Media + CKEditor

  1. Install & enable Media (1.4 works fine) and CKEditor.
  2. Configure CKEditor:
    1. Go into each profile that should have access.
    2. Go to Editor Appearance.
    3. Make sure “Plugin for inserting images from Drupal media module” is checked.
    4. Remove the Image button from the current toolbar.
    5. Add the Media button to the current toolbar. (It looks like the Image button, but as if the little pictures were stacked!)
    6. Go to Advanced Content Filter.
    7. Add “img[*]” (w/out quotes) to the Extra allowed content box. (Probably you could narrow down the attributes in the brackets, but I’m just going with * for the time being.)

Then: ta-da! It just works. (Assuming that your site has been set up with permissions for uploading via Media module, which is a whole other story.)

what we’ve done

I forgot exactly how I wanted to put it, but it’s something like: “fixing ALL THE THINGS, a little bit at a time”.

Our team formed having a lot of work to do. Susan had been by herself for nearly a year; her previous programmer had not been particularly proactive; her previous designer had been burnt out. (My take on the situation, anyway.) The last big redesign had been in the mid-2000s, followed by their big conversion to the current CMS. I came in almost two years ago, and Justin about six months after that.

Setting routines

Breaking off little pieces

Recruiting guinea pigs

Work sessions

Getting inspired

Jumping off cliffs

CMS template training notes

  • Finding your stuff
  • Editing an existing page
    • “Inline Metadata” -> title, navigation title, description, review date
    • Main content vs secondary
  • Uploading files (esp naming conventions)
  • Creating a page
  • The “Needs Review” area
  • _info: navigation and more
  • _contact: contact info and hours

Remiss in my blogging!

So I guess it’s been 6 months since I’ve posted anything here. Hrm.

Been thinking about what we might post to our team blog, which is also pretty well neglected.

Possible topics:

How to rite gud

What to do with analytics reports

Understanding your audience

Doing a content inventory/audit

What does a usability test look like

How to integrate a blog

All about card sorts

What to do when everything goes sideways

Chunks vs blobs

What is responsive design

Strange features of Cascade

Picture posting tips

Lady Lego on bicycle

Test: 30-character (max) title

Lady Lego on bicycle

What exactly is the setting to make sure there’s an image in the feed? (Library/Photoland project.) Checking for ideal excerpt length: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus varius mollis mi, in pellentesque nisl iaculis mollis. Donec tincidunt volutpat urna, ac mattis nulla commodo vel. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Vestibulum euismod ornare venenatis. In bibendum tristique eros nec ultricies. Donec faucibus, lorem sed lacinia aliquam, odio augue rutrum lectus, nec pulvinar nisl libero et elit. Nulla laoreet sem id est lacinia et iaculis elit adipiscing. Sed sed eros lacus. Sed venenatis consectetur augue rutrum dapibus. Maecenas congue libero vitae lorem pharetra nec porttitor velit adipiscing. Praesent semper sollicitudin lorem, in venenatis sem gravida ac. Aenean fringilla, eros vitae varius molestie, metus ligula viverra diam, sit amet rhoncus risus mi ut nisi. Pellentesque feugiat, ante et sagittis vehicula, ligula ipsum blandit dui, vitae blandit sem nunc condimentum purus. Vestibulum aliquet venenatis nibh. Sed porta imperdiet purus, in imperdiet mauris cursus at. Fusce consequat faucibus lacinia.

Google Search Appliance webinar

Looks like a lot of this is aimed at internal/intranet search. (which makes me wonder if there’s a Banner integration.)

– SharePoint integration (no relevance for us)

– multilingual (does that have any use for us? translation could be helpful, I think. will want to ask about that for potential international students)

– PDF preview (which is pretty sexy)

– assist & suggest, dynamic navigation with entity recognition (controlled vocabularies)

– searches file shares?

– moderated social settings, subject matter experts can recommend results at the point of search w/out having to do manual keymatch, with a moderation queue.

– search of subject can also include a list of experts.

– search across sites (sharepoint, wiki, etc) and other repositories (document mgmt, database, filesystem)

– entity recognition is like filtering – by author, creation date, file type, or attributes set on the back end

– pull info about experts from LDAP (or Sharepoint profiles) to build a profile page. (this feels a lot like intranet in a box)

– that answers the translation question – individual can choose to translate previewed PDFs from any (supported) language to any other.

Gut check: overkill for our needs unless we did something REALLY big with it internally.

Gerry McGovern webinar

quantifiable task completion to see results

choose the top tasks (a survey) – took 6 weeks putting it together – gathered from employees? to be answered by customers/potential customers. “often your gut instinct is totally/dangerously wrong”

[how do you intrduce this survey in front of site visitors?]

“continuously improve the small things” (cisco)

4 tasks got as much of the vote as the bottom 49 tasks. (OECD site)

we have to say what we’re focusing on, but more importantly, what are we NOT focusing on?

often an inverse relationship between importance of task and the amount of time being spent on it by staff. ouch. “often the tiny task are political”

same as OECD with Scottish Enterprise: top 5 get same level of interest as bottom 50, etc with Enterprise Ireland, Innovation Norway.

“supertask” – Get funding, book a flight, etc.

brng the top tasks to the top of the architecture

[do the same thing for my?]

people want to do things themselves, not call a sales rep or customer service.

“have to break the culture of launch & leave”

“evidence of actual behavior”

identify top task, measure them continuously, loop of continuous improvement

Cisco: top 3 tasks get as much votes as the bottom 40+. checked with internal data: matched with metrics. list of survey is overly long on purpose, btw.

even potential customers had the same questions as current customers. (is that so for students?) ppl are coming to websites to “take you for a test drive” because they know what they’re going to be doing later.

