The Drupal 7.37-cws-1.0.0 update was released to our development environment on Tuesday, May 11th, 2015, and will be released to production sites on Tuesday, May 19.  This release includes:

OSU Drupal Bug Fix

  • In the previous release, which included a major update to the Media module, it was discovered that the Colorbox module no longer worked, which affected the display of our Video Carousel feature. Videos themselves still worked, but they would not open in the “lightbox” that we were using for the Video Carousel feature. The fix for this required the inclusion of a new module, media_colorbox. This allowed us to simplify the View that displays the videos, so in the end we now have a better solution. This fix has already been pushed out to all of the development sites, and many of the production sites that were using videos. The rest of the production sites will get the update on Tuesday May 19 during the normal update cycle.

Drupal Core Bug Fix

  • In Drupal 7.36, a regression occurred which caused certain kinds of content to become disabled if they were originally defined by a module that is no longer available.  This has been corrected.

Major Version Upgrade

  • Drupal core 7.37

Security Updates

  • None

CWS Custom Module Updates

  • live_feeds-7.x-2.3.1 – the Beaver Job parser has been added
  • doug_fir-7.x-2.9.0 the LPI theme variant has been added

Contributed Module Updates

  • faq-7.x-1.0 has been updated to its first stable release

New Modules

  • job_scheduler-7.x-2.0-alpha4 added to support Feeds module

 

If you have questions or concerns please contact us though our contact form.

The Drupal 7.36-cws-1.2.0 update was released to our development environment on Tuesday, April 28th.  This release includes:

Major Version Upgrade

  • Media -> 7.x-2.0-alpha4
  • File Entity -> 7.x-2.0-beta1

The long-awaited update for media handling has been provided with the adoption of Media 7.x-2.0-alpha4.  Please visit the OSU Drupal Community site  to learn more about the Media module, through our Making Media Manageable article and the Media Component Overview, which provides rudimentary instructions and evaluation information.

Security Updates

  • Display Suite 7.x-2.8
    • This update was actually pushed out to production immediately last week to address a Cross Site Scripting vulnerability in production. It has been added into the update package for this week’s dev environment updates.

CWS Custom Module Updates

  • doug_fir 7.x-2.8.5
    • Updated Google Analytics javascript code
  • live_feeds 7.x-2.3.0
    • Added a new parser plug-in for Beaver Careers
  • osu_editor 7.x-1.0.0
    • New module to include all Media module and File Entity related configurations
  • osu_manager 7.x-1.1.3
    • Back-end updates, added permissions for Media and File Entity modules
  • osu_author 7.x-1.2.3
    • Back-end updates, added permissions for Media and File Entity modules
  • osu_architect 7.x-1.2.3
    • Back-end updates, added permissions for Media and File Entity modules
  • osu_editor 7.x-1.0.0
    • New module to include all Media module and File Entity related configurations
  • osu_groups 7.x-1.4.2
    • Fixed query used to determine the top-level book page

Contributed Module Updates

  • Advanced help 7.x-1.2
    • Mostly back-end fixes, though a few different, small CSS issues within the module were corrected.
  • Better Exposed Filters 7.x-3.2
    • Fixed AJAX issue that was failing with BEF links
  • CAPTCHA 7.x-1.3
    • Fixed issues with session reuse errors, improved image markup, provided environment specific CAPTCHA disabling
  • Features 7.x-2.5
    • Fixed back-end issues
  • reCAPTCHA 7.x-1.12
    • Fixed back-end issues
  • Webform 7.x-4.7
    • Fixed some conditionals related bugs, corrected some incompatibilities with Media module and other token-like markup, addressed several back-end issues

New Modules

  • Plupload    7.x-1.7
  • Multiform   7.x-1.1

These modules were added to provide bulk upload functionality for the Media module.

If you have questions or concerns please contact us though our contact form.

The Drupal 7.36-cws-1.0.0 update was released to our development environment on Tuesday, April 14th.  This release includes:

Security Updates

None

CWS Custom Module Updates

OSU Groups Module

An “Hours of Operation” field has been added to the Group node type.

Highlights Feature

The background fill that displays when a mouse hovers over a transparent background highlight has been fixed.

Contributed Module Updates

None

If you have questions or concerns please contact us though our contact form.

The next CWS Drupal release, 7.35-cws-1.0.0, will be deployed to production Drupal 7 sites on Tuesday Mar 24. This release includes:

Security Updates

  • Drupal core 7.35
  • Webform 7.x-4.5
  • Chaos Tools 7.x-1.7

CWS custom module updates

Caching
It was discovered that the varnish cache was not being cleared when the site cache in Drupal was cleared. In response, a hook was added to clear the varnish cache for a site when the site cache is cleared through using “Flush all caches”.
Lookup Module
After deleting the module, the content in the database was still present, including the tags data.  This has been corrected.
OSU Groups
Login redirection to dashboard was broken.  This has been corrected.
The appropriate Actions Permissions were added and provided to the group user role.  These permissions will allow group managers the ability to perform bulk operations when managing their users.
OSU Group Views
Every view that is a part of the OSU Group Views module has now been configured to cache for 1 hour, the same as Feature Story.  Therefore if changes do not immediately show after you make them, flush the cache.

Updates to contributed modules

New contributed modules

Domain Context
This will allow sites that use the Domain module to create Contexts that use the domain as a condition. This will be particularly helpful in fa.oregonstate.edu.

Removed contributed modules

Fancybox
We are no longer using this having instead gone with the Colorbox module.

If you have questions or concerns please contact us though our contact form.

Blogs have been updated to WordPress 4.1.

