Web Advisory Committee Minutes - October 19, 2022

Attendance (32)

Don Duff-McCraken (Chair), Michael Tjendra (Notetaker), Amanda Vos, Bernice Ma, Charlotte Armstrong, Daniella Cross, Danielle Jeanneault, Derek Leung, Elizabeth Rogers, Erica Clement-Goudy, George Choy, Gregory Smith, Harminder Phull, Herbert Balagtas, Israel Cefrin da Silva, Iva Badjari, Janice Cooke, Jen Konkle, Jennifer Halcrow, Jessica Barch, Kevin Paxman, Lannois Carroll-Woolery, Marlon Griffith, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Nancy Schnarr, Nick Di Benedetto, Pratik Patel, Tasha Glover, Taylor Small, Tom Graham, Trevor Ridgway, Troy Grandy

Minutes of 21 September 2022 and Business Arising

The minutes were accepted as distributed. No business arising.

WCMS Site Requests (Tom Graham)

  • There has been an increase in site requests to divide an existing larger site into smaller, more focused ones.
  • Tom would like us to please keep in mind that there are SEO implications and each site cost money. He is happy to explore ways to keep content together on the existing site, such as information architecture (IA) changes.
  • Michelle Douglas-Mills stated that it puts faculties in a difficult position when there are uncoordinated changes among the faculty sites, and asked for some best practices on achieving consensus and proceeding in one coordinated effort.
  • Michael Tjendra stated that we should proceed with caution as adding obstacles for users to get a WCMS website will encourage them to get a website elsewhere. This could be counterproductive to our efforts on achieving AODA compliance. We need to ensure ease of access to WCMS while being fiscally responsible.
  • Marlon Griffith stated that we should start talking about other areas of the web beyond the WCMS, such as web apps.

WCMS 3 Migration Update (Charlotte Armstrong)

  • We have 240 live WCMS 3 sites as of today!
  • Kudos:
    • Engineering for following up with migration requests after our migration planning consultation meeting!
    • Science for launching 21 sites this month!
  • Biggest sites that we’ve migrated so far:
    • Institute for Quantum Computing with 2472 published items including 209 web pages
    • Writing and Communications Centre with 517 published items including 110 web pages
    • Stratford School of Business with 394 published items including 76 web pages
    • Total published items = Blogs, Contacts, Events, News items, Profiles, Web forms and Web pages
  • WCMS training working group call for volunteers:
    • Email Sarah Cooper directly sarah.cooper@uwaterloo.ca by October 28/22 if you wish to participate in the small WCMS training working group.
  • Form editor permissions change:
    • We will be applying permission for site managers to apply the form editor role to users in WCMS 2.
    • If you are against this new permission, please email sarah.cooper@uwaterloo.ca by Friday October 21.
  • We are looking into easier and more autonomous options for website leads to access course completions. Some website leads have users email them a screenshot of the course completion.
  • Website leads can now email our support email at wcms@uwaterloo.ca to request course completion confirmation rather than submitting an RT.
  • Reminders:
    • If you have a migration schedule for your sites, please share that with Charlotte.
    • Website lead change process: Make sure to submit a ticket to inform us of any changes
    • Site owner roles: this is the only role that can add users, cannot be generic accounts
    • Training sites are deleted after four months
    • Our co-op team is at full speed and eager for migrations! The most efficient way to migrate your site is by using our resources. Collaborative remediations where our team remediates all content types other than web pages, is the most efficient method and gives you opportunity to review and update your content. We are happy to manually migrate content to expand/collapse content types as well! Co-ops love working with expand/collapse!
    • Now that Sarah is back, we can catch up from Charlotte’s “lone wolf spring term” and appreciate everyone’s patience. Our response time for tickets and support are now back on track!
  • Site Database:
    • The sites database site can be used to access lists of sites assigned to you and their WCMS 3 migration status. Please note that the best way to find out if your site is eligible for migration is to ask Charlotte (the WCMS 3 migration coordinator) directly if you aren’t sure. This is only an information tool for website leads, not for other users.
    • If you see a recent discrepancy that needs updating, reach out to Charlotte.
    • Please note: we are in the process of creating a more user friendly site directory in the future.
  • Training and support:
    • # of WCMS 3 course completions since last WAC
    • WCMS 3 fundamentals: 33
    • WCMS 3 web forms: 9
  • Communications:
    • Web resources blog is returning and the October edition will be published soon.
  • Migration hesitancy poll:
    • An anonymous poll to choose their top reason(s) holding people back from migrating sites.
      • site users do not have time to take WCMS 3 training
      • waiting for expand/collapse to migrate
      • no time to prepare the site for migration
      • cannot go on a content freeze until the spring term
      • no time to review site after it migrates
      • I need more information about the migration process
      • We want to remediate the site ourselves and do not have enough staff
      • Waiting for bibliographies
      • We have customized modules
      • WCMS 3 scares me
    • Responses to these hesitancies will be addressed at the next WAC meeting.
  • They are working on making it easier to check people's training.
  • WCMS 3 site authentication still does not protect files uploaded to WCMS 3 (same as WCMS 2). All files submitted on web form are still private though. All the more reason to replace documents with web pages.

