November 19, 2014

Web Advisory Committee 

3:00p.m., November 19, 2014. MC 2018 a/b

Present:

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Herbert Balagtas, Kirsty Budd, Janice Cooke, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Tom Graham, Chris Gray, Marlon Griffith, Karen Jack, Joe Kwan, Andrew McAlorum, Collin McIntyre, Liam Morland, Kevin Paxman, Susan Shifflett, Andrew Smith, Jeff Voskamp (guest), Heather Wey, Andrew Smith

Regrets:

Daniel Allen, Marta Bailey, Dianne Inacio, Mark McKay, Amy Meredith, Terry Stewart

Absent:

Amy Aldous, Dave Annable, Chris Francis, Nigel Henriques, Jim Johnston, Paul Miskovsky, Rose Padacz, Elizabeth Rogers, Megan Saunders

1. Approval of the minutes of the October meeting

The minutes of the October meeting were accepted as distributed.

2. Business Arising

None.

3. Waterloo CMS update

Introduction and comments on WCMS feature requests (Andrew McAlorum)

  • The University of Waterloo is ranked as one of the most innovative universities in Canada; our website needs to reflect that ranking and right now it doesn’t.

Responsive Web Design (RWD).

  • This is a top priority.
  • We are working closely with Marketing and Strategic Communications (MSC) and others.
  • We are hoping to be able to demonstrate our progress on this in a few months.
  • It is definitely not a “one size fits all” type solution; different sites have different requirements and needs.
  • We will be keeping everyone up to date on the information we learn in this process; there are a lot of stakeholders in the WCMS.

WCMS Feature Requests

  • The current feature request page needs to be updated and reflect what our priorities are; it is date stamped from September 2013.
  • At the time information was pulled from our request system and a survey was created; items were voted on for importance and they were than sorted by highest to lowest score.
  • We need to figure out a way to come up with an updated list that reflects our current priorities in line with the needs of the stakeholders --  to get a renewed sense of what the users (site managers, content maintainers etc.) want and need across campus.
  • These feature requests will not be completely ignored during the RWD development; some of them will actually be completed with the RWD work.
  • A survey could be sent out, not only to WAC members but also to Point of Contacts for sites.
  • An issue with this request list is that there is no indication of the likelihood that these requests will be completed.
  • Perhaps there is a way to combine the request list with the development roadmap. This will be investigated further.

 Technical update (Kevin Paxman)

  • WCMS v1.9.5 on Nov 12th; primarily to fix  bugs we had not caught yet with very few functional updates that can be found on the web resources site.
  • A maintenance release for Drupal was done on November 18th (version 7.33).
  • The WCMS had some intermittent issues with pages reporting infinite redirect loops. We believe we have fixed this problem (since no other reports have been made). More information on this redirect issue is available in the attached PDF.

Training update (Heather Wey)

  • We are scheduling the co-op student training for the Winter term.
  • Andrea Jennings gave a presentation on the new features in the v1.9 release on November 22nd which was webcasted/recorded.
  • We will continue to run the drop-in labs in the MC building for the Winter term.

4. Responsive Design Update

Responsive design on existing IA (Collin McIntyre)

  • Collin has been looking into responsive-themed templates to use in Drupal.
  • This was more difficult than expected; the theming in Drupal is not for the faint-of-heart!
  • Coillin will investigate starting an html5 plain, platform-agnostic template.
  • Will work with Andrew McAlorum offline to coordinate our efforts.

IA Working Group (Joe Kwan)

  • Duff-McCracken put the call out to WAC to ask for participation in the information sessions.
  • We have initially scheduled two sessions; December 2nd and 7th.
  • If you haven’t signed up but still want to, please email Joe Kwan.
  • Duff-McCracken will send out another email asking for participants.
  • Quite a bit of homework involved in participating in this type of exercise.
  • If you have already signed up, but have not received a meeting invitation please contact Joe Kwan via email.

5. Web Steering update and Chair’s Remarks (Don Duff McCracken)

  • The last web steering meeting was fairly brief but included a presentation from Andrea Sweet and Pascal Calarco on the Digital Asset Management project.                 
  • This presentation was also done at a Friday morning seminar.
  • We will have Andrea Sweet present at a future meeting for an update on this project.

6. Other Business

None.

7. Adjournment

Adjournment at 3:45pm.