Categories » Updates

We will be offering another introductory workshop on WordPress for anyone interested in creating a new WordPress site or just learning more about the platform.

• 3-4 pm, Thurs, Dec 8th, Library 105, Introduction to WordPress (sign up)

If you are a faculty person using WordPress for one or more course sites and would like assistance setting up your site, come to one of our Curricular Technologies work sessions:

• 3-4 pm, Tues, Dec 13th, Library 105, Curricular Technologies Work Session (sign up)
• 2-3 pm, Wed, Dec 14th, Library 105, Curricular Technologies Work Session (sign up)

Finally if you are currently using WordPress for your course sites but are interested in trying out Moodle as an alternative or additional platform for your course, consider attending a Moodle workshop:

• 2-3 pm, Thurs, Dec 8th, Library 105, Introduction to Moodle (sign up)

We’ve just installed Jetpack on blogs.middlebury.edu.  This plugin replaces the WordPress.com stats plugin that many use to keep track of how many people are viewing their sites.

If you own or are an administrator on a site that used the WordPress.com stats plugin, we encourage you to update to JetPack.  For more information, see:
Plugins > Jetpack

Update: We have had reports that updating from WordPress.com Stats plugin to Jetpack may prevent access to historical site statistics.  If such statistics are important to you, we recommend not updating to Jetpack until these issues are resolved.

JetPack also has a number of other features including a Twitter widget, support for LaTex markup and a spelling, grammar and style checker.  For more information, see:
http://jetpack.me/ 

Here’s a 3 1/2 minute screencast that gives a quick overview of some of the new features introduced in WordPress v3.

[middmedia E966CA341E9D26A5EA67ECDE36E4C402 achapin wordpress-update-version3-02.mp4 width:480 height:300]

WordPress @ Middlebury was updated to v3.0.1 in late August.  This new version of WordPress introduces a number of key features that make WordPress useful for more than just blogging.   In particular, we think that these new features make WordPress a suitable platform for basic course sites (see: Using WordPress for Course Sites).  Here’s an overview of some of the new features and why they are so important:

Top Navigation Bar

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 WordPress 3.0 introduces a top navigation bar.  By default, this navigation bar contains links to all the pages in your site and for any pages that are the “children” of other pages (i.e. they specify another page as their parent and so are sub-pages of that parent page), they will appear in a drop-down sub-menu (see the navigation bar on this site to see how this works).

Click on image to enlarge

Custom Menus

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WordPress v3 introduces “custom menus” (see: Dashboard > Appearance > Menus).  Custom menus allow site owners to create their own menus of pages, categories or links.  Once a custom menu is created, it can be used in the top navigation bar (see:  Menus > Theme Locations > Primary Navigation) or in sidebars (see: Appearance > Widgets > Custom Menu).

Click on image to enlarge

The Menus user interface (UI) works the same way as the Widgets UI, allow users to drag menu items up or down to change their order or to the right to make them sub-menu items.

New Theme Options

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Middlebury blog themes have been updated to take advantage of many of the new features of WordPress v3.  Most themes now support both custom header images and custom background colors and images (see: Appearance > Background and Header).  We’ve also added some sample headers that you can chose from.

We will be updating WordPress to a new version this week at the following time:

• 8-9 am, Thurs August 28th

It is not likely BLOGS DOT MIDDLEBURY will be offline for more than 5 minutes. If it is, we’ll let you know immediately.

The update includes all of the new features that come with WordPress v3.0.1 including custom menus and navigation bars. For more information about new features, see:
Introducing WordPress 3.0

Ian McBride just created some new themes for WordPress @ Middlebury.  These themes, like most of the Midd blog themes are based on designs by White Whale, the folks who helped us create the new college site.  For a good description of these themes, see Ian’s post on the LIS blog New WordPress Themes Available.

Navy

Pastoral

Map

The latest update of WordPress @ Middlebury also added links to plugin documentation on this site from the plugins list.  This allows Midd users to be able to get simple consistent step-by-step instructions for how to use a given plugin.

This will also give us an opportunity to link to other Midd blogs that use a given plugin to help illustrate how it can be used.

We plan to update WordPress on June 2nd; the system will remain “up” during this process which should take less than a half hour before 9am ET that day. This is an incremental update that fixes bugs and introduces very few new features.

In addition to updates to the WordPress codebase, we will also make updates to some plugins and themes

Plugin Updates

The following plugins will be updated:

• Authors Widget
• Exclude Pages from Navigation
• Geo Mashup
• NextGEN Gallery

We have been testing the new versions of these plugins and do not anticipate any change in your use or administration of the blog but wanted to let you know.

Theme Updates

The following themes will have updated versions:

• ShadowBox
• Translucence
• Blue Landscape
• Classics

Please try out the new version of your theme as soon as you are able and let us know if you have problems/questions.  We’ll automatically update all blogs to the new theme versions sometime in the last 2 weeks of August.