WCMS 3 Development (Kevin Paxman)

  • WCMS 3.1.12 is in the process of being released, with the full 3.1.12 release notes on the Web Resources site; biggest changes being:
    • Added CSV content and menu reports to the dashboard
    • Added Media management links to the dashboard
    • Made listing pages properly “single-column” at narrow screen widths
  • “Conversion” of theming from Gesso to Ohana is now complete; to reflect the scope of this work our next release will be versioned 3.2.0
  • We are now starting to work on bringing features from WCMS 2 single page sites into WCMS 3
  • Focus points in the current sprint include:
    • Adding functionality to place banners above the page title
    • Creating separator and spacing options for sections
    • Creating an option to leave content summaries blank
  • This week we say goodbye to WCMS developer Anu, who was hired to cover Tyler’s paternity leave and who has accepted a position elsewhere
  • Drupal 10.0.0 is expected to be released on December 14th, 2022
    • This date is much firmer than dates that were previously announced as potential release dates
    • We have been waiting on a final release before finalizing our plans
    • Drupal 9.5.0 is expected to be released at the same time; this is what we will update to in the short term
    • We don’t have to go to Drupal 10 right away – Drupal 9 still has security support until November 2023
    • The Drupal 10 upgrade will be largely invisible, not requiring functional changes to the WCMS
    • Because we have been keeping up to date with Drupal 9, the upgrade to Drupal 10 should be as clean as possible
    • We will begin working towards upgrading to Drupal 10 in early 2023

WCMS 3 (Joe Kwan)

  • Charlotte Armstrong has accepted a permanent role in the WCMS web development team. Congratulations, Charlotte!
  • Elizabeth Rogers stated that "WCMS 3 Fundamentals" training is a lot for some people and would like to discuss opportunities to improve the training in a working group. 
  • Joe responded that over a year ago they had to scramble to create the training materials and agrees that it can be improved. They are in talks with Centre for Extended Learning (CEL) and the working group for the WCMS training sounds great. If you would like to be part of the WCMS training working group, please email Sarah Cooper by October 28, 2022.
  • At the previous Web Steering Committee meeting, there were talks on rebooting small working group.
  • Marlon Griffith suggested that we should add an item on the next agenda to look into areas of the web to create the working group.
  • Tom Graham and Iva Badjari hopes to have more to share on digital accessibility in the coming months.

Other Business

  • Kevin Paxman suggested that we should consider recording the WAC meeting in addition to or instead of the meeting minutes. This will be added to the next agenda for discussion.

Adjournment

Adjournment at 4:27 pm