All Updates

Winter website updates underway: SEO, Events Calendar, Jetpack

The Digital Communications team has been performing behind-the-scenes work with your websites. You may see changes in the WordPress dashboard once these changes are made: SEO — Moving from Yoast to SEOPress As mentioned in our October newsletter, we are transitioning from the Yoast SEO tool to SEOPress for search optimization features. The SEOPress tool […]

Read more

Important: known issue with Content Blocks

While we continue to adopt the newer Gutenberg Editor, we are working to ensure our older Content Blocks system continues to work for websites. A critical issue has been discovered with the Content Blocks system and the WordPress revision history feature, resulting in corrupted, uneditable pages when the error occurs. With the help of UMS […]

Read more

Listing events on your web pages: the shortcode explained

As mentioned in our August newsletter, our existing Event List Content Block has become unreliable, and we have discontinued its use. The new method of listing events uses a text “shortcode” — instructions for the website you can add in the page editor that will trigger features in the published pages. We have used these […]

Read more

Twitter/X updates and recommendations

Earlier this year, Twitter changed its name to X Corp, and the familiar bluebird icon was changed. We are working with UMS IT to change the twitter icon on our campus websites where it appears in social menus. This logo change will occur automatically for our social links menus. If you have featured a link […]

Read more

DubBot Training

Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and ensuring your content is accessible is part of an inclusive communication strategy. This month, we discuss the new accessibility checking tool DubBot and training available. Coming in September: DubBot Accessibility Checker DubBot is a new website compliance checking tool (replacing Monsido) that we will be available for use […]

Read more

Important: Event list content block problems

A required update to our WordPress software has broken the Event List Content Block. We are working with UMS IT to remove the block from use altogether in a future update. Because of this problem, pages using the event list content block are not listing events in the correct order, and many events are missing […]

Read more

Accessibility and inclusion: Using accessibility checkers

This month, we discuss accessibility checkers. WebAIM WAVE Accessibility Checker WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) has provided comprehensive web accessibility solutions since 1999, and their free online service is available to anyone for free use to evaluate a web page. Simply navigate to the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool website, and enter your web page address. […]

Read more

Past WPCampus conference recordings available

WPCampus is an annual conference focused on the use of WordPress in higher education. This year’s event was held in mid-July, and recordings of the sessions will be made available soon in their Learning Library. This resource offers a convenient filter to view sessions from 2016–20 on topics from Accessibility to Writing, all with the […]

Read more

Gutenberg training in August

In late June we conducted our “beta test” of Gutenberg training, and the results of that session are informing what will become our official Gutenberg training. We will continue to offer our existing “basics” training (now called content blocks basics), and all three of these trainings (Gutenberg basics, Content Blocks basics, and Beyond the basics) […]

Read more

July 24 WordPress updates

The University of Maine websites benefit from great support by the University of Maine System IT department, and part of this involves a quarterly schedule of updates to keep the technologies we work with current. Updates to add-on software (plug-ins) Features such as our events calendar and web forms use add-on software that WordPress refers […]

Read more