Institutional Knowledge

When the university gets around to redesigning the campus web presence, it will need to meet the following goals:

• Accessible
• Manageable
• Usable
• Findable
• Flexible

If implemented properly, Web Content Management would be a great tool for making inroads toward achieving the first three: accessibility, web document management, and usability.

By placing the onus for accessible templates in the hands of developers who understand accessibility and how to create standards based solutions, the campus can ensure that all new sites created in the WCMS are accessible.

A WCMS solution will also play a significant role in how manageable documents will be on the web. Centralizing and standardizing the workflow should make it easier for departments across campus to publish content to the web.

How usable the web site is will depend on many factors. One way to ensure good usability is through centralizing the creation of template sets with those who practice design with usability in mind.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of “Able-ity: Chico State’s Web Presence”

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.

Yesterday, we updated the CAS interface. It’s now based on the Yahoo YUI CSS library. Working with the YUI library has been a blessing. We’ve converted most of our web applications, as well as any websites we create, and even a few we update, to use the YUI library. Next up to get converted to YUI, the portal… stay tuned.

It is just me or did anyone else notice that iGoogle (aka Google Personalized Homepage) is now using YUI Grids ? Talk about validating the direction you’ve choosen for adapting a framework: both Yahoo and Google are now using the YUI Grids framework. Mega Cool.

Technorati Tags: yui, yahoo, igoogle,

A very subtle change occurred on campus today. No, it wasn’t the mysterious JunkMail Digests that appeared in our inbox, rather a step forward toward a better future.

At the request of Public Affairs, we updated the Public Facilities page. With the ATI we’ve been cleaning up some of the pages on the campus web server as we go just to make sure we’re covering our basis. I noticed that the Public Facilities page was using a University template that appeared to be from the late 1990’s.

So, I cleaned-up the page and made it accessible and valid HTML, etc. In addition, I tossed the content into one of our “beta” templates that’s built upon the YUI Reset/Fonts/Grids foundation.

We hope that this foundation will eventually be made available to other web contributors on campus. Right now, we’re still finding corner cases and looking for ways to abstract CSS into components for more of an ala carte option. (more…)