VLN Upgraded
The VLN Group sites was upgraded today to bring it into line with the latest version of the open source platform it runs on - elgg
Apart from some minor visual and layout changes this upgrade also provides:
- More descriptive subject lines in email notifications
- The ability to follow the links in email notifications even if you are not currently logged in
For the geeks among you the underlying html has been radically changed in order to make the site more accessible to all users. The downside of this is that we were not able to carry across any of the custom themes that you developed for your profiles or groups. These can now be added again though using the same process as before. Please email help@vln.school.nz if you would like access to any of your old theme images as we can provide a link to a backup copy of the site prior to the upgrade to allow this.
The VLN Support Team
Comments
This upgrade lost me about 2 hours of work today. When I came to save the page I was working on it said the upgrade was in progress and I couldn't do anything about it.
May i suggest you do NOT upgrade while people are using the VLN!
Michael Loretz
Hi Michael
Apologies for the inconvenience, but we did our best to notify people of the planned outage over the last week. As the VLN groups operates as a 24/7 service it is difficult to find windows for upgrades when we can be sure that nobody is using the service.
A good approach when submitting large amounts of data to any online service would be to do the bulk of the work in an offline document and then copy and paste the completed text into the online service, otherwise it could just as easily be a local internet outage that will cause loss of work as much as a scheduled upgrade.
Apologies again from the VLN support team.
Glen
Yay, the annoying you have been logged in message has now gone :)
Can you please fix the VLN News widget, it was ok when it was small, but now with the discriptions it is now beyond being needed in it current state
>Yay, the annoying you have been logged in message has now gone :)
Yes, the annoying green message box that appeared all over the place when adding posts, etc. should also be gone :-) Replaced with a much less annoying notification at top right.
Hi Gerard
The News widget is top of our list to fix in the morning - will be knocked back to title only - we agree that the new format takes way too much space.
Glen
Yes thanks Glen this looks good at first glance but annoyingly the addresses for our groups have changed! For example our groups address used to be /groups/935/vln-primary/
now it is /groups/profile/935/vln-primary
This affects all the links i have previously shared in newsletters, blogs, emails, signatures, business cards... Is there anyway you can tweak that url address back to the previous one or do a redirect.
Hi Rachel
We will try and get a redirect in place to fix this first thing in the morning.
Glen
Hi Glen,
I can no longer access Jenni Bedford ESOL Online group. The message tells me that this group has been removed. Do you have any suggestions?
Kind regards
Breda Matthews
Hi Breda
Try /groups/profile/306293/esol-online/ - not sure if this is the group you are talking about - some of the old links to groups are broken - we will get these fixed in the morning.
Glen
Hi Glen, I like the new look and had a quick tour, clicking on discussion on the top I got this error message:
Fatal error: Call to a member function getAnnotations() on a non-object in /home/vln/public_html/mod/threaded_forums/views/default/object/groupforumtopic.php on line 30
Not an issue for me, I don't understand it but I thougt you might find this useful.
Cheers, Monika
Thanks Monika - looks like this only happens if you are not logged in - we will get this fixed in the morning.
Hi Glen - I had a good play last night and discovered - as I wired - that file links went to a generic pile. I redid all my hyperlinks. Worth people knowing if they are submitting Milestone reports this week.
Also - as I said - group themes don't save. I had a couple of goes but it kept sayiong there were no themes saved.
Hi Annemarie
Are you able to give us an example of the file links that now go to the generic list - may be tricky I guess if you have now updated them all, but we are having trouble working out what you mean, so an example would be great if possible.
Glen
If you go to /pages/view/688437/weekly-home-contact-with-parents you'll see in the comment box that Ann Eastcott has put a link to a doc. When you click "Correspondence to parents via email", it goes to "all site files". That is what happened to all the rest. Links to pages in the VLN and on the web were fine.
Feeling a little stupid but on my forums for NAPP such as the various Korero, there now seems no way to go to the next page. All that is at the bottom is the option to reply. Help!
@Katherine - Thanks for reporting that, should be fixed now.
The problem with broken links should now be fixed, eg. an old link of style /pg/groups/935/vln-primary should now automatically go to the new format of /groups/profile/935/vln-primary and a file link like /pg/file/read/688436/correspondence-with-parents-via-email should redirect automatically to /file/view/688436/correspondence-with-parents-via-email.
Apologies for any inconvenience while we got this sorted.
The VLN Support Team
If you still have problems with old file and group links not working try clearing your web browser cache and restarting your browser.
Hey Glen - themes done! All good mate - thanks
Thanks for fixing the redirect on our main group pages phew!
Hmmmm the link thing isn't completely fixed. Links to resources aren't working. For example links to resources from a blogpost for example this post
Also from our side much is integrated into the resources for example our Learning Tools page is linked to several separate resources all of which are now broken links.
This will be a big problem for the LCO handbook also as the supporting resources are linked into the pages of the LCO handbook (have checked that one out & the ones i have looked at are broken links)
Another glitch coming up is when you click on more blog post from the front page of our group it goes off to a weird page with no css in it. Though if you click on group blog from the left hand side bar it works correctly.
Also rss feeds please can you check these are working properly. I had an rss to our moodle front page running from our group blog. After the change over that rss showed all vln site blog entries, so i tried to redo it and now it doesn't display anything.
Wow you guys must be busy with this!
Also the Gallery/photo widget has disappeared this used to be on our groups front page
Hi Rachel
The Resource links are redirecting properly now - if you still have problems empty your cache and restart the browser. Still working on the other issues.
Glen
Hi Rachel
The 'More blog posts' link is now fixed, along with the picture gallery widget. We have tested the RSS and it works ok on the examples we tried - if you can send the url of the feed you are trying to add to Moodle to help@vln.school.nz we will have a look at it.
Glen
Just wondering if you know of any residual issue with groups approving membership? I have requested membership but the group moderator says the link in the message he recieves does not open?
Also I seem unable to log into the VLN at all via IE and whereas I used to log in via the google button, now I have to enter my log in details? Is there something I need to do to restore that function?
Chris