Cascade

Replied to DR (H&I) re photo display and powerpoint presentation.
On the advice of trainer recommended use of pdf instead of pp.

Built out their Cascade site according to communications recent recommendations to submitted spreadsheet.
Sent email to JH (RELS) with update (cc'd SA/HCMC)
Additional content incoming from RELS

Currently corresponding with Rels (JH, SA) in preparation for new Cascade website.
Received "draft" of site plan; added new features
Sent email to JH (Rels) requesting content information from them; advised Rels of site plan changes and procedures for site plan submission.

Met with TG (yesterday) to talk about a plan to move the History site to the 2012 templates. We tentatively agreed on May to early June as the best time to do a freeze-and-port. She has the new image sizing details, and will begin work on that, and at the same time will discuss any changes to the current site structure that may be appropriate; the idea is to do these before the freeze, to make the downtime as short as possible.

JS sent code for including a Skype link, which calls external JS from Skype, which I've inserted as the dept requested into the contact page and footer. Had to republish the whole site, of course, but nothing else was publishing at the time. The link doesn't work for me, even though I have Skype, but I don't have any kind of Skype plugin in my browser; I looked for one, but there doesn't seem to be one.

The first broken link report came from the French site, and it shows up what looks like an Apache misconfiguration for a PDF link (it bounces to the web.uvic.ca equivalent site), as well as a huge number of errors which I think originate from the global top-of-the-page stuff, which of course is not under our control. I fixed the other errors -- there were only a few, mainly typos in URLs.

JS showed me how to do multiple FAQ sections with multiple questions in each, using a set of plusminus blocks, so I've completed the last urgent task before launch this evening. There are a few remaining issues that require input from the department.

The new French site is about to go live. I worked through the remaining issues arising out of the proofing by Communications folks, and fixed everything I could fix; a few things remain outstanding or are things that should be done by a department member. The changes have been published to the dev site, and JS will go ahead and replace the old site with the new some time tomorrow, according to our plan.

LSPW reported the French site is ready to go live, except for a couple of problems; fixed those (news index blocks had been set not to publish), but after proofing found a lot more issues, so I've reported those to her and the others proofing.

DR requested rearrangement of photos in Film week (past film weeks) and Awards sections

- standard now is : a 2 x 2 column, photos "clickable" (presents large size of same photo) with captions below each picture

- past film weeks (2012, 2011, 2010) captions TBA

Awards:
- added a tabbed feature containing photos with above structure for 2013 & 2012 awards
photos

I've just spent about an hour working on a font issue related to accented characters on Cascade sites. I'm going to refrain from giving details of it here, for fear of ridicule. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

How to migrate to 2012 templates:

1. Make sure Jes has turned off live publishing, and copied core components into the current site (e.g. assets/blocks/templates).
2. Go into Configuration Sets/Site Configuration.
3. Edit it, and copy all settings over from an existing site.
4. Edit /_configuration/formats/datadefinition/pages/standard-uvic-html-page and copy in from existing site.
5. Edit assets/blocks/template/site-scripts, and copy content from existing site into "HTML" view, changing site-specific name in paths.
6. Edit assets/blocks/index/site-navigation-index, delete pointer to Index Folder and replace with site root (humanities/whatever).
7. Make sure Home is in primary menu; if not, edit Home directory metadata and set it to Primary instead of Ignore.
8. Get Jes to copy over all the asset factories so the right stuff shows up on the New menu.
9. Make configuration set publishable.

Created new block with single icon/button for Research section.
Updated other pages within Research with button.
SA and I completed building the site's structure and have forwarded to BT, SB email
advising of structure completion. Have requested from them some additional information
we may need to include in future. Awaiting feedback for any changes, additions etc. to site. A meeting to discuss next steps may be set up.

Attended Cascade session Oct. 24, 2013:

Sorted out tertiaries display issue. A home folder containing tertiaries needed to be created within the various sections (e.g.STUDENTS section) specifically in order for tertiaries to display. Mirroring tertiary pages throughout site done also.

Layout of structure was also reviewed, secondaries are also displaying correctly.