“download software is our ‘book a flight'”

in 2010, took 15 steps, ~800 seconds (ea step?).

2012: 4-7 steps, 60-100 seconds

end of formal presentation

first few questions are terrible, this one guy wasn’t paying attention to the presentation & is nitpicking.

missed some questions while doing survey (which is very like the one he talks about in the presentation)

cost of projects they work on: $25-50K. (!) [altho it strikes me that there are some of these techniques that can be done without spending a ton of money.]

“the stranger’s long neck” – his book

“get rid of all the navigation you can get rid of” – plus naming navigation around the tasks, then focusing into that task’s navigation.

“we’re really in the stone age if we’re measuring visits [pagehits, time on page]” – what activity but none of the why. harder to measure, but worth doing.

This week…

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a Week in Review!

This was the first week with the Web Team’s new designer, Justin McDowell. He’s getting himself set, which makes me realize how much I’ve already figured out in just four months. 🙂 Also, how helpful my previous experience at Pierce College was, and how helpful it is to have two family members who attended Evergreen.

But now we can start to set up common processes and systems, toss out old stuff, start big new stuff. So that’s very cool.

This week I worked quite a bit on OARS (Online Academic Records System) — some personas work, which I find I really enjoy both the research and the writing. (I was a creative writing major at UPS. Go figure.) And also some UX work with the very first bit of the system. I’ve never done UX design in Excel, and yet for this piece it was exactly the right tool. Since, really, it’s just a table. The OARS project team has a cowork/meeting one morning a week, and we mostly worked on that — clarifying from what I’d done and what the lead developer had done, and getting to something that made sense to the whole team, and that we think will be good for students…someday.

I also did lots and lots of Google Analytics reporting, which can be mind-numbing, but then there are flashes of insight. Those are kind of delightful; it even included discovering that something I’d done was actually helpful to our site visitors, measurably so!

There’s been one incredibly dull project that’s also incredibly necessary to move some other projects along. TBH, it’s sort of nice sometimes to just have something quiet and routine to do.

Cascade User Conference – summary

I wrote all my live notes on my personal blog, mostly because I can actually connect to that with the Android WP app, which I use on my tablet. But the summary properly belongs here.

Session highlights

Some upcoming features: modules, which I’m still not clear what those will do, although it sounds like an image gallery/slider is among those planned; auto-saving drafts; more contextual editing; customizing the options in TinyMCE; site-wide link checking. (Note: it looks like “Check for broken links” when saving after editing isn’t checked by default the way we have it now. Should it be?) Better reporting. (I would like to look into existing reporting options.) HTML5 support, which is “coming soon”, mostly consists of support for new tags. When they upgrade to the latest version of TinyMCE, it’ll also have dropdown options for the block level HTML5 tags.

Template XSLT formatting – you can apply a format to a template to do post-processing after the whole page has been generated. Makes it possible to get at the whole XHTML page, which is sometimes nice for accessing sidebars etc. This may not be needed if using an approach similar to UCDavis’ modular content model.

Web services – we could do quite a bit with web services to read/write to Cascade. My thoughts: create a “web services” user so nothing is tied to a specific user; inclined to keep all web services scripts separate from CMS output, unlike the way partials are set up. Possible uses: “bug all page managers,” synchronize catalog with CMD, same thing with calendar items. With that last one may need some combining with R25 info. Had my instincts about web services & calendars confirmed later with the calendar presentation, where the presenter uses web services to auto-publish/update.

UCDavis modular content model. The general idea: a generalized content type with fields to add data definition (structured data) blocks in specific parts of the page. An index block, similar to the “calling-page” block I learned in training, then works out which blocks have been included in order to place correctly and include the correct CSS/JS for those blocks.

Magazines: presenter’s college gives each issue its own look and feel. The magazines have their own “Site” in Cascade, and each one has its own config set. It seems like we could use this concept to do some RWD experimentation and practice coordinating with print.

Calendars: not a ton of useful info in this one, but confirmed some of my earlier ideas. One interesting thing to note: they use Cascade to power digital signs.

oXygen Editor: need to download bsf.jar to be able to do JS inside of XSLT. There’s a whole bunch of other things that I want to try with this tool to make life easier.

Vassar creates a backup (?) of their whole Cascade site in a MySQL database, partially for running more sophisticated reports. Among other things, she gets a daily email of what pages were published, listed by site, with new pages highlight, and links directly to the CMS. Think we could do this with web services. Also, their alumni site is a mix of Cascade and Harris, although that requires putting some assets on a secure site to avoid mixed content errors.

Some general/overall notes:

Recommendation to use hosted jQuery library instead of our own, with a fallback to a local version. Many people have those external libraries cached from other web surfing, should make page loads faster.

Think we need a slightly different server setup. At least two presentations mentioned having a “common” or “assets” site to store common CSS/JS/images and templates/blocks/formats, plus several different production, development, test setups that I heard about.

At least two presentations mentioned using PHP includes for some of the site navigation — the site-wide stuff, where you’d want to be able to change it and not have to republish everything. Vassar does quite a few pieces that way. Is that something we want to look at or not?

A site migration spreadsheet, with statuses, users, etc. Useful both for tracking and for figuring out better roles and groups.

Looks like most folks use index blocks to auto-generate navigation, with a checkbox in the page to include or not, defaulted to NOT include. Seems to keep people more organized.

I just joined the Higher Ed Cascade Listserv. I have cards for Jessica & Craig at UCDavis, and Megg at Vassar.