A major upgrade to myUMBC went into production today. The intention, and hope, is that this change will be transparent to users. Please let us know if you encounter any strange behavior.
This upgrade (or non-change, from the average user perspective) was necessary to make myUMBC more "future smart". If you haven't heard the rumors, we have a brand-new portal coming down the pike (oops, you didn't hear that from me :-) While the portal will have all sorts of neato features like skins and RSS feeds and user-customizable layouts and all the usual stuff you would expect in a modern portal, we still have to make sure the boring stuff continues to work, like course registration, transcript requests, and parking ticket appeals. Initially, most of this content will actually be served up by the existing myUMBC code, and just repackaged within the new portal's UI. With this release, I've basically re-engineered the myUMBC code so that it can run within the new portal. Major changes include: Cleaning up the generated HTML code to comply with XHTML 1.0, which the new portal requires; adding a flag to display content without added navigation or decoration; and revamping the (database driven) layout scheme to provide additional flexibility that we will need to handle the transition to the new portal.
Stay tuned for more exciting developments...