Created today:

Under section FACULTY AND STAFF - PEOPLE: (note: PEOPLE is a new section
now included in the structure build out)

- 6 new pages created containing individual profiles for 6 persons.
Short and long profiles descriptive content TBA.

Continued progress on building out structure.

Humanities new site in Cascade format:

Currently working on building out the various sections for the site's structure.

Met with CC and LSPW to check on progress. The basic site structure has now been figured out, although there are some pages which are too deeply nested in a couple of folders, making navigation to them difficult, so they're going to be simplified. Images for the new site are still being processed by BD, but CC and LSPW have selected two complete sets of images for the new site (so they can switch them out next summer for variety). The admin stuff will be moved to Sharepoint, and the LSPW will prune the assets folder as thoroughly as she can before we freeze the current site. They're on target to make that freeze around the beginning of November.

An old version of the French website was hanging around on one of our development accounts, and had been found by a user, so I've now hidden that.

Met with CC, LSPW, and JC to discuss the port of the French website to the 2012 templates (meetings both yesterday and today). The site structure is being reworked by LSPW, and images are being processed by BD in Communications. When the images come back, LSPW and CC will select the ones they want for each purpose in the new templates. We'll meet again on Oct 15 to check that all the bits and pieces are in place for the new site, and if everything's ready, we'll ask Communications to freeze the old site (i.e. remove the live publishing targets), and convert us to the new templates. LSPW will have all of the time to the beginning of December to get the port done, with help from me where necessary, and we should be able to go live early in December and have the site fully updated in time for the new semester. That's the plan, anyway.

Today's broken link report for WS threw up many broken tel: links, and this is because the transformation is producing a URL like this: tel://, but it should be without the slashes. Reported this to JC in Communications who will be able to pass it on to whoever wrote the XSLT. Also fixed some broken links on History site.

Published the WS site as planned, but immediately we found problems in rendering with IE8. Avoid left-floated images in long pages, otherwise it will completely lose its marbles.

To configure a home page billboard, you set up assets/blocks/content/billboards/billboard-home. But you don't drop that block into the page; this is what you do:

Edit the home page, Configurations tab, and se the "12 - Features" block to your billboard-home block. Then choose a Format: UVicCa:_internal/formats/datadefinition/blocks/uvic2012/billboard-rotator-sites-32. Note the "-32" at the end -- this is required to match the configuration of the page itself (at the top), I had a situation where I chose the plain "billboard-rotator-sites" format, and the billboard was broken (it disappeared after showing the first picture). This is because the page configuration for the WS site home page is "UVicCa2012-3-2". Watch out for this. I was working from the analogy of the Hispanital site, but their page configuration is older.

Came up against something I haven't seen before and don't really know how to fix. The French site structure has changed substantially in the last year (not sure when), as part of a reorganization that enables them to have various different paths to the same page content. There are now three locations for undergraduate course info:

• graduate/undergraduate/courses/index (up to date)
• undergraduate/undergraduate/courses/index (mirror of above)
• undergraduate/courses/index (mirror of above first page)

There seem to be two paths through the menu structure to this content, prospective-students/undergraduate/courses and current-students/undergraduate/courses (no idea why three copies are needed). Whichever way you go through the menus, though, you no longer see "prospective-students" or "current-students" in the url path; you just see either undergraduate/undergraduate/courses/index.php or graduate/undergraduate/courses/index.php. But it looks like there were once paths including "*-students", and content was published to those paths and never unpublished. As a result, there are ghost pages up on the site, which have out-of-date info and broken links. The link-checker keeps flagging those pages, but I have no idea how to remove them since there's no equivalent resource I can see on the Cascade system that I could unpublish. Weird. Waiting for advice from LG.

As HR and I tidy up the last details of the WS site port to the 2012 templates, I've learned a few things worth remembering. First, notes on the Faculty listings page and individual faculty member pages:

• Each faculty member has a page in the faculty directory which is created using the New / UVic Pages / Faculty Profile template.
• There is a block called assets/blocks/index/site-navigation-index-faculty which is set up as a folder index for the faculty folder.
• That is included as the content of assets/blocks/content/profiles/profile-chooser-faculty, which is set to "Profile table" for its list type.
• That block is placed on the faculty index page.

