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University Blog Service

University of Texas at Austin

, Filed Under: maintenance, News

Maintenance Outage: 6/13/19

The UBS stewardship team will upgrade PHP 5.4 to 5.6 on June 13th, 2019. Maintenance will begin at 6 pm and is expected to last for one hour. The service will need to be restarted and a short outage is expected. No actions are required on your part.

, Filed Under: maintenance, News

WordPress 5.1.1

UBS has been updated to WordPress 5.1.1.  See the following link for more information about this maintenance and security patch.

WP 5.1.1

, Filed Under: maintenance, News

Gutenberg Editor Is Available!

WordPress has released the new Gutenberg editor, which aims to improve the content creation experience for your WordPress site.

The “Classic” editor will continue to be available by default for all current and new sites.

Site Administrators are welcome to try out the new Gutenberg editor at any time!

Just log into your site Dashboard, click on Plugins in the left-hand menu, then deactivate the “Classic Editor” plugin.

NOTE (7/25/19): There is a known issue affecting sites with a custom domain that are also using the Gutenberg editor which can cause an error creating/updating posts or pages.  To avoid this error, make sure to always use your custom domain when accessing the site dashboard.  

Use this:
customdomain.utexas.edu/wp-admin

Not this:
sites.utexas.edu/site/wp-admin

, Filed Under: maintenance

Maintenance Outage

The University Blog Service will undergo an upgrade on December 18th, 2018 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM. During this time the service may be unavailable.

Check the IT Maintenance Events Calendar for more information.

If you have any questions, please contact the UT Service Desk at 512-475-9400. Thank you!

, Filed Under: Did You Know, Plugin Documentation

Wave of the Future: Google Analytics

First published on January 28, 2015. Updated on November 29, 2018.

This post will walk you through getting your site up with Google Analytics and properly configured. Let’s get started!

Before beginning, please be sure to review the best practices policy for the use of analytics on campus. Ensure that you have the following before beginning to configure your blog site:

• Site administrator credentials for a University Blog Service blog
• An email address that is not hosted on UTMail

First, create a Google Account. This can be your own personal Gmail/Google account if you have one. For departmental blogs or sites with multiple administrators, we do strongly recommend that a new Google Account be created for the group and that the credentials be shared in Stache with fellow administrators.

Next, log into the Google Analytics page, http://www.google.com/analytics/web, using the blog’s Google Account.

• Click “Sign Up”

• Fill out the New Account details using your blog information

• And select “Get tracking ID”

screen-shot-2017-02-09-at-3-23-32-pm

Next log into the Dashboard for your WordPress blog site, then:

• Click on “Plugins” in the left hand menu.
• Look for a plugin named “Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights.”
• Click on the “Activate” link under it.

The Dashboard will refresh once the plugin had been successfully activated. At this point the plugin will need to be configured to follow the best practices for Google Analytics use on campus.

• While still in Plugins, find the Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights you just activated and click on Settings.

settings
• Click “Authenticate with your Google account” and provide the email used to create your google analytics profile, then click “Allow” to allow the plugin to access your Google account.

• Select your site from the “Pick a Profile” dropdown and click “Complete Connection”.

 

complete connection

• You will get a message that it is finishing up and you will be taken back to your site. You will be on a page called Insights.

• Scroll down and click “Save Changes”.

Insights

That’s it! You’re done! After a short period of time Google Analytics will begin to collect information and you can view your Analytics from your Google Account. If you should have any questions, please send an email to help@sites.utexas.edu

NOTE: On August 9, 2018 Google Analytics for WordPress changed ownership from Yoast to MonsterInsights. This article has been updated to reflect this change.

If you already had Google Analytics activated on your site, please follow these instructions to re-authenticate:

  • Log in to your site dashboard
  • Open the left hand menu item, “Insights” (formerly called “Analytics”)
  • Follow the instructions to re-authenticate with Google Analytics

Resources from the plugin Developer:

, Filed Under: News

SSL Only Available on UBS

Starting today, all site administrators now have the ability to force visitors to view their site over HTTPS!

There is much discussion from Google as well as the US Federal Government as to why you might want to consider it. Least to say when it comes to Google search rankings, those that are HTTPs only get a little boost. This is how you do it.

Getting Started

SSL only is configured on the server on a per site basis so you must activate it for each of your sites individually. Fortunately it’s real simple

To enable this feature on your site, log into your Dashboard and click Settings -> SSL

In the resulting page you will see a “Go ahead, activate SSL!”. Click that button and you’re done! Browse your site and ensure that all content is displaying as you expect.

Encountering Issues?

You may notice images not appearing, styling not being applied, Javascript not running, or your site not behaving as expected. This is likely because there are hard coded references to these resources in your website. Changing them from ‘http’ to ‘https’ will address the issue. If you encounter further difficulties, please submit a ticket to help@sites.utexas.edu for assistance.

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