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Web guy
Technical Updates

removed: Shadowbox JS

A user reported issues with Shadowbox JS plugin showing error messages in the dashboard.  I was able to replicate the issues and researched them. The research showed that the plugin had fallen out of support with the author.

In these instances, we do not attempt to take over support for the plugins that are out of support; we remove them from the server.

If you are interested in finding a replacement for the Shadowbox JS plugin, please let us know in the comments or contact me directly.

 

Technical Updates

new plugin: Co-Authors Plus

We had a request from The Choices Program to show a byline for multiple instructors. So, we added the Co-Authors Plus plugin to the Brown Blogs network. Doing so enables some co-author functionality but it doesn’t actually go into the theme and fix the byline codes. Since The Choices Program uses the Hemingway theme, I took the following actions in said theme:

Find the files that render the author byline:

cd /navigate/to/theme
grep "post-author" -nroI .

Replace this:

<?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>

With this:

<?php if ( function_exists( 'coauthors_posts_links' ) ) {
 coauthors_posts_links();
 } else {
 the_author_posts_link();
 }
 ?>

This post is partly to mention how we run this blog service but also to serve as documentation for how to handle future requests regarding co-authors. The steps will be different for each theme.

If you need co-authors, please submit a ticket to the service center.

Feb 26 update: one other thing that we will need to keep in mind (going forward) is that the customizations to the Hemingway theme are local to our instance of it and if the theme author (Anders Noren) makes an update, we would need to re-add our customizations to the updated Hemingway.

General News, Technical Updates

Core update

I just finished running the update to 4.4.1 and was prepping to write my standard “upgraded wordpress” post when I started rethinking that practice. My goal is to keep the platform updated, along with its themes and plugins. I also think that being transparent about changes to the platform is important for compatibility and incident reporting. However, it can get redundant with the frequency of updates that are happening.

So, going forward, I am not going to post when a minor release is installed. Thereby, the next release that I will post about is 4.5.

 

Technical Updates

End of Year Housekeeping on blogs.brown.edu

We upgraded to 4.4 and updated all themes and plugins that had updates available.

Brown Contributions to WordPress Core:

In hope of having better search in wordpress, we reported a bug that got some traction with the awesome wordpress dev team. We were hoping the patches would make it in the 4.4 release, but in the final moments, it was deferred for a future release.

Configuration Changes:

We raised the max upload size to allow image panoramas.

We added the following themes:

  • Dyad by Automattic
  • Receptar by Webman Design
  • Twenty Twelve by WordPress.org
  • Twenty Thirteen by WordPress.org
  • Twenty Sixteen by WordPress.org

We added the following plugins:

  • Search Everything
  • Add Category to Pages
  • Network Plugin Auditor

We removed the following unused plugins:

  • Custom Facebook Feed by Smash Balloon
  • Thinglink Official Plugin by Thinglink

We removed the following unused themes:

  • DePo Square by Derek Powazek & Noel Jackson
  • Digg 3 Column by Small Potato
  • Thirteen by Becca Wei