We need to do the same thing with the sessionals, but right now there is no Sessional Page templage (LG is getting one added for us). We could use the Faculty Page thing, but that's programmed to automatically drop the page into the faculty folder, so you'd have to move each one as you create it. Once that's done:

• Create a new block called assets/blocks/index/site-navigation-index-sessionals, which is cloned from site-navigation-index-faculty but pointed at the sessionals directory instead.
• Edit assets/blocks/content/profiles/profile-chooser-sessionals so that it uses profile-builder-block-chooser-2012 instead of the current profile-builder-2012, and specify our site-navigation-index-sessionals block as the Profile index block.
• Insert profile-chooser-sessionals as the content of the index page in the sessionals folder.

Other stuff:

• The footer comes pre-configured with contact info for the University rather than the department; that has to be changed in assets/blocks/templates/footer. You can also add other columns to the footer if you need to.
• Social media links are supposed to have class="facebook", class="twitter" or class="flickr", but these options are not available in the link dialog box, so someone has to add them manually into the code. LG is trying to get this fixed.
• You get some default buttons in the home page title bar ("Apply online" and "Our programs"), but these are not linked to anything. You can edit them in a block: assets/blocks/content/template/title-index.

HR has done a great job working through the whole site in the new design, updating things, and there's only another few hours of work to do. I've only had to figure out a couple of things. I've written to LG to see if there's another sort of review process that needs to happen before it can go live.

Due to work that was done over the past two semesters (not by us), the French site now has many mirrored pages for course lists, some of them in the oddest locations (undergraduate course lists mirrored in the graduate folder, and copies of the undergraduate directory, containing only the courses subdirectory, inside itself. I really can't figure out what's happening. The link check has thrown up a bunch of broken links because (for example) two of the four undergraduate courses pages are in an old incarnation with links to PDFs which no longer exist. However, in Cascade, the pages look fine (as mirrors of another page). When I publish the mirrored pages, however, no change appears on the server.

LSPW is aware of this and is planning to tidy it up in August (she's on vacation till then). I won't be around for a month either, and SA will also be away, so there's not much we can do till then. Just blogging it in case it comes up while I'm away.

Hispanic and Italian Studies Cascade site now approved for production and launched Thursday June 20, 2013.

Emailed DR with latest changes/additions required for site.
Site in progress.

In Progress: updating site with new course listings 2013-14.

In progress: updating site with new course listings for 2013-14.

SA and I met with SA (Rel.St) to discuss migration of current Religious Studies site over to Cascade format.

Discussion:
- RELS current information and design to be replicated basically in Cascade
- discussed various Cascade requirements

Next steps:

- sent info. request to SA (RELS) required for outline
- HCMC:currently preparing RELS structure outline in readiness for submission for approval

After checking it out with UComm, I've been trying to reproduce the rather nice two-column text boxes available as (I assume) a widget in the new template on the existing History site, for JW and LM, who want to put some on the home page. I have them working OK, but I'm not sure the department are going to want to use them. Took a bit of hacking to make them size correctly, and in the context of the old template they don't look as nice as in the new.

Working through changes.
Attended with SA information session re news & events issue.
BKB will reply when process is clarified.

Manipulating photos requires: downloading from "old" site to Cascade; organizing (72 photos) varying in size; resizing, uploading resized photos to Cascade appropriate folder (images/photos/misc), inserting photos; updating links

Working through changes, inserting photos, editing research page, correcting right-column location
SA, JN attending Cascade session tomorrow to sort out site's news & events issues

Received batch #15 from DR

Today:
- changes to navigation implemented
- manipulating photos
- news & events issues in progress
- editing spelling
- inserting new content

Batch #14 changes/additions received from DR.

Inputting content; editing.

Navigation changes/confirmation in progress.

Updating site:

- additions to Undergraduate section (confirmation pending re layout of awards and scholarships additions)

- new arrangement and content inserted in alumni page

- reviewed news and events issues

- internal site review scheduled for next week

Continuing with building site.

