Web Advisory Committee Minutes - November 16, 2022

Attendance (31)

Don Duff-McCraken (Chair), Charlotte Armstrong (Notetaker), Michael Tjendra, Allison Wells, Amanda Vos, Bernice Ma, Caitlin Yu, Daniella Cross, Danielle Jeanneault, Elizabeth Rogers, Erica Clement-Goudy, George Choy, Harminder Phull, Israel Cefrin da Silva, Iva Badjari, Janice Cooke, Jen Konkle, Jennifer Halcrow, Jessica Barch, Joe Kwan, Kevin Paxman, Marlon Griffith, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Nick Di Benedetto, Rebecca Schuetze, Sarah Cooper, Sarah Forgrave, Steve Weber, Tasha Glover, Tom Graham, Trevor Ridgway, Troy Grandy

Minutes of 19 October 2022 and Business Arising

The minutes were accepted as distributed. No business arising.

WCMS Site Options (Marlon Griffith)

Marlon’s goal was to get us thinking of how to guide all the types of websites on campus to be more accessible and secure. He presented five types by functionality and one by branding. They are:

  • Public facing static content website for a group or organization managed by a long-term faculty or staff member
  • Public facing static content website for a group, organization or individual managed by a short term or occasional student or staff member
  • A web application dynamically generating content, most likely using Javascript for interactivity
  • An interactive online content editor for publishing static content, i.e. a wiki for documentation purposes, a blog etc.
  • A computer aided learning webpage with sections that provide instant feedback to the student, i.e. tutorials, course examples, practice tests, sample research analysis etc.

He proposed that professors use off campus hosted sites because it allows them to have their own brand. He gave the professors in Architecture as an example. Elizabeth also noted professors in Arts.

WCMS 3 Development (Kevin Paxman)

  • WCMS 3.2.0 is still coming – we found some regressions that were important to fix before release; the last of those is being evaluated now and then we will be able to move on to building and testing
  • The database software that powers Scholar is being updated and will require some downtime – this is scheduled to happen on November 21st between 8 and 11pm, with the actual downtime being approximately 1hr within that window; there are no changes to Scholar itself
  • Focus points in the current sprint include:
    • Teaser and listing blocks for contacts
    • Functionality to place banners above the page title
    • Creating options to put a background behind sections
  • As we have begun bringing features from single page into WCMS 3, we are starting to plan beyond that, with the functionality from conference and publication sites
    • Currently, based on the overall impact of the sites, the intended order is publication site functionality, then conference site functionality
    • Conference sites use a different front-end technology than the other sites, which means that we have to keep the necessary software up-to-date
    • Because of this different technology, searchability and shareability of conference content is not ideal
    • we are considering reversing the order so conference site functionality comes into WCMS 3 before publication site functionality and would like feedback from WAC on what the impact of this would mean for you

WCMS Training & Support (Sarah Cooper)

WCMS 3 Training stats since last WAC:

  • 24 Fundamentals
  • 4 WCMS 3 Web forms

Learn working group:

  • Final reach out to see if anyone would like to participate
  • Will be sending a Welcome to the working group email this Friday
  • We're looking to do about 3 maybe 4-1 hour sessions for this working group

Conference site outreach:

Just a quick note to say that we are doing some outreach on older Conference sites to see if they are still needed. Stay tuned for an email from Sarah.

WCMS 3 Migration Update (Charlotte Armstrong)

WCMS 3 stats:

# of live WCMS 3 sites: 260

# of live WCMS 2 sites: 820 (approximately 160 of those are publication, single site and conference sites) = 660 sites left

# of WCMS 3 migrated sites remediated by our team this term: 50

Migration prep reminders:

Important tasks to complete before the site migrates:

  • Visit the Migration prep checklist page for regularly for updates
  • Embed image galleries
  • Add content to the summary field: A brief and concise description of the page's content. Recommended: no more than one or two sentences. Character limit is 160 characters
  • Make sure any user that will be a site owner is added to the source site before migration
  • Review your promotional items. Because support for promotional items was dropped in WCMS 3, they are manually recreated as a sidebar on every page that originally had a promotional item. If you have a broken link in your original promotional item, you will have to edit it on every side bar that was manually created to remediate the original promotional item
  • Remove any broken or unneeded redirects (especially nodal redirects)
  • Review images and files and delete duplicates. We often see multiples of the exact same image
  • Review content. We have seen “This is your about page” text still existing on published About pages
  • Download form submissions. The WCMS is not a record keeping tool and it is a good practice to regularly manage web form results
  • This is a good time to inform the site’s content maintainers to complete WCMS 3 training

Post remediation task reminders:

If our team has remediated the site, we will highlight any content that requires your review/edits on the comparison check spreadsheet sent to you once the site is remediated.

Typical items highlighted are:

  • Expand/collapse titles that exceed the character limit and require content editing
  • Unusual use of expand/collapse content that isn’t possible in WCMS 3 such as Images in expand/collapse titles, anchors linking to other expand/collapses, etc.
  • Use of expand/collapse for content that only contained one sentence
  • Broken links (external, PDFs, and in promotional items)

Other post-remediation tasks:

  • Review users, roles and expiry dates and remove roles from users you no longer want to have access
  • Take advantage of having your site in the staging environment and QA your site for accessibility, typos, and content updates

WCMS 3 feature reminders:

Site owner role:
Who should be a site owner? Website lead, alternate, and a person that is an active site manager that is most likely to add users and manage site permissions. This role is only on WCMS 3 sites.

Site permissions migrate along with the site and it is the responsibility of website leads and site owners to ensure that users are active, current, and have completed training.

Migration hesitancy poll from October meeting:

Results:

  1. Customized modules
  2. Site users do not have time to take WCMS 3 training
  3. No time to prepare site for migration
  4. Need more information about the migration process: Information about the process can be found on the Requesting a WCMS 3 site page
  5. Waiting for bibliographies: they are in the works!
  6. We want to remediate the site ourselves and do not have enough staff: We highly recommend using the WCMS Content Migration Specialist co-op team to remediate your site's as the most efficient solution.

Kudos

Faculty of Engineering for migrating 35 sites and using our services to remediate and expedite the process! They submitted an Excel spreadsheet with their tentative schedule and it really helped with our planning.

Faculty of Health for prepping their faculty site for migration!

Jessica Barch with the challenging Campus Housing site migration!

Other Business

None

Adjournment

Adjournment at 4:58 pm