Web Advisory Committee Minutes - September 18, 2019

3:00 p.m., 18 September 2019, NH 3318

Attendance

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Herbert Balagtas, Lisa Brackenridge, Lannois Carroll-Woolery, Tom Cauduro, Pavol Chvala, Beth Cotter, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Graham Faulkner, Laurel Forbes, Chris Francis, Tasha Glover, Tom Graham, Troy Grandy, Danielle Jeanneault, Andrea Jennings, Joe Kwan, Liam Morland, Kevin Paxman, Elizabeth Rogers, Carlos Saavedra, Greg Smith, Stefany Snedden, Michael Tjendra

Absent:

Iva Badjari, Marta Bailey, Cynthia Breen, Lannois Carroll-Woolery, Sandra David, Jasmin English, Sarah Forgrave, Marlon Griffith, Melissa Holst, Adriann Kennedy, Ryan Lahti, Martin LeBlanc, Derek Leung, Greg McIntyre, Neil McKay, Amy Meredith, Iaasc Morland, Trevor Ridgeway, Andrew Smith, Lori Suess, Annaka Willemsen, Mirko Vucicevich

Approval of the Minutes of May Meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Drupal Cloud Update (Joe Kwan and Greg Smith)

  • IST is undergoing an request for proposal (RFP) process to move WCMS FDSU from on-campus servers into the cloud.
  • The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendor would be responsible for providing backend services, such as security patches, core Drupal updates, and maintenance of the web service environment.
  • Moving UWaterloo Scholar into the cloud is out of scope.
  • A more cohesive web strategy for the University of Waterloo is needed. Tom Graham is well aware of it and will consult stakeholders next year.

WCMS 3.0 (Joe Kwan and Kevin Paxman)

  • Consult the WCMS 3.0 project timeline.
  • D7 will reach end-of-life in November 2021. IST is determined to have all D7 websites migrated into D8 before end-of-life.

UWaterloo Search (Joe Kwan and Kevin Paxman)

  • The new search engine is still a work in progress.
  • Since launch, we have added some keymatches, and location search functionality, along with behind-the-scenes fixes.
  • Just today, a bug was resolved which was preventing some pages from being indexed; these pages will begin being added with the next crawl.
  • Coming soon is autocomplete functionality, and we have been looking at people search.
  • Additional functionality is planned, including filter by document type.
  • We are continuing to discuss things with the vendor.
  • We intend to look into available tuning options.
  • We have created a document to assist site maintainers in optimizing their page content for the new search engine.

PHP 7 (Joe Kwan)

WCMS will be upgraded to PHP 7 starting October 2019. Communications will be sent out by IST, but here's a preliminary timeline:

WCMS Training/Support Update (Andrea Jennings)

All WCMS courses offered throughout September and October are posted on the Web Resources website.

SEW moved to ITPD

The SEW brand has been retired, and training courses will now fall under the title IT Professional Development (ITPD).

  • ITPD courses are available under the IT Professional Development topic in Workday.
  • ITPD courses will no longer be referenced by course code, but by course title (this aligns with Occupational & Human Development (OHD) course practices).
  • This change will be introduced more broadly in the summer issue of the IST Newsletter and in the fall course brochure; relevant web pages will also be updated.
  • Beginning in the fall, course participants will be charged $75 for each missed course unless 72 hours’ notice has been provided (this change aligns with OHD practices).

WCMS Drop-in Lab

  • Regularly scheduled WCMS Drop-in Lab hours have resumed: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1-4 p.m. in MC 2060.
  • The WCMS Drop-in Lab will be closed on October 22, 24 and 29.
  • If you require special arrangements outside of the regular drop-in hours please contact Andrea Jennings.

WCMS UX Survey

As part of an ongoing assessment of the University’s central web content management system, and to support early planning and development of WCMS 3, IST’s Web Development team conducted a WCMS UX survey. The results of this survey will help inform prioritization of future website development as we begin to shift our focus toward building the next WCMS. More information can be found on the Building the Next WCMS website. You can also review the WCMS Survey Summary presentation slides (PDF).

Reminders

  • Start of a new term is a great time to review site permissions! Set expiry dates on role(s) assigned to your new co-op students so their permissions automatically expire at the end of the term!
  • Have you hired a co-op student to work on your website?  See this list of resources that will help them get up to speed.
  • LinkedIn Learning IST-WCMS playlist is available. The playlist will answer questions like: What is responsive design? What is Drupal, and why do we use it? How do I create and maintain an effective website within the WCMS?

WCMS Technical Update (Kevin Paxman)

  • Focus points in this sprint are: getting things to a point where we can release WCMS 2.8.0 – testing recoupled publication sites, fixing outstanding issues with Catalogs, and minor maintenance; Open Scholar maintenance release work; recoupling conference sites; search; and Drupal 8 work
  • The last third of this Friday’s “Conference Updates” presentation will feature the WCMS team’s experiences at Drupal North.
  • The latest Chrome release has introduced a display issue with home pages of sites using randomized banners; we are working on a fix; it is also possible that a future Chrome update will resolve this. In the meantime, disabling randomized banners will fix affected sites.

Domain Name Policy Update (Joe Kwan)

Due to other more pressing matters, the Executive Council has not reviewed/approved the updated domain name policy.

Other Business

None.

Meeting Adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 4:31 p.m.