Batch #13 received today re right-column content.

Working with Alumni and Research pages content, layout, photos
display options

Received batch #12 of changes/additions from DR for site.

In progress:

- renaming of navigation
- sorting out news & events
- moving photos
- creating folders within photo folder for future incoming photos
- creating new layout for alumni
- creating new layout for research
- obtaining java script for special "more" & "less" features on specific pages
- applying java script to research section

Received new batch of changes/additions from DR.
Updating site accordingly; more content arriving next week

Feb. 21: attended Cascade support session for advanced features advice
Feb. 25:SA &JN meeting to discuss site changes

Sent emails to DR re site updates.
Updated site with content and most recent structural changes/additions.
DR currently reviewing site.

Working on recent batch of changes/additions. Inputting content and making some
structural changes as per DR's request.
Sent email to DR re another possible structure change.

In progress:
- photo display
- incoming content
- verification of links
- validation

On current site made changes to Study Abroad Program as requested by DR. (e.g. reordered items) Confirmed with SA then sent email to DR advising request completed.

Received correspondence from DR re site changes/additions.
Working my way through these with batch #11 next in line.

Sent confirmation email to DR (cc SA) with update.

Next steps:
- additional content incoming (photos)
- decisions re photo display, location, selection, arrangement
- possible structure changes/suggestions

Cascade Hispanic & Italian Site meeting: Feb. 6, 2013 (DR,SA,JN)

- Reviewed the site together. DR approved the new Study Abroad Program information which is now
on current site as well as Cascade.

- Composite photo discussion: DR provided several photos which may be manipulated into a grouping
and displayed in various ways throughout the Cascade site. DR will choose a few photos for
us to experiment with. He will get back to us re this.

- DR has a colleague who will proof-read the Cascade site for them

Received request list from DR for changes to current (Hispanic & Italian) site and for
Cascade new site.
Updated both sites with changes (Study Abroad Program information etc.)

Cascade site:

PEOPLE INDEX
- cropped, resized, inserted additional photos on page
- reordered list as requested

HOME/CAREER OPPORTUNITIES:
- inserted new text with links

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES:
- added next text

GRADUATE:
- deleted old text; inserted new text with links

RESEARCH:
- created table and inserted faculty profiles (4)

SUMMARY:
- sent confirmation email to DR (cc'd SA) advising changes completed

NEXT STEPS:
- will pursue how to create "News and Events" section

Set up meeting with DR & SA to discuss composite photo idea on cascade site.
Meeting Date: Wednesday, Feb. 6th, 10:00 am, HCMC office

Note: Previous blogs in Admin. & ALL - will enter in CASCADE from now on (Feb. 5, 2013)

CASCADE - Hispanic and Italian website update:

PEOPLE PAGE:
- uploaded new photos; inserted more faculty photos
- updated text within cells

Final fixes and tidying up nearly complete. Spent some time fixing the odd typo, demonstrating how to add news and archive it and how to create and link to anchors. All that remains to be done is to replace two photos, and to add some "back to top" links on long pages. Asked LG if we could launch by the end of the week.

Met with MM and ran through the process for moving to Cascade. Followed up with sample documents. They will do a basic navplan, and we'll take it from there, hoping to get provisioned before the October Cascade workshop.

GN and I met with JS and LG -- JS is handing over to LG for a year, so LG will be our contact on Cascade projects.

The Pacific Asia site work is now under way, and MK dropped by for help with some Cascade issues. The GUI for Cascade editing is pretty under-functional in non-IE browsers, so we always end up messing with the code in the end for things like tables. Gave her a copy of all the photos from the current PA site, to save downloading them one by one.

Created all the pages and navigation structure based on the approved navplan. Over to EG-W for the content.

Saw a broken link error that's been in the History site report for a couple of weeks now, so I fixed it.

Entered today all primaries, secondaries and some sub-secondaries on the site.
Remainder of site in progress.

