Author: Ned Zimmerman

Pressbooks Shibboleth SSO 0.0.5

We just released a security update to Pressbooks Shibboleth SSO which includes a security fix for a bundled library, robrichards/xmlseclibs.

Pressbooks Stats 1.6.1

We just released Pressbooks Stats 1.6.1, which fixes an issue with retrieving network storage when the uploads directory is a symbolic link. We’ll be deploying this update to all our hosted networks by Wednesday, October 17th.

Q4 Roadmap Preview

In Q3, we added a couple new and exciting features to Pressbooks:

Image attributions (thanks to Brad and Alex at BCcampus)
New shortcodes to facilitate adding more complex content

We also released a new Open Source plugin, Pressbooks Shibboleth SSO, which provides bilateral Shibboleth SSO integration for Pressbooks networks. And we converted a few more themes to use Buckram, our theme component library, which gives us added flexibility to add new theme options for all themes.

In Q4 we’re wrapping up a few loose ends from our Q3 goals:

UX improvements to the webbook Table of Contents
UX improvements to the Export page

We’re also working on:

UI and UX improvements to the Theme Options page
Adding support for DOIs in Book Info and metadata outputs
Testing integration with Gutenberg, WordPress’ new editing interface
Continuing to convert themes and improve Buckram

As always, we’d love to hear your ideas for Pressbooks, so feel free to share them in the Pressbooks Community Forum!

Pressbooks 5.5.3 and McLuhan 2.5.2

We’re releasing Pressbooks 5.5.3 and McLuhan 2.5.2 today. In Pressbooks we’ve optimized two chunks of our codebase that were responsible for some performance issues, and in McLuhan we’ve patched some SCSS that was generating invalid CSS. Thanks to Thomas Dumm for reporting this issue.

Sprint Preview: October 9–19

This sprint we’re working on finishing some improvements to the webbook Table of Contents, an internal tool for our users to manage their communications preferences with Pressbooks, and converting more of our themes to Buckram.

Pressbooks CAS SSO 1.1.1, Pressbooks LTI Provider 1.1.1, and Pressbooks Shibboleth SSO 0.0.4

We’ve got some more bug fixes and minor improvements out for Pressbooks CAS SSO, Pressbooks LTI Provider, and Pressbooks Shibboleth SSO. As always you can find the full release notes on our documentation site.

Pressbooks 5.5.2, McLuhan 2.5.1, Aldine 1.5.0, and Pressbooks Stats 1.6.0

We’ve just updated Pressbooks, McLuhan, Aldine, and Pressbooks Stats with some bug fixes and improvements, and we’ll be deploying these changes to our PressbooksEDU networks tomorrow. You can check out the full changelogs on our documentation site, or get an overview on our October 3rd Release board.

Sprint Preview: September 24–October 5

This sprint, we’ll be working on:

Refinements to the forthcoming glossary feature
Cloning and API support for glossary terms
User experience and accessibility improvements to the Export page
Continued work on user experience improvements to the webbook table of contents
Developing a user experience strategy for the Theme Options page to make it more intuitive and less intimidating while improving its extensibility

Pressbooks 5.5.1

We just released Pressbooks 5.5.1, which fixes an issue in the release packaging for Pressbooks 5.5.0 that caused some problems with the cover generator. We encourage all users to update at their earliest convenience.

The Pressbooks Community Forum

As many of you know, we maintain a forum for Open Source users of Pressbooks at https://discourse.pressbooks.org. After some internal discussion, we’ve decided to close down the #opensource channel on Pressbooks Slack and refocus our Open Source community efforts on the forum. We’ve decided on this change because we believe that keeping conversations among our Open Source users on the open web is the best way to serve the broadest possible community of Pressbooks users. Many of you are already members of our Discourse forum and are actively involved sharing tips & tricks, suggesting features and helping your fellow Open Source users. If you aren’t yet a member, we encourage you to sign up! Thanks and please don’t hesitate to follow up with me by email — ned [at] pressbooks.com — if you have any questions.