WordPress Logins

Recently, in order to increase the security and performance of the UMW website, we made some changes to the way logins are handled. For the time being, you will need to be either on-campus, or logged into VPN in order to login to the website. … [Read more...]

Phasing Out The Old Slideshows

When we initially launched the new UMW website, we were using a plugin called Easy Page Slideshow (EPS) to allow users to place photo slideshows on their sites. However, as we've continued to add new content to the site, and kept up with updates to the software, we've found that the EPS plugin is causing quite a few problems on the site. As a result, we are working on phasing it out so we can eventually remove it from the site entirely. Before we do so, though, we will need all content managers to make sure they are no longer using that plugin to create their slideshows. We have already deactivated the EPS plugin on many sites throughout the system, but we still have quite a few more to go. … [Read more...]

WordPress Admin Changes

WordPress Admin Changes Tomorrow, we will be upgrading the UMW WordPress installation from WordPress 3.6 to WordPress 3.8. While the way you accomplish your normal tasks will remain unchanged, the appearance of the administrative area will change fairly significantly. Everything you use on a regular basis can still be found in the same locations, it might just look a little different than it does right now. Following are a few screen shots showing a comparison of the current interface with the new interface that will be in place tomorrow. As you can see, the appearance of these items has changed, in some places pretty significantly, but everything is still found in basically the same places. … [Read more...]

Why Can’t I Edit My Page?

When you're trying to edit a page on your site, occasionally, you might not be able to actually edit it. Instead, the editor window will be blank, your toolbar will be missing, and, if you scroll down the page a little bit, you'll probably notice that much of the rest of the editor page is missing, too. More than likely, one of the most recent things someone did while editing this page, was to upload a PDF or Word document to attach to the page. The problem is, the original plugin we used to create slideshows within the site, Easy Page Slideshow, attempts to process those PDF documents as images; when it can't figure out how to create a thumbnail of the PDF, it stops loading the editor page altogether. The quickest way to solve the issue is to delete attachments one-by-one until the editor starts working again. To do so, you can click "Delete Image" in the "Slideshow" box below the editor. When you do so, the attachment will be deleted from the server and the editor page will … [Read more...]

Menu Changes

As some of you know, we updated WordPress, our theme, and all available plugins during the week of July 4. After that update was completed, we began to receive reports that strange issues were occurring with navigation menus on various sites. Eventually, we tracked the issue down to a change that was made within Genesis, the "parent theme" used as a base to the UMW website theme. Basically, the option to enable/disable the primary and secondary navigation menus was removed in a recent version of Genesis. Normally, with Genesis, regardless of those settings, if you want a menu to appear in either of those spots, you have to create a custom menu within Appearance -> Menus. However, within the UMW theme, if you had either of those settings enabled, and you didn't have a custom menu created, the system would automatically generate a menu based on your page hierarchy. Since those options were not used within Genesis itself, they were removed. However, the values for those options were … [Read more...]

Recent Theme Changes

Recently, we upgraded many pieces of the website, including Genesis, the "parent theme" that helps provide much of the features and functionality found in our website theme. As part of that update, the authors of Genesis removed the option to enable and disable the Primary and Secondary Navigation menus. The UMW website theme used the Secondary Navigation Menu option to determine whether or not to display the gray menu bar at the top of certain sites. As a result of this change, we had to remove the dependency on that option. Therefore, many site owners may now be seeing a large, ugly gray menu bar at the top of their sites with all of their pages listed. If this is the case, you can solve this issue fairly easily. To do so, please go to Appearance -> Menus in your administration area. Then, create a new menu and leave it empty (don't add any links to it). Once you've saved the new, empty menu, choose that menu from the "Secondary Navigation Menu" dropdown box (EDIT: Make … [Read more...]

Urgent Server Updates

Late this evening, the server administrators in IT will be performing some urgent updates and upgrades to the Web server. During that process, we will be turning off the current version of the website, and automatically directing visitors to a backup copy of the site. Any changes you make to the site today will be temporarily lost until the maintenance is completed. If you need any urgent changes made to the site during this maintenance window, please let us know by emailing webmaster@umw.edu. If you are a content manager, you should have received an email message with more information about these upgrades in your email. … [Read more...]

WordPress Updated

On Friday morning, the UMW website was updated to the latest version of WordPress (3.5.2), and all plugins were updated to their latest versions. Following is a list of some of the plugins that were updated on Friday. If you use any of these plugins on your site, please be sure to check things out and make sure the new versions are working properly. In addition, if you notice any new issues on the website itself, please inform us so that we can look into it. … [Read more...]

Twitter Changes – Old Twitter Widgets No Longer Working

For those of you that have Twitter widgets set up on your websites, you may have noticed that they are no longer working correctly. Instead of showing a list of your latest tweets, they are most likely displaying some sort of error message. This issue is due to the fact that Twitter recently removed support for the "application programming interface" (API - an interface set up to allow websites and applications to communicate with Twitter) that was used by all of the old Twitter widgets. There is a fairly simple solution, but it will take a bit of work on your part. You can find some basic instructions explaining how to set up your new Twitter widget within the "Cool Tools" section of this website. … [Read more...]

Security Bulletin: Social Media Widget Plugin Removed

Anyone that was using the "Social Media Widget" plugin might have noticed that it's missing from your site. Unfortunately, we had to remove the plugin immediately, as we were informed that it included malware. Basically, the plugin was injecting links into your pages that led back to various spam sites. If you are interested in reading more details about the issue with the plugin, you can read the security bulletin at Sucuri. If you were using Social Media Widget, and you need to find a replacement, please email us at webmaster@umw.edu so we can help you investigate possible alternatives. … [Read more...]