Sent email to BB, SB (GRS) cc'd SA advising what has been done to date.
BB, SB both attending Cascade training session next week.

Built the complete P&A site structure down to the bottom level pages, and organized the navigation. Remaining to be done: additional-marketing and external-links.

With SA, synthesized all the various changes and suggestions into a single document, then met with the folks from P & A and finalized them all. SA has merged them back into the final spreadsheet, and we're ready to get to work. I created the primary folders.

Posting time spent with LSPW figuring out how to port the old colloquium materials over to the Cascade site.

Met with PAB and JT to discuss moving Beck to Cascade. The decision is to wait until PAB's PhD is finished, at the end of the year.

Broken link reports came in with many links on Hist still broken from before, so I went through them and fixed any that are genuine (many are not -- Xenu seems to report lots of links which are perfectly OK). Reported reasons and changes to TG. Also checked out some odd items on the otherwise-empty WOST report which seem to be for the CFUV site, not from WOST at all. Reported that to CB, who fixed it.

ST solved a long-standing issue in the Xenu broken link report for the French site. Apparently when a number of pages were originally created, they were made by copy/pasting from the existing site. That site had links to a Contact page, which were then deleted -- except that what was deleted was only the text, not the anchor tag, so the links were still there, invisible. Deleted them all, except for one reported by ST on a page which no longer seems to exist (french/current-students/graduate/colloquium/index.php). Wrote to LSPW to find out what happened to that page.

Cascade (HCMC site)

Attended Cascade drop-in session:

Issues:
- banner color (color will be implemented later today by communications staff)

- home-home: issue has already been reported by others; will be addressed by communications later; (HCMC -correct as is for now).

Reviewed:
- "page mirroring"
- content details

GRS - website

Prepared GRS website navigation structure spreadsheet; forwarded it BB for review.
Prepared GRS project document in readiness to forward to communications when navigation structure confirmed.

Sent email with attachment to BB to review navigation structure.
(cc'd SA)

HCMC website - Cascade

Making progress with the HCMC website. Basically have the site
now structured and am inserting content. However, a couple of issues
still to be sorted out e.g. color in banner; "home" primary displaying
a little different than expected. Will address at drop-in session.

Update to new site:

Content:
- inserting content from old site to new site sections

Blocks:
- created new blocks (assets); inserted in contact information (hours)

External links:
- created and applied

Projects:
- received updated list from SA; inserted in new site

Index pages:
- created for staff information; individual pages

Layout:
-reordered primaries

Tertiary:
- applied

Next steps:

-"Welcome" text for landing page required (SA)
-"Conference" information TBA
- attend drop-in session for further instruction

Finished working through the 11-page History feedback report, sorting into stuff I just implemented myself, stuff that's urgent for TG to do, and stuff that needs discussion in the department.

Last week, I determined that the presence of a link tag with an empty @href attribute was causing the Xenu Link Sleuth to report a non-existent broken link on every page of the WS site. We narrowed this down to an error in the assets/blocks/layout/site-scripts block, which had been left with a placeholder "thesite" instead of the actual path.

Trying to correct this myself failed; it seemed to "take", but then it appeared that nothing had been saved and the audit trail showed that the file had not been edited. Reported this, and DW called; he made the change, but bequeathed the tip that when saving you should uncheck the "Tidy HTML" checkbox. I tried this on History, which also has the same problem; the result was success, but with a minor side-effect: suddenly the History site acquired the "Food" header appropriate to Food Services. I wasn't exactly sure where this had come from, but just in case, I commented out the entire content of the site-styles.css file (which is unnecessary anyway), and republished the site. It now seems to be working correctly.

Worked through the first half of the History feedback, doing a lot of the stuff myself and sending categorized bits to TG as well.

