbers-only Page Slugs

We’ve discovered a bug in WordPress in which pages that only have a number for a name (e.g., 2009) can’t be accessed. Instead of going to the page in question (e.g., http://sites.lafayette.edu/asite/classes/2009) the parent page loads (e.g., http://sites.lafayette.edu/asite/classes). The problem is that WordPress will not allow page slugs to contain only numbers; if you change the slug to something with a mix of alphanumeric characters, like “classof2009″ then the page loads normally.

Here’s how to change a page’s slug name:

  1. Click “Pages” from the left menu in your site’s Dashboard.
  2. Hover over the pages titled with only numbers and click the “Quick Edit”
    link when it appears.
  3. Change the slug name to include a non-numeric character and click
    the “Update Page” button.
  4. Repeat for each page titled with only numbers.

This bug has been submitted to WordPress.org.