Today’s update is a bit meta. The feed from blogs.princeton.edu now dis­plays in the Word­Press admin­is­tra­tive dash­board for sites on the network.

We try to avoid mass email com­mu­ni­ca­tion to users in the Word­Press net­work, so these news updates are the pri­mary method of com­mu­ni­cat­ing out­ages, upgrades, tuto­ri­als and new features.

It is pos­si­ble to hide this dash­board wid­get by click­ing the cor­re­spond­ing check­box in the Screen Options set­ting up top.

Photo by LEOL30 on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Early Tues­day morn­ing, I deployed the Word­Press 3.4.1 update. Users should not notice any changes to nor­mal work­flow. There may be a few blue and white pop-ups in the admin inter­face that call atten­tion to new fea­tures. In the admin tool­bar, if you hover over the Word­Press logo in the top left cor­ner, you should see an “About Word­Press” link that lists all of the new fea­tures. In this post I will demo a cou­ple of the new features.

First, take a look at the Cap­tion for the metal house num­ber photo in this post. At long last, authors can use basic HTML tags in image cap­tions. Now you can ital­i­cize titles, insert a line break, or add a linked attri­bu­tion for shared images.

The next new fea­ture is Twit­ter Embeds. They work just like oEm­beds for videos. Just paste a raw (unlinked) tweet URL on its own line in a post or page. The pub­lished entry dis­plays a styl­ish box with the tweet, the Twit­ter avatar, and some action links for the tweet. For an exam­ple, check out the meta tweet below:

We’ve upgraded the Word­Press sys­tem to 3.4.1. Read about what’s new: blogs.princeton.edu/blog/2012/07/w…

— Prince­ton­Web­Ser­vices (@PrincetonWDS) July 24, 2012

With Cus­tom Head­ers, you no longer have to set­tle for the same height ban­ner image on every page. You can still use the “PUWS Options” in our Princeton-customized themes, but that height value just acts as a sug­gested height. When you upload a ban­ner image, the sys­tem will ask you if you want to crop the image to that sug­gested height or use the image’s orig­i­nal height. Please note that this will not work well for tall images.

Live Theme Pre­views allow you to try out a new look for your site before mak­ing those changes live. Not all cus­tom theme set­tings are avail­able with the live pre­views and the Cus­tomizer side­bar. Sur­pris­ingly, any cus­tom CSS saved under the “Edit CSS” Appear­ance page should dis­play in the Live Preview.

The next fea­ture update for Word­Press is ver­sion 3.5, set for release Decem­ber 5. Bar­ring any devel­op­ment delays, we should be deploy­ing this ver­sion (or a sub­se­quent bug fix release) to the net­work soon after the holidays.

(Def­i­nitely not the real logo for the Guest Account Pro­vi­sion­ing service)

Users log­ging into sites in our Word­Press net­work over the past year may have noticed a mes­sage which stated that accounts cre­ated via the Guest Account Pro­vi­sion­ing ser­vice were not sup­ported. This was because the user­names for these accounts take the form of an email address.

We recently switched authen­ti­ca­tion plu­g­ins (and added two more related plu­g­ins), finally allow­ing these Guest Account Pro­vi­sion­ing ser­vice users to authen­ti­cate to sites on this Word­Press net­work just like other Prince­ton netID users. Site admins can assign roles to these users as they would to any other netID.

Any­one with a Prince­ton netID can spon­sor a guest account user for up to one year (accounts are renew­able upon request). For more infor­ma­tion about these guest accounts, take a look at the OIT Knowl­edge­Base arti­cle “Guest Account Pro­vi­sion­ing (GAP): Answers to Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions (FAQ).”

Ever since this Word­Press net­work launched, users may have got­ten mixed con­tent warn­ings when using HTTPS (Hyper­text Trans­fer Pro­to­col Secure) to access site pages and admin pages.

These warn­ings have mes­sages like “This page has inse­cure con­tent” and con­fus­ing but­tons like “Don’t load (rec­om­mended),” “Load any­way,” or “Aren’t you sure you don’t want to not dis­play the non­se­cure items?”

Thanks to a plu­gin called “Word­Press HTTPS” and a few extra con­fig­u­ra­tion lines added to our reverse proxy servers and Word­Press con­fig files, these mixed con­tent warn­ings should be gone for good. Also the in-browser icons that indi­cate a properly-loaded HTTPS page should now appear instead of the bro­ken lock or miss­ing icons.

We are now auto­mat­i­cally redi­rect­ing all admin pages (/wp-admin) on all net­work sites to HTTPS, includ­ing the login screen.

Another ben­e­fit of the Word­Press HTTPS plu­gin is that it adds an abil­ity for con­tent authors to force a page or post to be secure via an option on the “Add New” screen.

This is just a quick note that we will be deploy­ing Word­Press 3.4.1 and Jet­pack 1.5 early next week. We took a month to test that every­thing still worked and to give the plu­gin authors time to release com­pat­i­bil­ity updates.

A few of the new fea­tures in ver­sion 3.4.x include a theme cus­tomizer with live theme pre­views, flex­i­ble heights for header images, fancy Twit­ter embeds just by past­ing the tweet URL, and basic HTML sup­port in image cap­tions (credit links, italics).

Jet­pack 1.5 includes a new “Carousel” view for image gal­leries and the Jet­pack Com­ments from ver­sion 1.4, which I will explain in a post next week.

I also promise an entire week of posts to high­light some of the new fea­tures that we have added to the blogs.princeton.edu net­work over the past cou­ple of months.

Our net­work is once again run­ning the lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press. The upgrade (knock on wood) was unevent­ful and pain­less as is per usual with Word­Press. The revised Admin Tool­bar and the new blue and white Pointer Tips are the first thing that will jump out at blog admins and editors.

Pointer Tips could prove to be use­ful, even for vet­eran users; the evo­lu­tion of the Word­Press inter­face and the addi­tion of new fea­tures has sped up con­sid­er­ably over the past year. When a user dis­misses Pointer Tips, they stay hid­den (their sta­tus changes in the data­base for that user).

The new JavaScript-based, drag-and-drop Media Uploader is a wel­come change over the past Flash-based version.

If you are logged in, check out the rest of the new fea­tures on the “About Word­Press” page under the Word­Press icon on the left side of the Admin Toolbar. Feel free to leave a com­ment after this post if you like any of the new fea­tures, or if some­thing really annoys you about the interface.

On Sat­ur­day, Feb­ru­ary 4, 2012, between 7:00 AM and 4:00 PM, there will be a par­tial out­age of our Word­Press ser­vice for up to nine hours as OIT’s Enter­prise Servers and Stor­age group moves the cen­tral file servers to the University’s new data center.

This should only affect items in the upload fold­ers. There will be a read-only copy of the upload fold­ers dur­ing this out­age, so all sites should dis­play as nor­mal, and it will still be pos­si­ble to cre­ate and edit any con­tent stored in the data­base, such as pages and posts.

It will not be pos­si­ble to upload new files dur­ing the out­age, and any attempts to do so will result in an error message.

We will update this post with fur­ther infor­ma­tion about the out­age should any­thing change.