• All sites are now live, and aliases are in place and working.
• There are 11 pages of feedback reports to go through for History. I've worked through two pages, making some changes, writing instructions for others (so TG knows how to do various things), and categorized others as requiring dept consideration. I need to work through the remaining 9 pages.
• The broken link report from WS is itself broken, probably caused by a mysterious empty stylesheet link that is inserted by the site-scripts block. CB is investigating; if nothing emerges, I'll contact DW. I think the problem is caused by the XSLT that processes the site-scripts block; which converts a link to a local CSS file (which I don't think we even need) into a link tag with an empty href attribute.
• I found and fixed another bug reported by TG on the History site, which was only apparent in Internet Explorer. Someone had added lots of empty h3 tags in an effort to make one table appear below another one (they were showing side by side), and this (as usual) freaked out IE. Removed the empty tags, and added a style attribute with a clear property to make the tables display correctly.

Both WS and History have decided they want to go live, so I've asked JC to make it so.

Made 20-odd structural changes to the History site, based on the department's response to the IA's review. Everything desired is now accomplished, except that it proves impossible in Cascade to specify a tooltip for a menu item which is different from the menu caption itself. This means we can't gloss acronyms in the menu with their expansions. Still waiting to hear from the dept how they would like to proceed on this issue (expand captions, or leave acronyms unexpanded).

Feedback from IA on the History site came in the form of a completely reworked structure in the dreaded spreadsheet format. Spent the afternoon going through the proposed structure, comparing it to the old, and creating a list of action items for each of the proposed changes, along with a putative rationale for the change, and notes on implications and implementation. Some changes make sense, others don't, and some are simply puzzling. The dept folks will look at the spreadsheet and my action list and make decisions on all the changes; it's not yet decided whether we'll implement structural changes prior to launch, or whether it's a bit late in the day for this, and it needs to be a separate project undertaken after launch. Meanwhile, TG is working on the content notes. More feedback will come in through JC in due course.

TG reported that some users were complaining about over-large fonts on part of a page on the History test site. I finally figured out that only IE has the problem, and it was caused by an empty <h2> tag which had been left in the field by mistake.

JS sent the feedback from the WS site. I implemented the more complicated bits, wrote a couple of notes for HR, and sent it on to her; most is content-related or stylistic, so not my concern. It should be done in a week or so.

Did some tech support for TG on the History site, including trying to figure out why we're getting some broken link messages on from publishing particular pages; the links pointed at are not in fact broken, so there seems to be a bug at work. For now we'll just ignore them.

Met with LM re History site. Prior to the meeting I did a review of all the pages and made a list of gaps and other problems. We divided these amongst the two of us and TG. Then I worked through the list of changes assigned to me, which have now been done. One worth describing: the News/Events page was set up to pull content only from the UVic Events Calendar, but I've added a block to pull the info from the site news/current folder too, so both listings will show up. The Events calendar is empty right now.

If the remaining changes are done by the time I come back from vacation, we should be ready to go for review at that point.

After some final tweaks from HR and myself, we've passed the message to JS in Communications that the WS site is ready for review.

SA and I turned the tree structure from our meeting yesterday into the required spreadsheet, and submitted it along with a project-light-web document, to JS, hoping to get the project officially under way before the vacation starts.

Site meeting with Hispanic and Italian folks, during which we thrashed out the final form of the navigation plan, which we will submit to Communications. SA has created a tree-view version for discussion, and I've written to JS to see if Communications will accept this in lieu of the spreadsheet we dislike so much. If not, we'll have to spend time turning it into a spreadsheet tomorrow.

Created a center-column-accordion block to accommodate the lengthy content on the home page, which I think is a good solution to avoid proliferation of pages. Also created four more faculty pages, and added a variety of other content. Now waiting for feedback from LM on what remains to be done.

Almost done with the faculty pages; some more data waiting to be processed tomorrow. After that, it's the list of Emeritus, and there's some core content to go on the home page and the People landing page. I need to figure out how to use a Central Column Accordion widget for the home page, I think.

Worked through all the faculty pages, normalizing captions and layout, tweaking things like italicization in publications lists, and noting where things are missing (JS-R's bio, for instance). Also added a new page for JP. The remaining pages will be added this afternoon, based on the current site if no info comes in from them.