New features:

  • Twentyfifteen theme
  • Distraction-free writing mode
  • Vine embeds

New Plugins:

  • Disqus comment system – Use the disqus.com system for comments
  • Printfriendly – Creates a printer friendly version of your blog contents as well as creating a PDF of the page.

 

 

The update of the WordPress-SEO plugins has resulted in extra content being added to a blog site’s RSS feeds.

The extra content is “The post xxx originally appeared in yyy”.

To remove this content, you will need to log onto your blog site and from the wp-admin page, go to SEO -> RSS.

Remove the text in the ‘Content to put after each post’ edit section.

Save the ‘Save Changes’ and you should be good to go.

SEO RSS Content editing

With the installation of the prezi-embedded plugin, using prezi in blogs posts and pages has been simplified.

To enbed a Prezi in our blog posts, we need to do the following (from the plugin installation notes):

Place [prezi id="<Prezi ID>"] in any post or page were you want to embed a Prezi.

To find your Prezi ID, the easiest solution is to simply copy the URL of your Prezi, which should look something
like this: http://prezi.com/<Prezi ID>/<Prezi Slug>. If you paste that URL exactly as it is, the plugin is
now smart enough to extract the ID for you. Alternatively, if you would like to do it the hard way, you can
manually extract the <Prezi ID> from that same URL.

Prezi Embedder Options

In addition to a simple embed, you can also set some additional embed options:

  1. align (default = none): Aligns the Prezi left, right, or center in your post.
  2. width (default = 500): Width of viewer in pixels.
  3. height (default = 400): Height of viewer in pixels.
  4. lock_to_path (default = 0): Whether to constrain user navigation to Prezi path (1), or let them roam free (0).
  5. autoplay (default = 0): Enables option at bottom of Prezi display to start autoplay.
  6. html5 (default = 1): True (1) to use new HTML5 viewer, false (0) to use Flash-based viewer.

The following shortcode is equivalent to [prezi id="<Prezi ID>"], with default values explicitly set:

[prezi id="<Prezi ID>" width=500 height=400 lock_to_path=0 html5=1]

Central Web Services is continuously making improvements to our Drupal platform. We’re fixing bugs, updating modules, adding new features, and enhancing existing features. For the past 3 years we have been on roughly a six week release cycle. If there were important security updates it could be shorter, but frequently it was longer. We want to change that. We want to be able get new features, and fixes out to the sites that requested them in a much more timely fashion.

As part of our Agile Development process we have been implementing procedures for automatic testing and deployment of changes to our Drupal modules and features. This has made it much easier for us to find and fix bugs and make sure that a feature is ready for prime time before it reaches your site.

This will allow us to move to a two week release cycle. We will update all of the Drupal 7 production sites every other Tuesday. Sometimes these updates will be minor and provide no additional functionality, sometimes they may only include security updates, but often they will include enhancements to existing features, or new features entirely. We will communicate these changes through e-mail announcements to site managers, through the Drupal Support e-mail list, and through a post here on the OSU CWS Blog .

As always our goal is to help you create the best websites we possibly can. We think this change will really help in that regard.

WordPress received a set of plugin updates today.  The Jetpack plugin was updated to version 2.5 resolving an issue of the Twitter widget not displaying tweets.  The issue had to deal with the Twitter widget ID not being saved properly in Jetpack’s Twitter widget.  A Twitter site owner needs to create a Twitter widget first in twitter.com as a pre-requisite to using this WordPress widget.  The widget works properly now.

You know there’s a however coming next, right?

However, certain browser add ons or extensions may prevent it from displaying properly.  In the event that you still do not see the Twitter timeline, then first clear the browser cache and settings (Google it if you don’t know how), and see if it works.  If that does not work, then disable your add ons and figure out which add-on was preventing it from being displayed by re-enabling the add-ons (Firefox) or extensions (Chrome) one at a time to figure out which one.

The other plugins that were updated were:  SI Captcha, WordPress SEO, and WP-PostRatings.  Please go to the respective plugin sites to look at what was updated for these.

In between terms, we will be looking to upgrade the WordPress version to the latest, as that change will be more involved and require a longer period of downtime.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

As we’ve been talking to people about consolidating Drupal sites into larger sites in Drupal 7, questions come up about how to set up navigation for a much larger site. With academic units the navigation breaks down nicely along the lines of colleges, schools, departments, and programs, but with administrative units it is not always that clear. When Information Services was faced with this task a decision was made to de-emphasize the organizational structure and instead focus on the services provided. This makes a lot of sense as most visitors to our websites really don’t care that much about our department structure but rather what we do and what services are available to them. As CWS was designing how we would use Organic Groups to combine the old Drupal 6 sites into the new Drupal 7 site for IS we wondered how well OG would work with this service oriented approach. Fortunately IS had already done the hard work of coming up with logical groups of service categories, and the services within each one. We then were able to map the groups directly to the services, and organize them into “parent units” which were mapped to the service categories. By including the names of the service. and the category, in the site name header, we accomplished the goal of having these appear as distinctive sections of a website.

og-site-header

Each title is a link back to that level of the site, just as the site name has always been a link back to the front page.

The services based navigation solves many of the problems of organizing a large website, but sometimes there is still a need to represent the department organization as well. For example to see where people work, and where they are located, you still might want to have an organizational view of your website. At first we were not sure how to approach this, but then realized that we could have a parallel structure of parent units and groups that matched the department structure. So for example a parent unit for Media Services, and a group for Central Web Services. Once we determined the right approach this was easy to implement and works well in practice.

To see this for yourself please visit the Information Services website at http://oregonstate.edu/is . The services and categories are all in the “Services” menu and the departments are under “Directory & Contacts” => “Organization”. As you explore this site think about how we can use this model on your Drupal site when it comes time to upgrade it to Drupal 7.