Cascade

TG finished the first run through the History site the other day, and we're now tidying up and fixing minor annoyances. I've done a lot of table tweaking to get better layouts, and fixed a couple of oddities (pages that were unaccountably set to not be published, and that sort of thing).

Adapted some table-sorting JS I wrote for MoEML so that it works to enable sorting of faculty and staff profile tables on the History site, pending the possible future arrival of the more sophisticated filter system they've asked for in a ticket. There is apparently a similar system already available that you can invoke by adding the "tablesorter" class to your table, but of course we can do this with automatically-generated tables from the profile-block system, so our custom option is needed in this context, and it will serve as a model for adding JS to other Cascade contexts when custom features are needed.

Spent all day following these instructions:

http://web.uvic.ca:8080/~ucomcoop/docs/Building_and_Migrating_Sites/Migrating_From_2008_Template

In most cases, the simplest approach is to copy stuff over from an existing site (I used French). Sometimes it helps to screenshot the working site and copy settings from it (because you can't have two simultaneous sessions on Cascade in different locations, even with different browsers). I have virtually everything working except for the News and Events page, which is strangely borked, and the unit logo, which I think needs to be done by an official graphics person.

Departmental website maintainers have no easy way to generate a list of course info for their sites. However, somebody does, because pages like this exist. Wrote a script to download this page, patch it to make it well-formed enough to process, and then XSLT it into a couple of different sets of tables suitable for copy/pasting as source code into a departmental site. This is just a pilot, since the main courses will probably not be available in exactly this format, but it seems like a workable approach once we can find a similar way to access content through Banner.

There were none; I've added a default set to all major pages. After the final publish before freezing, we'll see if these have any effect on the search engine rankings for the site, which are not high at the moment.

Received request from DR (H&I) to update site with new photos.
Completed task and published site

This is the plan for History to move to the new templates:

The freeze of the current site will happen on May 9. This has been scheduled by JS, but we should check live publishing is in fact turned off before we start editing.

The site is scheduled to go live again on June 6.

Things to be done before the freeze:

• Change course codes from HIST to HSTR (TG).
• Update winter schedule (TG).
• Update contact info and add new page and info for incoming new prof (TG).
• Remove office hours (TG).
• Add a Field School page under Current Students (TG).
• Correct all existing titles and captions to sentence case (TG).
• Add keywords to all pages (if possible, globally) (MDH).
• Write headings/captions for future images, to save time later, and identify where banner images will link to (the "Read more" link) (TG).
• Investigate the possibility of scripting a scrape of the Banner course information to create source code for Courses pages that can be pasted into Cascade (MDH).
• Investigate ways to make the Twitter feed more active (TG).
• current-students/graduate landing page: break up the content with headings (GT).
• current-students/graduate/degrees-completed: This should be moved to future-students/graduate, or perhaps mirrored there (TG).

Notes on specific pages from our discussions:

• Home page:
  • 3 big buttons, identical to French.
  • Banner with rotating images.
  • 2 sentences of "Why study...".
  • 2 column-boxes, one for undergrad nd one for grad.
  • A tab control with tabs for YouTube (main tab with video), Facebook and Twitter.
• fhome/why-history-is-crucial: recycle content to elsewhere. Take a one-sentence quote for the home page (see www.uvic.ca/anth).
• future-students/undergraduate/careers-in-history: sentence case for title; table of job areas might be converted into a multi-column box with no outline.
• Course pages: use expanding boxes sorted into levels as on the anth site.
• home/offic-hours: MH to set up a block for office hours as a div, for each fac member's page, and then set up a block containing all of those blocks; the latter may be able to use CSS display: table-row etc. to show the aggregated office hours content as a table.
• future-students/undergraduate/awards-scholarships-undergrad: Use accordions for the three scholarships.
• Faculty page: MH and TG to liaise with Systems through JS to arrange the creation of a search-and-filter widget to supercede the existing error-prone duplication of content. This will likely cost money.
• current-students landing page: Add a banner and some content from the chair's letter, and move the video down the page.
• current-students/undergraduate/research: definitely needs a picture.
• current-students/undergraduate/find-your-professor: MH to investigate creating this as a block. Perhaps the Office Hours block described above can be designed to fill both purposes.
• current-students/coop-and-career: Get a copy of the picture used on the Coop site, which features a History student, in uncropped format, and re-use it.

Long and productive meeting with TG and JS today. Details to be laid out tomorrow...

Received request from DR (H&I)to update website with new photos.
Currently working with new photos to be included in various locations throughout the site.

Received request from BAK to add new announcement with links to website.
Completed the task.
Sent email confirmation to BAK task completed.