Met with LH, DR and DF from Hispanic and Italian to discuss the process for moving to a Cascade-managed site. Had a wide-ranging discussion, and came to the conclusion that we should start ASAP, despite DR's upcoming absence, and LH and DF will take the Cascade course as soon as they can. Meanwhile, we will prepare a first draft of the navigation plan ahead of another meeting the same time next week. I've already written to JS to get the process moving from the point of view of Communications.

Today:

• Two more faculty pages completed.
• Fixes made to others.
• Completion of tabular version of faculty list, which had been started by TG, to replace plain alphabetical list.
• Review of what's outstanding, and proposal for some minor changes to captions for layout purposes, sent to Chair.

One more Faculty page done. It's much easier and quicker to keep snippets of XHTML and edit those directly than it is to use the wysiwyg editor. In future, I should build a library of standard snippets for each site, early in the process, and work mainly outside Cascade, because the IDE is a bit slow and unpredictable.

In TG's pending absence, she's sent me all the incoming stuff for the site, and I've been building pages in the Graduate area and in the Faculty area today. The Faculty pages are going to take the most time, but as long as core data is there, we should be able to launch in time. I still need to figure out what to do about images on the home page, and there are two more Faculty profiles that need to be turned from word-processor files into pages.

In view of her coming absence, TG has been sending me a lot of the materials missing from the site, so I can start filling in the gaps. I'll get going on it tomorrow.

Checked in with TG, and we made some decisions together about the News, external links, and Facebook button, which I've largely enacted (I'm still waiting for Systems to supply the menu option for a News item, which is missing from this site; once that's there I can create a couple of sample news items and send some instructions to TG on creating more).

We also decided to give the video its own page on the site, which I've done, and I've filled in the Undergrad landing page (where the video used to be) with material from a PDF that's downloadable on the old History site. I've published the state of play so far, and it looks as though the content is about two-thirds complete.

Checked in with HR, and she's just missing a couple of bios and some content for the Research page now. I made the following changes, which I think are the last bits and pieces I need to do:

• Changed the Support Us button for the one supplied by BD and used on the French site.
• Moved the Facebook link to the right side, following my own instructions on creating an additional-marketing block. There's no Twitter link yet.
• Set up the Home page and the site configuration to put a News feed in the related-content accordion on the right. Basically I just examined how the French site works, and duplicated it.
• Added a couple of sample news items for HR to look at.

JS came by to help me work out how to create an image rotator for the History site. We have two images so far from T, and we created one with those images. The main points:

• New / UVic Blocks / Media Rotator
• Choose Body rather than Banner (banner is only used on e.g. faculty home pages).
• Add your images (they should be the same size).
• Ignore the navigation stuff.

There's one gotcha: each image has to be a link to somewhere. The only way we could make it work, since we didn't want our images to link anywhere in particular, was to put in a complete hard link to the eventual page location of the site home page (where the rotator would be housed), so it would reload its own page. No idea why you can't have an image rotator that simply shows images.

We also worked out a couple of other things, including how to put an events calendar harvester into the additional content area on the right.

Had to add 16px Facebook and Twitter buttons to the right side of the pages in French. This is how to do it:

• Create a block called "additional-marketing". I put it in assets/blocks/content. Put the buttons/links in there.
• Go into Administration / Configuration Sets / Site Configuration, and add the block to the Additional Marketing (03) region.
• That should make it appear on all pages; if it doesn't appear on the Home page, though, you may need to add it manually to that page, since it seems to be generated from a different template.

JS provided a set of buttons created by BD, which have two states, allowing a mouseover effect. Since our existing buttons (Humanities, Newsletter etc.) don't have two states, I've modified the Facebook and Twitter ones so they're simple, and added them and their links to the External Links block. I've published the home page so we can see the results; the changes will propagate to other pages once they're published.

DW helped me sort out a range of issues with the banner in the French site. One was due to an HSD image rotator being inadvertently included in our banner setup; the other seems to have been my fault -- apparently I'd made changes to the site-styles.css file back in May, but I can't find any references to that on the blog, and can't remember what I was trying to fix when I was doing it. I took the first half of that file from the German and Slavic site, and it's working fine now. Meanwhile, History seems to have been making progress, and I've contacted TG about image processing and BD's instructions.

