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· One min read

The Morea team is delighted to announce the release of Version 3.2. This release focuses on improved support for new Morea users, and includes:

  • Addition of a "template-module" to the morea template repository.
  • Documentation explaining module design and implementation using the new template-module. For details, see Module design.
  • Addition of a "_module-icons" directory to the morea template repository, making over 50 PNG from past Morea modules available. For details, see Module Icons documentation.
  • Documentation on how to use Gitpod for Morea development. For details, see Choosing local vs. cloud development
  • Bundler updated to 2.4.2, various gems updated.

As usual, any changes to the code do not impact existing sites. You will only see these changes the next time you create a new Morea site from the morea template repository.

Have fun and let us know if you run into problems.

· One min read

The Morea team is delighted to announce the release of Version 3.1. This release adds a number of useful new features to Morea, including:

Many users might decide to wait to obtain these features until the next time they create a Morea site. If you want to upgrade an existing site to Version 3.1, then we provide guidance in the Morea User Guide Chapter on Updating.

Have fun and let us know if you run into problems.

· 3 min read

The Morea team is delighted to announce a new major release of the system. This release should be mostly backward compatible with existing Morea instructor content, though there are extensive changes (and simplifications!) to the way sites are developed and managed.

Summary of changes​

Here is a summary of the changes from Version 2:

  1. Morea 3 uses the latest releases of Jekyll (Version 4.2.0), Bootstrap (5), Bootswatch (5), FullCalendar (5.8), and ChartJS (3.5).

  2. Create a new Morea 3 site using the GitHub "template" mechanism. Templates have advantages over the previous approach of cloning: you can create a private repository even though the template is a public repository, and you can create multiple repositories in a single organization from the same template.

  3. Morea 3 sites are automatically built and deployed via GitHub Actions whenever there is a commit to the main branch. Unlike Morea 2, Morea 3 does not use custom scripts (such as morea-run-local.sh, morea-publish.sh, etc.).

  4. Morea 3 does not require local management of multiple branches. Unlike Morea 2, there are no "src" and "gh-pages" subdirectories.

  5. To build and run a Morea 3 site locally, you no longer use a custom script (morea-run-local.sh). Instead, you use the standard Jekyll command bundle exec jekyll serve.

  6. To publish a Morea 3 site, you no longer use a special script (morea-publish.sh). Instead, you just commit your changes and push your repository to GitHub. Morea 3 uses GitHub Actions to automatically build and publish the site whenever there is a commit to the main branch in GitHub.

  7. Morea 3 is (finally!) cross-platform: there should be no significant differences between development on MacOS, Linux, and Windows platforms.

Astute Morea users will also observe that https://morea-framework.github.io has been reimplemented using Docusaurus. This will make documentation easier to maintain.

Migrating your V2 content to V3​

Instructors who have existing Morea V2 sites for a course taught in a prior semester and who wish to build a new Morea site for a future semester will need to migrate their content. Here are the issues that have been discovered with this migration:

In Morea 3, Assessments are no longer "page fragments" (like Outcomes), but rather their own page. This leads to several breaking changes:

  • The morea_summary field is now required for Assessment pages.
  • The URL for interior linking to an Assessment page has changed. Please see this page.

Morea 3 updates JSChart from Version 1 to Version 3. As a result:

Morea 3 updates Bootstrap from Version 3 to Version 5. As a result:

  • Pages that embed Bootstrap CSS and HTML must be updated to Bootstrap Version 5.

Getting started​

If you are a current user of Morea, please read the Getting Started section of the Instructor Guide and try building a new site using your old Morea files. If you run into problems, please create an issue or send an email so we can address it.

A list of known issues and desired enhancements for Morea 3 is available at https://github.com/morea-framework/morea/issues.

· One min read

Unfortunately, several of the Morea "cerulean" style themes (i.e. cerulean_green, cerulean_red, etc.) were loading the Open Sans font using the http: protocol. Now that GitHub uses https: by default, sites built using those themes were not displaying the Open Sans font correctly when retrieved from a github.io domain. (Instead, the Open Sans font fails to load and the site falls back to the use of the Times Roman font.)

We just published a fix to these themes in the core repo so that Open Sans will be loaded correctly regardless of the protocol (http: or https:) used.

To get the fix, cd into your Morea top-level directory, then invoke the morea-merge-upstream.sh script to incorporate the corrected code into your local copy of these themes.

Then republish your site and all should be well.

Other themes (SuperHero, SpaceLab, etc.) did not have this bug and so you should not have noticed this problem if you were using them.

Our apologies for the inconvenience!

· One min read

We've neglected the Gallery page for quite a while, so we spent a few minutes today updating it with links to additional sites using Morea---some in quite interesting ways! Take a look and let us know if you'd like your site included.

· 2 min read

The Morea team is delighted to announce the addition of breadcrumbs as a standard feature of Morea sites.

Breadcrumbs are located just below the navbar and provide an indication of where you are in the site. For example, this page shows you are at the page "WODs: An athletic approach to software engineering", inside the "Introduction" module, which is inside the "Modules" page, which is below the "Home" page.

Upgrade instructions​

To update your current Morea site to support breadcrumbs with minimal hassle, please do the following:

  1. Inspect your current master/src/_layouts/default.html. Do you add any navbar items (or anything else) to that file? If so, copy the added lines to a text buffer someplace and remember where they were located in your default.html file. If you didn't add anything, great.

  2. Invoke morea-merge-upstream.sh. You will get a merge conflict in default.html. Don't panic.

  3. Edit your master/src/_layouts/default.html file. Make it identical to this default.html file.

  4. If you had added navbar links or something to your original default.html file, then edit the master/src/_layouts/core.html file to put them back in. This will look almost exactly like your old default.html file. Add back in whatever customizations you saved to your text buffer in Step 1.

  5. There is a slight chance your master/_config.html file also has a merge conflict. If so, just edit it back to your original version. (the changes are just the addition of comments.)

That's it. Now invoke morea-run-local.sh and see if everything looks OK. If not, fix it. If you can't fix it, send me an email.

Now invoke morea-publish.sh to publish your cool new breadcrumbs to the world!

· One min read

The Morea team is delighted to announce the release of morea-watch.rb, a ruby script you can use instead of morea-run-local.sh and which will automatically stop and restart morea-run-local.sh whenever files in the morea directory change.

Morea-watch.rb was developed by Dan Port. Please check it out and let us know what you think!

· One min read

The Morea team is delighted to announce the release of morea-lintui, which combines "lint" content validation with a refreshingly retro terminal user interface (tui) for manipulating the structure of Morea sites.

Morea-lintui was developed by Henri Casanova. Please check it out and let us know what you think!

· One min read

The Morea team is delighted to announce the 2.0 release. Enhancements include:

  • Improved user interface
  • Improved calendar integration
  • Module meta-data
  • Google analytics
  • LaTeX equations
  • Eliminate dependency on Python
  • Page overviews
  • ... and much more!

Please see the release notes for details and a migration guide for current users.

· One min read

Cam Moore has contributed an include file that makes it easy for you to track the use of pages in Morea sites with Google Analytics. To learn more, see the documentation.