Hello from OIT Design and welcome to the 2016 fall semester. We’re doing our best to get into the fall groove, despite the residual nuclear temperatures still greeting us each time we emerge from our basement headquarters. We’ve had a productive summer and already have a busy fall lined up. We’re working on promising collection of new client sites that will be launching in the coming months, but here’s a look at what’s happening in the opening weeks of the semester…
WordPress 4.6 is Here
Version 4.6 of WordPress, named “Pepper” in honor of baritone saxophonist Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams III, is now live. In addition to a number of under-the-hood enhancements, this version features improvements to the WordPress Editor, incorporates native fonts and streamlines plugin and theme updates. We are currently in the process of updating all campus sites to version 4.6. To learn more about Pepper visit the WordPress blog or contact us.
Shiny & New
We‘ve had several new client sites go live this month, all released to riotous fanfare from their adoring user communities. Most recently, we’ve debuted the new Human Resources site. Click through and explore your this one-stop hub for all your HR needs.
Our friends over at The Office of Research, Innovation and Economic Development have just completed a major redesign and relaunch of their site. Visit their site for an example of how WordPress can help you create a site that is both eye catching and NC State Brand compliant.
Lastly, OIT Design team member Chris Deaton has been hard at work on the NCSU Dining Ipad app. This app, currently in use at Talley Student Center, is a ground-up redesign of its predecessor, including major improvements to the UI and optimized ADA accessibility. You can read Chris’s blog post about the redesign but for true proof of concept, head over to Talley and try it out for yourself!
Introducing: The NC State Protected Content Plugin
Suppose you have a page in your WordPress website that should be publicly available, but whose contents should only be read by a particular campus audience — for example, a page or section of your site that should be available for faculty and staff at NC State but not students or the general public.
Out of the box, there’s no easy way to do this. So we wrote our own plugin: NC State Protected Content, which allows you to manage user access to content on your site on a page-by-page basis. Once the plugin is enabled you can restrict user access to any page on the basis of unity credentials, WordPress user roles or employee type. For more information on this plugin, including installation instructions, see Brian’s blog post.
Register Now
Spots are going fast in our fall Basics of WordPress class. Basics of WordPress is a two hour course, offered three times during the fall semester. Representatives from OIT Design cover a complete outline of topics including: setup, configuration, themes, plug-ins, settings, options and management of WordPress. The dates for this fall are September 13, 2-4 PM(waitlist only), October 18, 2-4 PM and November 15, 10 AM-12 PM. You can register through NCSU ClassMate.
We’re also offering a special class on WordPress security on September 20th from 10:30-11:30 AM. Join Jen McFarland of OIT’s Web Services Team for this intermediate presentation on the security vulnerabilities of WordPress environments. Jen will also provide information on how to recover from a hack along with tips for securing your site. Register now through ClassMate (unity login required).