Cascade

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.