Departments at Lafayette

Departments at Lafayette is Lafayette College’s new light-weight content management system for departments and offices. It is powered by WordPress MU.

• Request a Web site hosted on Depts.
• Read Lafayette’s Web Site Account guidelines.

Questions about WordPress can be directed to  instructional technologists Courtney Bentley (bentleyc@lafayette.edu) or Jason Alley (alleyj@lafayette.edu)  Technical questions can be sent to Ken Newquist (newquisk@lafayette.edu) web applications specialist.

Personal, club and organization web sites are hosted by Departments’ sister installation, Sites at Lafayette, which is located at sites.lafayette.edu.

We’ve updated three WordPress plugins:

• Authors
• Contact Form 7
• Google Analytics

If you’re using these plugins, and encounter problems after the upgrade, please call the Helpdesk at 610.330.5501 or submit a help ticket.

We’ve made some changes behind the scenes to give WordPress a speed boost.  The practical effect of this is that almost everything that makes up a WordPress page (web pages, JavaScript and style sheets) will now download 2 to 3 times faster than they did before. This should help those who’ve reported slowness when working with WordPress off campus or over wireless.

If you’re still experiencing slowness with WordPress, please contact the help desk at 610.330.5501 or submit a help ticket.

We’ve updated several plugins on Departments at Lafayette to their latest versions: Contact 7, Google Analytics, NextGen Gallery, Page Links To, PowerPress and Sidebar Login. We’ve also added the Authors plugin to Depts to bring its roster of plugins into sync with Sites.

If you’re using these plugins, and encounter problems after the upgrade, please call the Helpdesk at 610.330.5501 or submit a help ticket.

Departments at Lafayette has been updated upgraded to WordPress 2.8.4. This was a security update, and doesn’t include any major new functionality. One side effect of the upgrade is that sites that have an apostrophe in their title (e.g. Joe Smith’s Web Page) now have a backslash in them (e.g. Joe Smith\’s Web Page). You can remove the backslash by logging in and going to the “Settings” page for your site, clicking the “General” link, and then editing your site’s name where it says “Blog Title”.

We’ve also updated the Google Analytics (statistics tracking) and Powerpress (podcasting) plugins to their latest versions.  Unfortunately, we also needed to remove a plugin: the Slideshare plugin (used for sharing online presentations via Slideshare.net) is broken, and has been deactivated.

If you encounter problems, please call the Helpdesk at 610.330.5501 or submit a help ticket.