As the summer winds down, WEBD has successfully completed the uPortal upgrade that we’ve been diligently working on for the past month. In addition to moving to the uPortal 2.6 framework, and DLM based layouts, we’ve improved the presentation layer quite a bit.
The most exciting element of the upgrade is the move away from table based layouts thanks to the Yahoo! Grids framework. Thanks to some clever XSLT hackery we are now able to support 1-3 column layouts. Plus, we reimplemented our tabs using the YUI Tabs mark-up and styles to take advantage of the browser testing Yahoo! has already done and standardize on something.
We also made a slight change to the location of the navigation bar by moving it above the banner graphic to a location more inline with where major websites (Yahoo, Google, etc.) place the ” YOURNAME Login/Logout” links.
Not content with our footer, we jazzed up the mark-up with some Microformat goodness and tossed in a Campus Search box; just in-case someone has a need to search for something not in the portal.
The finishing touch of the upgrade was the migration away from Verdana as the main sans-serif font, to Helvetica Neue for Mac users and Arial for Windows users. The migration to Helvetica was a small homage to the Swiss school of design who brought us such tools as grid frameworks, which we have employed in the portal layout.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Jason Shao // Aug 23, 2007 at 10:18 am
I dig the tabs — we should really think about moving that into trunk for uP3. Grids I’m less fond of, though blueprint is something that I would seriously consider…
2 scott // Aug 23, 2007 at 10:29 am
My only concern is that Blueprint is still young. YUI has been around for about 18 months now and has already gone through some serious browser testing; one of the biggest upside to YUI.