The Beta Blog

Today we are launching the next version of McGill’s online course and programs calendars, in the form of a new website: www.mcgill.ca/study/. Starting as a pilot project for the Faculty of Law, this site will soon grow to encompass programs and courses, regulations and general information for all of McGill’s faculties and schools.

We call this new site Programs, Courses and University Regulations. This reflects a shift away from the term “calendar”, which, although commonly used in Canada, can be misleading to those who are not already familiar with it.

Our goals in producing this website were to make the calendar information:

1. More readable and understandable
   By rewriting much of the calendar content, we have been able to make the text less formal, less legalistic, and easier to read. The presentation is also less dense and easier on the eyes.
2. Easier to find
   A new search engine has been built that allows for a simple, unified search across programs, courses, faculty information, and university information. This search engine will continually be improved to bring forward the most relevant results.
3. Easier to share
   By making the URLs meaningful and persistent across yearly publication cycles, it should be easier to bookmark pages and share links with others. A major feature coming soon will be the ability to embed a calendar “topic” directly on another www.mcgill.ca web page, such that it always remains up-to-date with the source information. This will eliminate the need for many faculties and departments to copy/paste information onto their own websites, which may then become out-of-date.

What you see today is just the beginning! In March of 2010, the undergraduate calendar will be migrated to www.mcgill.ca/study/, later to be followed by all other calendars. As this is a pilot project, and a proving ground for the new technology and design, we eagerly await to hear your opinions. Any thoughts, suggestions or questions that you have are more than welcome!

We’ve upgraded blogs.mcgill.ca to Wordpress MU 2.7.1, you shouldn’t notice any dramatic changes.

Here are a couple of quick tips for navigating the new 2.7 dashboard interface:

• Many of the boxes on the dashboard and especially on the post editing page can be dragged around to suit your workflow better. You can move them from one column to another or up and down in the same column.
• Boxes can also be “closed” and “opened” by clicking on the small down arrow on the right-hand side of the box title. This is useful for boxes you use occasionally but not often enough to have open all the time.
• There is a pull down “Screen Options” button at the top of most pages, here you can select which boxes you want to see. Never use custom fields? Turn off that box and reduce your screen clutter.
• The side menu can be minimized by clicking on the little arrow buttons. This will give you more screen space for important stuff, but if you’re unfamiliar with that menu it may take some getting used to.
• The dashboard boxes can be customized, so for example if you don’t want to read the latest wordpress news, you can change that box to use a different RSS news feed.

We have succesfully upgraded blogs.mcgill.ca to the latest version of WordPress. You will notice that the Dashboard has been completely re-designed, mostly in a good way. If you have any problems, or questions about the new version, just leave a comment or contact me.

Just a small addition to the QuickForm block — you can now drag-and-drop items in the block configuration screen in addition to using the “↑” and “↓” buttons. This should make it easier for you to rearrange the form elements.

Thanks to David for his excellent work on this feature.

While setting up blogs in our pilot WordPress project blogs.mcgill.ca, I’ve been asked what the difference is between the various user roles in WordPress. From the WordPress Codex, here is a brief summary:

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
• Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc.

For more information, read about Roles and Capabilities on the WordPress Codex.

Block QuickForm, being deployed today, will allow users to add simple web forms to their wps pages.

Configuration of the block allows to select from 4 types of inputs: Text, text area, select and checkbox. The user can customize the text label for each of the input types and can also add static text throughout the form. When in live mode, the form submits its data to one or several email addresses provided at configuration, but has the useful feature of submitting the data only to the logged in editor when in edit mode. ICS has published complete documentation on its knowledgebase site.

We’ve improved the Channels posting form so that you can now replace an attachment by deleting the existing attachment and re-uploading it in one step. (Previously, you had to delete the attachment, save the item, then reattach and save again.) We’ll continue to investigate how to make replacing existing attachments even clearer and easier. Check the Beta Blog for future updates on this front.

I spent the weekend in Toronto attending WordCamp Toronto, a two day community driven event organised by Melissa Feeney and Mathieu Yuill at the Centennial College Student Centre all about WordPress. It was two days well spent.

I heard from Matt and his new hire Jane Wells about the features in WordPress 2.7, coming in November (re-designed admin interface, threaded comments). I heard about podcasting with WordPress from Charles Hodgson, photo-blogging with WordPress from Rannie Turingan, video blogging with WordPress from Mark McKay, making money from blogging with WordPress from David Peralty, using WordPress as a CMS from Jamie Ostler, and making your WordPress blog more secure from Mark Jaquith.

I also had the chance to chat to WordPress users and developers and get involved in discussions on new ideas for future WordPress plugins.

You can see videos of a lot of the presentations, as well as the slides from those presentations at the newly created wiki. You can see photos in the flickr pool. You can read back through the tweets and dents using the hashtags #wcto08, #wct08 and #wordcamptoronto (yes there was some hashtag confusion).

Also coming out of this event are plans for a WordCamp Toronto 2009 as well as talk of a WordCamp Montreal.

With more people using WordPress as their CMS of choice, we have to keep up to date with our WordPress installations and make sure they are all safe and secure. Here are some changes we’ve been making recently:

• The new McGill Reporter site has gone live, powered by WordPress 2.6.1.
• The FYI blog has been upgraded to WordPress 2.6.1.
• blogs.mcgill.ca has been created using Wordpress MU 2.6. This is a pilot project which will eventually allow us to consolidate all blogs into one installation of WordPress for smoother upgrades and better security.
• beta.mcgill.ca, the Beta Blog, has been moved and redirected to blogs.mcgill.ca/beta
• Continuing Education’s Instructor Resources blog has been created under blogs.mcgill.ca
• Continuing Education’s Public Relations blog has also been created under blogs.mcgill.ca
• We have Installed the wpDirAuth plugin (written by Stephane Daury) on all blogs to allow users to log in using their official McGill credentials. This means we don’t have to store passwords in each WordPress Installation and you don’t have to remember multiple passwords (and remember to change them!).
• A new WordPress plugin has been written and installed on the FYI blog to provide extra branding on RSS feeds. Instead of the main feed being titled “For Your Information” it is now titled “McGill > For Your Information”

Finally, I’m off to WordCamp Toronto in October to meet some of the development team and other WordPress users. I’ll report back on that at and/or after the event.

Another round of small fixes for the linkchecker:

• Relative links are now checked correctly
• An annoying bug with external host checks and cookies was fixed

I have rerun the full check earlier this afternoon, so don’t be surprised if you have received the notification out of schedule. Our current plan is to roll out the linkchecker as public beta in the near future.

As always, please use the web feedback form to report any problems with this release.