wordpress

Notice: Gravity Forms – and admin notification emails – spam issue

Posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2022

Please note:

Due to the high volumes of notification emails that some WordPress web forms are sending out – we’re going to make a change to the email service it uses. This may temporarily affect whether those notification emails are marked as spam – at least if the recipients are using a college email address. This issue may also affect WordPress password reset requests.

  • eg: An admin notice email to “somedepartment@algonquincollege.com” may be marked as spam, but one sent to “someone@example.com” won’t necessarily have a problem – at least no more than they already would with our current email service.

We’re going to switch over a few sites that have lots of outgoing email traffic – if you’ve been sent this link it’s likely you may be affected.

It won’t change whether the submissions to the web forms are recorded in the WordPress admin area – as that doesn’t rely on the email system.

To resolve the problem please follow junk mail instructions here: https://algonquincollege.force.com/myACSupport/s/article/How-do-I-stop-known-emails-from-being-marked-as-junk

 

Notice: Accessibility updates for images

Posted on Monday, May 17th, 2021

Over the next few weeks we’re going to be manually adding alternative text descriptions (alt text) to images in every site, where they aren’t currently found. This will help to make the images more accessible for people using screen reader software, and is part of adhering to provincially required web accessibility standards.

Although this round of updates will be made by Web Services – in the future we will depend on all the site content owners to add alt text to images as they are published.

 

Notice: The Slider Pro Plugin is being replaced by Meta Slider.

Posted on Monday, January 13th, 2020

You may have noticed that some of the Slider Pro slideshow(s) in your site(s) have been replaced with ones that appear slightly different.

The Marketing Web Services team is in the process of replacing the Slider Pro plugin with one called MetaSlider. We’ll be recreating all your sliders using the new plugin, you won’t have to do anything for this to take place.

Please note: if you have one of the two column sliders in your site we’re going to leave those alone for now, as we’ll likely find another solution for updating those in the near future.

When will all the slides be converted?

  • Sometime in the Winter … we’re not in a rush to convert them.

Why are we replacing Slider Pro?

  • We’ve found that Slider Pro doesn’t quite meet all the web accessibility standards that we’d like it to, (for people who use screen reader software, etc… )
  • It also has a lot of customization options that are rarely used, and when they are – can sometimes end up producing sliders that don’t match the college branding standards as much as we’d like.
    • As well – we also have the slider plugin Revolution Slider, which we use for more complex slides with different layouts and interactivity We think it’s unnecessary to have two complex slider plugins available
  • It’s not a widely used plugin on the web, and isn’t updated by the developer as frequently as we’d like.

Why are we switching to MetaSlider?

  • We’ve found that it better meets the accessibility standards that we’re trying to match.
  • It has a simpler interface with fewer options, which will make it easier to work with for basic slider use.
    • We’ve also been able to customize it a bit to hide some of the extra options that we don’t want to make available right now
  • It’s the most widely used WordPress slider plugin – and it’s also frequently updated by the developers – so we think there will be better technical support for it in the long run.

How do I use it?

  • You’ll find the MetaSlider menu item at the bottom of the WP admin menu.
  • There are instructions onscreen in the plugin, and some fairly self explanatory menu items.
  • If we get enough feedback that more instructions are required – we’ll add another post an let you know about it.

 

 

WordPress password reset notice

Posted on Monday, February 4th, 2019

On February 4th you may have received an automated email to notify you that your WordPress password was reset – yes it is real.

We apologize for the lack of forewarning – the timing of the email notice was unfortunate – though we appreciate that many people called us to confirm that it was real.

Please note – we don’t know of a specific instance where a WordPress password was actually compromised – this is purely precautionary.

We’re aware that the reset link in the email may not be working at this time – which is due to an excess of people attempting to use it all at once. To avoid this issue please use the “Lost Your Password?” link on the login screen for your site.

Going forward we recommended that you *do not* set your WordPress password to be the same as any other password that you use elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

Update to the widget display selector

Posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2018

You may notice when working with widgets that there’s a few design changes to the page/post selection box.

One of the changes can be seen in the example below:

  • The orange lines on the left represent where your selections are relative to visible area of the list – which is represented by the blue box.

This should help you locate the current selections even when they’re not currently visible on screen.

Contact Card Posts Update

Posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2018

Please note – we’ve just updated the Contact Cards plugin to allow you to sort the output list in ascending or descending alphabetical order.

If you don’t set the new option in the sidebar widget or shortcode – it will continue to display them in the order which the posts were created, or using the “post order” field on each contact card.

We also updated instructions page for the posts – which you can find under the contact cards menu.

Not receiving the notification emails from one of your forms? Here’s how to fix it.

Posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2016

So – you have a form on your site and everything looks good, except you’re not receiving all the admin notification emails from it…

This is probably a result of the college email system filtering out genuine messages as if they’re spam.

There are two likely causes:

  • The email address you’ve used as the “From” field on your admin notification settings is being rejected by the college email system. It’s a bit picky about which address is being used to send emails that originate on our website. If the from email is not a college address it will probably not let it through.
  • The spam filtering settings on the email account that receives the notification emails may need to be adjusted to stop filtering emails from the address the form is using.

In the first case you’ll want to make sure that the admin notification settings are setup like so:

  • Leave the “From Email” field as the default “{admin_email}” or you could set it to “webservices@algonquincollege.com”. FYI when the email is actually sent the {admin_email} reference is going to be output as – “webservices@algonquincollege.com”.

    See an example of where to change the notification settings below:

form-screen

If your form is already setup with the right sender – then we recommend that you update the spam filtering settings on the receiving email account to never reject emails from “webservices@algonquincollege.com”.

You’ll need to follow these instructions: http://help.algonquincollege.com/articles/How_To/How-do-I-use-the-Can-it-anti-spam-server It covers how to block an address on that page – but once you login to the spam filter admin settings you can just as easily set it to never block emails from an address.

In this case you will want add a rule entry to never block emails from webservices@algonquincollege.com.

-Stewart