Website Freeze – Dec 16 through 18 2020

We are making a major ‘behind the scenes’ update to the BC website (www.bellevuecollege.edu) between Wednesday, December 16 and Friday, December 18, which requires that all website content be frozen (no changes made) during this time period.

Please plan to make any changes to your sites either before or after this time period. It is likely that you will not be able to log in at all during this period. In addition, any website forms not hosted on forms.bellevuecollege.edu will be disabled at times.

This update will not change the way that your website looks, but will involve an update to the WordPress core software we use, which includes some major updates to the ‘block editor’. All the same tools will be available, but icon, buttons, and the block inserter will look somewhat different; these updates make the editor more accessible, flexible, and fast. The block editor update will likely take place earlier in the week, before the overall freeze.

Thank you for the work you do, and have a happy holiday season.

Moving to HTTPS

Today we are moving the Bellevue College website to exclusively use encrypted connections (HTTPS).

Forcing the use of HTTPS has a number of benefits, including better privacy and security for our users, better search engine rankings for websites, and the future possibility of using HTTP2 and other new web technologies.

Data sent using HTTPS is secured via Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), which provides three key layers of protection:

  • Encryption. Encrypting the exchanged data to keep it secure from eavesdroppers. That means that while the user is browsing a website, nobody can “listen” to their conversations, track their activities across multiple pages or steal their information.
  • Data integrity. Data cannot be modified or corrupted during transfer, intentionally or otherwise, without being detected.
  • Authentication. Proves that your users communicate with the intended website. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks and builds user trust, which translates into other business benefits.

— from http://www.oncrawl.com/switching-https-priority-2017/

Bellevue College moves to Swiftype Site Search

On August 24 we changed the service that provides site search on the Bellevue College website. The service that we have used for many years, Google Custom Search, was discontinued by Google earlier this year. Our new service is powered by Swiftype, a widely used site search provider. We are excited to launch this new system, and hope that it will allow us to provide more relevant and dynamic results to the students and employees we serve.

As Swiftype and Google are different systems, search results may be somewhat different after this change. We will be working with Swiftype throughout the launch period to ensure that search results meet the needs of our campus; it’s very important that students and employees can find what they are looking for!

If you notice issues with the system, please submit a Service Desk ticket. This will help us improve search results over time!

Thank you for your patience and assistance as we make this change!

Updates that made this possible

Moving to Swiftype required us to update several projects that power the BC website; namely Mayflower, Mayflower Homepage, and Globals.

Along with the search updates, we also made some small tweaks to how headings are formatted, how title tags are generated, the small ad section of the BC homepage, and laid the groundwork for some new widgets in WordPress 4.8

The source code for most BC projects is open-source, and available on GitHub.

WordPress 4.7, Mayflower and Globals updates

We have just released a series of updates to the main Bellevue College website.

Globals and Mayflower updates

We have released significant updates to our ‘Mayflower’ wordpress theme and ‘Globals’ content and style library. For advanced users, this means that all Bootstrap features are now supported, and that Bootstrap grid systems will have better spacing on mobile devices. Headings are also styled more consistently with Bootstrap layouts.

WordPress 4.7.x “Vaughan”

We have release WordPress 4.7 to production. This update has a bunch of small, behind the scenes fixes, but nothing major on the user side.

WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan”

January 31 website basics training

Sign up for Bellevue College Website Training Tuesday, January 31 2017 from 1:30pm – 3:30pm in D240L (on the second floor of the Library).

This is a basic training on the essentials of working with our Content Management System (CMS). It is a great refresher or first time training. We will be paying special attention to accessibility and content requirements.

This training is limited to 34 participants, but don’t worry, we will be offering this again soon.

Sign Up for this Training!

December 13 Website Basics Training

We took a few months off, but we’re back!

Sign up for Bellevue College Website Training Tuesday, December 13, 2016 from 1:30pm – 3:30pm in A109.

This is a basic training on the essentials of working with our Content Management System (CMS). It is a great refresher or first time training.

This training is limited to 12 participants, but don’t worry, we will be offering this again soon.

December Session is full. We will be scheduling additional training soon!

Main BC website updated to WordPress 4.6.x

We have updated the main Bellevue College website to WordPress 4.6.x ‘Pepper’!

This is a pretty small update; the main new feature is that WordPress now checks links when you create them. For more information on WordPress Pepper, see the announcement on WordPress.org.

WordPress 4.6 “Pepper”

Note: Those who track these sorts of things may note that WordPress 4.7 was just released; we generally run about 1 version behind to allow time for stability testing.