Notice, Tips

Introducing Sa11y: Your new content accessibility checker!

We’re excited to introduce you to Sa11y, the accessibility quality assurance assistant! Sa11y works as a simple in-page checker that visually highlights common accessibility and usability issues. Geared towards content authors, Sa11y straightforwardly identifies errors or warnings at the source with a simple tooltip on how to fix them. 

Logged-in view with Sa11y enabled. Sa11y detected two issues: a non-descript "learn more" link and a skipped heading.

Before using this tool, we strongly encourage you to review some content accessibility basics.

View an overview and demo of how Sa11y works.

Available to all TMU blog editors

Sa11y is enabled by default for all TMU blog owners and content editors. No installation necessary. Sa11y appears in Preview mode on all pages where a logged-in user has permissions to edit the page.

Customize using Advanced Settings

Although Sa11y works out-of-the-box, you can use the Advanced Settings page to customize the experience for website authors and adapt Sa11y to your theme. Learn how to customize the Advanced Settings.

Temporarily disable plugin

If you are experiencing issues with your blog or theme and need to temporarily disable the plugin, you can do so within the Admin dashboard.

  1. On the sidebar, hover on Settings, then click Sa11y.
  2. Uncheck the first checkbox labelled Enable Sa11y.
  3. Scroll down and click Save Settings.

Contact

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.

Upgrade

Upgrade to WordPress 6.2 July 28, 2023

On Friday, July 28 from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., blog.torontomu.ca will be updated. During this time, blog creators and visitors may experience a brief outage.

WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy”

This upgrade has lots of improvements to content creation, including a release of the new Site Editor, updates to navigation blocks, improvements to style editing, and performance improvements.

Find out more about this upgrade on wordpress.org.

How will my blog be impacted?

As always, a broad range of tests will be conducted to ensure the upgrade doesn’t negatively impact the blogs on blog.torontomu.ca.

Unfortunately, not all combinations of plugins, themes and content types can be tested in advance of the upgrade. If any issues related to the upgrade come to light, they will be added to the bottom of this post.

After the upgrade is complete, please contact us if you have any issues with areas of your site that worked prior to the update.

Known issues after this WordPress upgrade

No issues specific to this upgrade have been found yet.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.

Upgrade

Upgrade to WordPress 6.1 March 24, 2023

On Friday, March 24 from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., blog.torontomu.ca will be updated. During this time, blog creators and visitors may experience a brief outage.

WordPress 6.1 “Misha”

This upgrade includes improvements to the way we create and manage content, organization of the features in the WordPress interface, improvements in accessibility, and other minor improvements .

Find out more about this upgrade on wordpress.org.

How will my blog be impacted?

As always, a broad range of tests will be conducted to ensure the upgrade doesn’t negatively impact the blogs on blog.torontomu.ca.

Unfortunately, not all combinations of plugins, themes and content types can be tested in advance of the upgrade. If any issues related to the upgrade come to light, they will be added to the bottom of this post.

After the upgrade is complete, please contact us if you have any issues with areas of your site that worked prior to the update.

Known issues after this WordPress upgrade

No issues specific to this upgrade have been found yet.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.

Notice

Email address updates for blog.torontomu.ca

January 11 Update
The next time you log in to your blog, your email address in the blog.torontomu.ca network will automatically update to @torontomu.ca.

There are two upcoming changes related to the university’s new email addresses that impact the blog.torontomu.ca network.

The university’s email addresses will change from @ryerson.ca to @torontomu.ca between December 26 and 28, 2022.

During this transition, the email notifications from the blog.torontomu.ca network may not work as expected. This may prevent you from receiving emails when people comment on your posts, along with other emails sent from the blog system. The email notifications will work as expected once the transition has completed.

On January 11, 2023, we will update the authentication system on blog.torontomu.ca.

The next time you log in to your blog after January 11, your email address in the blog.torontomu.ca network will automatically update to @torontomu.ca.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.

Maintenance, Outage

WordPress infrastructure maintenance October 28, 2022.

On Friday, October 28 from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., blog.ryerson.ca will undergo infrastructure maintenance. During this time, blog creators and visitors may experience a brief outage of up to 5 minutes.

How will my blog be impacted?

During the process, a brief service interruption of 60 seconds to 5 minutes is expected and normal to occur.

If any issues related to this change come to light, they will be added to the bottom of this post.

