December15
By: Liam McMurray
As part of the latest sprint for the online prospectus, we looked at the possibility of reusing the Course Structure diagrams that are part of the printed brochure.
As the old adage goes, a picture paints a thousand words (and these pictures have words on them as well, so that's probably something like a million words worth of content in each graphic...), so it was essential we found a way to use them online.
One issue we had to resolve was the legibility of the text contained within the diagrams when they were downscaled to work within a web browser - of particular concern was the fact that all the text was faced in a Serif font. A few hours of research and playing with real world examples and we came to the following conclusion: in general, there is no difference with legibility between Serif and Sans Serif fonts - it comes down to the end user's familiarity with the font and therefore their ability to 'interpret' it. Alex Poole has published a really good essay on this matter.
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Posted in: CMS, Design, Development
On Thursday 27th November at 11:00 am in the BUCS Conference Room (2 South), we will be holding a demonstration of the News module in the CMS. Topics covered will include:
- How to add, edit and expire news items
- How to include news items on pages using macros
- How to use tags to categorise news items and display them in context around your site
- Using RSS feeds to promote your site's news
There will also be time for questions and discussion.
Posted in: CMS, Events
We now have 27 sites being served out of the CMS, with 7 being developed (HSS, Computer Science, Management, Physics, Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Education, Mathematical Sciences) and 2 not yet started (ESML and ACE).
The 27 live sites are:
Posted in: CMS
We have created a new improved interface for inserting PersonFinder details, with more display options than before. You can see some examples of what is available by visiting the sandbox example page.
You can
- specify what resource you want the person's name to link to:
- PersonFinder page
- PIP profilepersonal home pageor a
- profile page on your site, which must be located in
/[department]/people/[initial(s)][surname].html, e.g. /oenology/people/jdbloggs.html
- select which contact details you want to display (name, role, phone, email)
- display details as a bulleted list, a table, a table row, or a normal paragraph
- restrict department lists by job title and by person type
- display a group (using the group short name, e.g. DEPT-ADMINS) that has been created in GroupManager.
- combine any of this information with details from PIP, or with included biographical information (for example, creating a short biography for each staff member and include it on multiple otherpages in your site; then it only needs to be updated once).
The old PersonFinder macro will still work in any existing pages that use it.
Posted in: CMS
It's always nice to know that a system that you're rolling out is making people's work easier and not harder. We recently received this feedback from a happy user of the CMS:
"I have recently had to design and set up a website for a multi-partner research project I am working on. Having only had limited training in website creation I worked directly with the web services team using the University Content Management System (CMS). The team helped design the layout of the CMS templates the way I wanted and were there to answer any questions I had. The CMS is simple and straightforward to use, making it easy for adding new information and links to existing web pages. I would recommend the CMS for anyone who is setting up a new website, particularly if you only have very little previous experience in designing websites."
Posted in: CMS, Communication, Tools
