Categories
Service News

WordPress 3.4.1 and Jetpack 1.5 coming next week

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.

Categories
Service News

WordPress 3.3.1 Deployed

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.

Categories
Service News

February 4 Partial Outage

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.

Categories
Service News

WordPress 3.3 is (almost) here

Update: We have planned the WordPress 3.3.1 upgrade for the morning of Tuesday, January 24, so that the students finishing up fall semester coursework on the system are not distracted by the new interface.

WordPress 3.3 saw its final release on Monday, December 12. WordPress upgrades are usually somewhat painless, but we will be delaying the upgrade of our multisite network for a few weeks. This will give us time to test compatibility with the 75+ third-party plugins on the network. We will also update our quickstart guide. Look for the update after the holidays, the first week of January.

WordPress 3.3 feature pointer

In the meantime, WPCandy has a great rundown of the new features, "Everything we know about the newly released WordPress 3.3." Check out the new admin bar (now called the Toolbar), welcome screen, flyout Dashboard menus, feature pointers, and the brand new drag-and-drop media uploader.

Also, if you first log into lynda.princeton.edu with your Princeton netID, the WordPress 3 Essential Training course has added a chapter to the Introduction, “Differences in the WordPress 3.3 interface.”

Categories
Tutorials

Launching Your Site

Updated February 14, 2014, for WordPress 3.8

New sites on our WordPress network are already "live" on production servers; however, there are a few items that you should review and some settings that you should change to make your site ready for visitors.

Continue reading "Launching Your Site"
Categories
Community

A Chat About Open Source with the Founders of Drupal and WordPress

On October 7 at SchipulCon 2011 in Houston, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, shared the stage for a fascinating question and answer session about their CMS platforms, their ecosystems, and open source in general.

Both founders are passionate about their software, passionate about their communities, and passionate about open source — not just as a way to write software, but as a way of life. In this honest exchange, Matt and Dries reveal the different origins and philosophies behind Drupal and WordPress that influence their strengths and weaknesses, and the two innovators explain how the platforms complement each other.

Problems with microphones mar the first four minutes of audio; the other fifty minutes are fine. Transcripts of a few of their answers are on the Schipul blog.

Categories
Tutorials

WordPress Tutorial on Lynda.com

Lynda screenshotLynda.com is an online training and tutorial library available to the entire Princeton community. It contains training materials on many topics including WordPress

Log in to Lynda at http://lynda.princeton.edu and search for 'WordPress 3 Essential Training'

Categories
Service News

Outstanding Issues 9/30

We are working hard to have everything working smoothly, and while WordPress may have infinite possibilities, the time and personnel to implement them is finite. Below are some of the more bothersome issues we are tracking:

  • Guest Account Provisioning accounts are not able to authenticate on any of the blogs in the network. The problem has to do with the @ signs in the usernames. Currently, only normal Princeton netIDs can log in.
  • We do not yet have a simple solution for adding videos that use the PUVOD Flash streaming server.
  • We have some documentation, but not nearly as much as we would like.
  • Https works just fine, but forcing https by redirecting from http to https causes our load balancer to infinitely loop the redirect.
  • Our Movable Type users will have to suffer with that aging platform just a little while longer as we migrate dozens of sites.
  • There is not a separate server for staging content or a multistage workflow as with Roxen CMS. Posts and pages are either unpublished (draft) or published, and you can revert to any previously saved version.
  • The Sharing buttons at the end of posts and pages do not have a Google Plus option.
Categories
Tutorials

Custom CSS

Edit CSS menu optionAlthough there are thousands of WordPress themes out in the wild, we will be initially making available only a small collection of "curated" themes. These themes will have a small amount of Princeton University branding. Most will be minimalist, with neutral colors, and some will have configurable options. As the service grows, so will our theme offerings.

However, site owners sometimes want to deviate from the default appearance of the themes, or they might (for some inexplicable reason) want to eliminate all traces of orange and black. Sites in our Roxen CMS environment have the custom.css file, and we wanted to offer a similar option with WordPress.

Fortunately, Automattic, the commercial entity behind WordPress.com, created a plugin that provides this feature. Site admins will find an "Edit CSS" menu under the Appearance section in the left navigation of wp-admin.

Continue reading "Custom CSS"
Categories
Presentations

WordPress.tv: Top 12 Features You Aren’t Using

In this WordCamp San Francisco 2011 presentation, Sheri Bigelow talks about the "Top 10 12 Features You Aren’t Using – But Should Be!" (27:24).

This is an excellent presentation for new WordPress users, but it includes a few things that WordPress veterans may not know about, like the Post Revisions Easter egg at 18:30.