Jul 27th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
After a successful pilot of WordPress MU during the Spring 2009 semester, ITS has decided to move WordPress into production with Sites. This installation, located at sites.lafayette.edu, hosts personal, club, and organization home pages. A separate 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.
Questions about the pilot-to-production migration can be sent to the program administrators at wordpress@lafayette.edu.
Posted in: News.
Tagged: wordpress
Oct 29th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
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:
- Click “Pages” from the left menu in your site’s Dashboard.
- Hover over the pages titled with only numbers and click the “Quick Edit”
link when it appears.
- Change the slug name to include a non-numeric character and click
the “Update Page” button.
- Repeat for each page titled with only numbers.
This bug has been submitted to WordPress.org.
Posted in: Known Issues.
Oct 29th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
The ITS Coffee Break podcast is back. After a six-month hiatus the long-running podcast has moved from its old home on Soapbox to Sites.
In Episode #60, hosts Courtney Bentley and Ken Newquist discuss Lafayette’s WordPress MU project, take a look at Bates College’s new WordPress-powered home page, discuss the Google Wave web application, debate the merits of Amazon’s Kindle vs. Barnes & Nobles’ new Nook ebook reader, and talk about an upcoming copyright webinar. Get the podcast.
Posted in: News.
Tagged: podcasts
Oct 28th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
We’ve updated three WordPress plugins:
- Authors
- Contact Form 7
- Google Analytics
We’ve also added a new FeedBurner plugin that can be used in tandem with Google’s FeedBurner service to track the number of people subscribing to your site’s RSS feed. To use it, just activate the plugin, go to Settings > Feedburner and add the URL of your feedburner feed. If you need to burn a feed, visit feedburner.google.com.
If you’re using these plugins, and encounter problems after the upgrade, please call the Helpdesk at 610.330.5501 or submit a help ticket.
Posted in: News.
Oct 26th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
We’ve made some changes behind the scenes to give WordPress a speed boost. The practical effect of this is that almost everything that makes up a WordPress page (web pages, JavaScript and style sheets) will now download 2 to 3 times faster than they did before. This should help those who’ve reported slowness when working with WordPress off campus or over wireless.
If you’re still experiencing slowness with WordPress, please contact the help desk at 610.330.5501 or submit a help ticket.
Posted in: News.
Oct 14th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
We’ve updated several plugins on Sites at Lafayette to their latest versions: Authors, Contact 7, Google Analytics, NextGen Gallery, Page Links To, PowerPress and Sidebar Login. If you’re using these plugins, and encounter problems after the upgrade, please call the Helpdesk at 610.330.5501 or submit a help ticket.
Posted in: News.
Tagged: updates
Aug 19th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
Sites at Lafayette has been updated upgraded to WordPress 2.8.x. This was a security update, and doesn’t include any major new functionality. One side effect of the upgrade is that sites that have an apostrophe in their title (e.g. Joe Smith’s Web Page) now have a backslash in them (e.g. Joe Smith\’s Web Page). You can remove the backslash by logging in and going to the “Settings” page for your site, clicking the “General” link, and then editing your site’s name where it says “Blog Title”.
We’ve also updated the Google Analytics (statistics tracking) and Powerpress (podcasting) plugins to their latest versions. Unfortunately, we also needed to remove a plugin: the Slideshare plugin (used for sharing online presentations via Slideshare.net) is broken, and has been deactivated.
If you encounter problems, please call the Helpdesk at 610.330.5501 or submit a help ticket.
Posted in: News.
Jul 27th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
Over the weekend we had a problem with off-campus users being unable to access the WordPress admin dashboard on Sites. That problem’s been fixed, and you should be able to access it now.
Posted in: News.
Tagged: bugs
Jul 27th, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
We’ve recently upgraded a number of plugins on Sites. If you use these plugins, please verify that they’re working as expected. If you encounter problems, please post a comment here or email the site administrator at wordpress@lafayette.edu.
- Akismet: This is our anti-spam software; there’s a known issue with the “Akismet Stats” link, but the anti-spam functions should still work fine.
- Slideshare: This presentation-sharing tool saw only minor updates.
- Powerpress
- NextGEN Gallery: This update fixed a number of bugs, but the jump between versions also caused a hiccup on the options page; the only way to fix that problem is to reset your options, as documented here
Posted in: Known Issues, News.
Tagged: plugins · wordpress
Jul 23rd, 2009
by Kenneth Newquist.
NextGEN Gallery, which many of our sites use for photo galleries, didn’t make it through the Pilot-to-Sites migration and upgrade unscathed. The new version of NextGEN (1.3.5) played havoc with existing NextGEN settings and also made tweaks to the database.
As a result, if you’re using NextGEN, you’ll need to do a quick upgrade, reset your options, and (if you’re using the slideshow tool) re-tell NextGEN where the Flash “image rotator” tool is. To do this:
Upgrading NextGEN
- Log into Sites @ Lafayette (http://sites.lafayette.edu)
- Click on the “My Blogs” link from in the lefthand navigation column (it’s located in the upper lefthand corner, under the heading “Dashboard”) and click the hperlink for the site you want to update.
- After the site loads, scroll down the page and click on the “Gallery” link for NextGEN gallery (also located in the lefthand navigation column).
- When the page loads, NextGEN Gallery will inform you that it needs to be upgraded. Click the “Start upgrade now…” link and the program will update itself.
- You’re done upgrading!
Reseting NextGEN options
An unfortunate side effect of our NextGEN upgrade is that all of the program’s options appear to be replaced with the letter “a”. The fix is a simple reset of the program’s options. To do this:
- Navigate to your site and click on the “Gallery” link (as above).
- Click on the “Setup” link.
- Click the [Reset settings] button
- A pop-up window appears asking if you want to “Reset all options to default settings?”. Click the [OK] button.
- When the process is done, a “Continue…” hyperlink appears. Click it.
- The program takes you to the NextGEN Gallery home page. You can now click on the “Options” hyperlink in the lefthand navigation to go and tweak your settings back to what they were (if you’re using the NextGEN Slideshow function, then follow the instructions below)
Setting up the NextGEN Slideshow
With your options reset, you need to update your options. If you’re using NextGEN’s Slideshow function, you’ll need to re-tell it where to find the Flash image rotator script that NextGEN relies on for the slideshow. To do this:
- Navigate to your site and click on the “Gallery” link (as above).
- Click on “Options”.
- An options page loads, with a number of navigation tabs along the top of the page. Click on the link for “Slideshow”.
- There is a field called “Path to the Imagerotator (URL):”. Enter the following URL into the field:
- http://sites.lafayette.edu/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/imagerotator.swf
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the [Save Changes] button.
Posted in: Known Issues, News.
Tagged: galleries · plugins