Publication to the dev site is now set up, and I published; this reveals two problems:

• The default page set up in French (and in History, although not in Women's Studies, for some reason) includes an image rotator in the banner; this makes the banner huge, and in any case the image rotator doesn't work properly in our Humanities banner because the images have a white background instead of being transparent. I've looked through all the places I can imagine where this might be controlled, and I can't find any difference between French and WS in this respect, although one has the image rotator and the other doesn't. Wrote to DW for help with this.
• CH has created folder names with spaces in them, which predictably fail on the published site. I've written to her so she can fix that.

Publication was quick and easy, though.

BD sent over her instructions for working with PS or PS Elements, but I've worked out a little procedure for preparing these banner photos using the GIMP. These are the steps:

1. Choose your image.
2. Crop and scale the image so you have something which is 508 pixels wide, and about 196 pixels high, including the bits that are going to stick out.
3. Make sure you have an alpha channel in your picture — Layer / Transparency / Add Alpha Channel./ If it's greyed out, you already have one.
4. Select a rectangle which will comprise the rounded bounding box, out of which the sticky-out bits will stick.
5. Select / Rounded Rectangle..., then set it to 15% and hit Apply. Your box should become nicely rounded at the corners.
6. Select / Invert, to select the rest of the image, then hit Control + X to cut, and then File / Create / From Clipboard. This will move the cut bit of your image to the clipboard, where you can work with it in a minute.
7. On the original image, choose Select / Invert again, then Edit / Stroke Selection. Set the width to 1 pixel, and press OK. You should now have a rounded rectangle with a border around it.
8. Switch to the other image, and do whatever you need to do to isolate the sticky-out bits. One approach is to use the lasso tool to outline the bits; you could also carefully erase the background using an eraser.
9. When only the sticky-out bits remain, and the rest of the background is transparent, draw a selection rectangle around them and hit Control + C to copy to the clipboard.
10. Switch to the other image and press Control + V to paste the protrusions back into the image. Position them carefully over the image so that they cover the border line and line up with the main image correctly.
11. Layer / Anchor Layer, to fix the pasted bits in place.
12. Save as XCF, in case you need to edit later.
13. Export as JPG (no transparency), or preferably PNG, which will preserve your transparency.

Created a couple more external links buttons that weren't needed for previous sites (Campus Security contact info, and UVic Calendar), and put all five buttons together into a layout block called external-links. Then:

Administration / Configuration sets / Site Configuration / Edit, then add the block to 08-QUICKLINKS.

External links are now done for WS.

I've now finished building out the site structure, and I'm now creating buttons for the external links; made one for Facebook, and I'm working on one for security.

History and French came already provisioned with the department name in the banner, but WS didn't. DW showed me how to do it:

• Edit assets/blocks/layout/banner-block.
• Wherever necessary, set "Department" to "Humanities", and "Unit" to "Women's Studies".
• Set the equivalent urls to /humanities and /humanities/women.

That makes the grey department bar show up on the banner.

I'm about half way through, after some tweaking about with the news stuff (which will have to be ported over to French and History when it's working properly).

There have been various incarnations of the "news" setup over the last few months, and some sites have different implementations (or none at all). This is how it's supposed to work, as far as I can tell after some help from DW:

• home/news should contain current and archive folders.
• To create a new news item, click on current, and then choose New / UVic Pages / News item.
• To archive an old news item, move it to the archive folder.
• The index page in current contains this in its Main Content: Page Block Content [humanities/women/assets/blocks/content/current-news-body].
• That block has some settings for the number of items to show, etc., and also contains this block: humanities/women/assets/blocks/layout/current-news-index. This block parses the current folder for all news item pages.
• A similar system should be workable using an index page inside the archive folder, which should use the corresponding archive blocks, but it doesn't seem to function. I've edited the archive blocks to make them as similar as possible to the current blocks (they had some settings slightly different), but nothing seems to work, so I'll talk to DW about it.

Met with RS and EGW about the Professional Writing site, which we'll move into Cascade. We're meeting to do nav planning next week.