After the maintenance is complete, please contact us if you have any issues with areas of your site that worked prior to the update.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.

Outage, Upgrade

Maintenance Window October 5, 2022

From October 5 at 10:00 p.m until October 6 at 2:00 a.m., blog.ryerson.ca will undergo maintenance. There may be a brief interruption of service during this time.

How will my blog be impacted?

You may experience a disruption of service for up to 5 minutes during this maintenance period.

Once completed, we do not expect any impact to blogs on our network.

If your blog behaves differently after the maintenance, please be sure to let us know right away.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.

Upgrade

Upgrade to WordPress 6.0 September 9, 2022.

On Friday, September 9 from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., we will be upgrading blog.torontomu.ca to a new version. During this time, blog creators and visitors may experience a brief outage.

WordPress 6.0 “Arturo”

This upgrade introduces a number of improvements to the writing experience, block themes, new uses for featured images and more!

How will my blog be impacted?

As always, a broad range of tests will be conducted to ensure the upgrade doesn’t negatively impact the blogs on blog.torontomu.ca.

Unfortunately, not all combinations of plugins, themes and content types can be tested in advance of the upgrade. If any issues related to the upgrade come to light, they will be added to the bottom of this post.

After the upgrade is complete, please contact us if you have any issues with areas of your site that worked prior to the update.

Known issues after this WordPress upgrade

No issues specific to this upgrade have been found yet.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.

Alert, Outage

blog.ryerson.ca to become blog.torontomu.ca

Following the university’s recent name change, we will be changing the name of the blog.ryerson.ca WordPress blog network.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.

On this page:

TMU’s blog network name will be changing

On August 19, we will change the name of the “blog.ryerson.ca” WordPress blog network to “blog.torontomu.ca”. We recommend that you avoid accessing the blog network on that morning, from 12:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m., as any changes you make during that time may not be retained.

Your blog will have a new address

Once the network has been renamed, your blog’s address will end in “blog.torontomu.ca”. 

Visitors who try to access your blog site using the old “blog.ryerson.ca” address will automatically be redirected to the new address. Please take the time to review your blog site and update any references to “blog.ryerson.ca” that may be visible in the content of the blog.

Your user email account is not changing yet

At this time, we don’t have a schedule confirmed for the change to your @ryerson.ca email address. We will provide an update once that change has been planned.

How long do I have to update any links that have the old URL?

While we don’t have an exact timeline, we expect to have the redirect in place for about a year. This will give blog owners some time to update the blog.ryerson.ca links in our posts and pages to blog.torontomu.ca.

Tips for updating your blog

While the university transitions to its new name, we will have redirects that automatically update “blog.ryerson.ca” to “blog.torontomu.ca” for your blog visitors. These redirects will be retired at some point – please use this time to update your blog and all references to it.

Blog posts, pages and interface

The following areas should all be updated once the change to the blog network has happened:

  • Images and links to your media library (their code contains the old URL and will need to be updated).
  • University logos

The following are examples of areas to review and determine if are ready to be updated:

  • Text in posts or pages that include the name “Ryerson” or any short-forms
  • Links to *.ryerson.ca websites (including other pages in your blog)

TMU offers branding and renaming guides on “The Next Chapter” website.

These are examples of situations where you may have shared or posted the old blog address, and need to update it.

  • Posted a link to the blog on another website (like your D2L Brightspace course shell)
  • Included the link in documents that you share with others (like your course outline or weekly course materials)
  • Set up a redirect from a custom URL to your blog URL (please contact our team if your custom URL contains “ryerson” and you will be obtaining a new one)
Upgrade

Upgrade to WordPress 5.9 March 18, 2022.

On Friday, March 18 from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., we will be upgrading blog.ryerson.ca to a new version. During this time, blog creators and visitors may experience a brief outage.

WordPress 5.9 “Josephine”

This upgrade, “Josephine“, introduces improvements to block site editing.

How will my blog be impacted?

As always, a broad range of tests will be conducted to ensure the upgrade doesn’t negatively impact the blogs on blog.ryerson.ca.

Unfortunately, not all combinations of plugins, themes and content types can be tested in advance of the upgrade. If any issues related to the upgrade come to light, they will be added to the bottom of this post.

After the upgrade is complete, please contact us if you have any issues with areas of your site that worked prior to the update.

Known issues after this WordPress upgrade

No issues specific to this upgrade have been found yet.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit an inquiry to the online form found on the Contact Us page.