Site map meeting coming your way

We’ve built a site map for the redesign using mindmeister.com. The goal behind the map is to represent how we propose reorganizing information on the new site so that it is more user friendly. So, the map doesn’t necessarily represent the back end architecture of the site, but it does represent what navigational options a user will be presented with at any given point. Now, in case you didn’t notice, there is a TON of information on the EWU website. Therefore we have undoubtedly missed some things on the map or – this may be hard to believe – even placed some things where they shouldn’t go. For this reason, we have grouped together areas of the map into several meetings with departments and colleges over the next three weeks (the first meeting was today with “Future Students”).

Below is a list of the meetings/groups and the lead staff member for each group. If you are a CMS web publisher or web developer for your area, please contact the lead staff member’s office to find out if you should attend.

• Future students (Admissions, Financial Aid, Registrar and more): Larry Briggs
• Current students (Student Affairs, Residential Life, Student Activities and more): Al Thompson
• Graduate Studies: Ron Dalla and Brian Donahue
• Academic resources (Academic Affairs, Academic Resources and more): Linda Kieffer
• DIEO: Doreen Timm
• Support EWU (Alumni, Development): Mike Westfall
• EWU Libraries: Dean Pat Kelley
• We’ll meet with all EWU Colleges individually, with the dean being the lead for each

In the meetings, we’ll focus on the following for each area:

• Goals for web pages
• Input and suggestions for site map
• What is your content wish list? What content can be removed? What new content do you need?
• Personnel resources for completing web pages

Most of these meetings will be led by either Michelle Hege or Lisa Cargill from Desautel Hege Communications. They will act as an extension of our staff to gather your input and report back to us. With this information, we can complete the site map. As this process is going on, the MarCom and IT staffs are working together to create all the new page types we’ll need in the new site. In addition, we are starting the programming work involved in building the new home page and navigation.

Once we complete the site map meetings, we should be at a point where we can start building the new site map into the CMS.

Web Manager, Where Art Thou?

As many of you know by now, our web manager in Marketing and Communications, Ryan Bentz, had to leave us. Sorry I’m a bit late in formal notification via this blog. Those of you who had the opportunity to work with Ryan and see his work know he was a very skilled developer, great communicator and a flat out excellent person to work with. He did a great job for us, helped us make great progress and he’ll be missed. While Ryan liked his job here and embraced our Eagle spirit, personal reasons forced his move back to Seattle where he’s found a new position doing none other than managing a website for an international company.

The good news here is that we have a solid, three-part plan for moving forward. (1) Thanks to Dr. Arevalo and our University leadership, we were granted the ability to replace Ryan. The application period closes this Friday (10/24) and we hope to start interviews late next week. (2) Again, thanks to recognition of the importance of this project, we were granted the ability to contract with Ryan to complete the site map and important pieces of programming work for the new site. (3) We are continuing our partnership with Desautel Hege Communications. They will act as an extention of our staff in conducting meetings with departments and colleges across the University to discuss the proposed site map (more on this in my next entry).

So, while Ryan will be missed, it is onward and upward with the redesign.

Ingeniux CMS Version 6

Throughout the redesign process we have been getting a lot of questions about the CMS. As you may know, the “redesign” is a bit more than a site redesign because we are also moving to a new version of the Ingneiux CMS. The transition to a new CMS is a bit more than an upgrade…”reimplementation” might be a better term. The new version, Ingeniux CMS version 6, contains many new features that should greatly improve the user experience and aide us in the development of the new site. I’ll run down some of the new key features in my personal excitement order:

AJAX Web Client: Cross-browser, zero-install client based on the latest AJAX technology, runs on Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Apple Safari.

Say goodbye to ActiveX controls and good riddance to the Mac Client! In the new version there’s nothing to install, no separate versions for PC and Mac; just bring up the CMS in your favorite browser and off you go. Although Ingeniux lists Firefox, IE and Safari as their supported browsers, I have tested version 6 in a couple other browsers and it worked great (even in Linux for all 2 or 3 of us Linux users).

New WYSIWYG Edit Control: Provides robust content import configuration options, improved support for tables and XHTML compliance

Ingeniux has chosen TinyMCE as the new WYSIWYG editor for version 6. If you aren’t familiar with WYSIWYG editors, TinyMCE is one of the most popular and widely used editors. It’s commonly integrated with other web content management solutions like Mambo, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. I would estimate that at least 90% of the issues users have with the current version of the CMS are directly related to the editors. I am extremely optimistic that we wont be experiencing any more disappearing content and IGXERROR issues with the new editor in place. Ingeniux has given us numerous configuration options for the new editor which should allow us to tailor it to our needs and better uphold content standards.

Enhanced Asset Management: Improved image and file management, including built-in image processing, group-level permissions and XML metadata support.

Asset management is referring to the management of documents, images and media. The new enhancements will give us an intuitive way manage files directly through the CMS instead of going through the “document server” process. We will be able to upload images, video, and documents directly through the CMS interface and delete those files when need be. All of the folders are secured using group permissions so we don’t have to worry about users managing files in a location that they shouldn’t have access to.

Another huge feature of the enhanced asset management interface is the ability to manipulate images. Currently, we have to use a third-party product like Photoshop to scale down images to a reasonable web-presentation size. Now we have the ability to scale images to size as part of the upload process.

Search Engine Friendly URL enhancements: Auto-generated search engine friendly URLs model site structure and page names

As part of the redesign we are focusing a lot of attention on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This feature of the new CMS should immensely help our SEO effort. The URLs are generated by the naming and positioning of pages within the CMS tree structure. Here’s an example of how the friendly URLs work:

In the above site tree, friendly URLs would build out from from the home page, “EWU Home”. Folders can be used to organize the site tree but do not play into the structure of the URL. If the page name contains a space, the space is replaced by a dash (eg. Site Map would be Site-Map.xml). So the path to “Admissions” would be /Admissions.xml. The paths to “Path1″ and “Path2″ would be /Admissions/Path1.xml and /Admissions/Path2.xml. As you can imagine, page naming will become very important because there’s a definite line between search engine friendly URLs and user friendly URLs. http://www.ewu.edu/apply-for-admission-at-ewu.xml might be search engine friendly (good for SEO) but certainly not very user friendly. An example of an appropriate search engine friendly URL might be when publishing news or blog entries (eg. http://www.ewu.edu/News/ewu-launches-new-website.xml). The friendly URLs feature will be a very nice enhancement to our site but it will be important for users to understand how the URLs are constructed when using the new version of the CMS.

Multi-Format Output: Publish CMS content with any file extension and to any server technology; including Microsoft .NET, PHP, Java Server Pages, and Adobe Cold Fusion.

My mind begins to race when I start thinking of the possibilities using multi-format output. To explain how it works I would direct you back to a diagram I used in a previous post. The diagram showed how content is created using the Ingeniux CMS but specifically how XSL stylesheets can be applied to user supplied data to produce a desired document type. The same method applies here. A user could supply content (via CMS) to be inserted into a page containing a scripting language like PHP (via XSLT).

Hierarchical Taxonomy System: Import, build or manage taxonomies directly in Ingeniux CMS. Categorize content for re-use and then use the Taxonomy Navigation system to return content based on categories, create pivot filters and generate tag clouds

It’s still a bit unclear to me how we will utilize this very powerful feature but it does present us with a lot of options . It gives users the ability to categorize/classify all of their content using a set of pre-defined categories. Taxonomy navigation will likely be used for media (image/video) galleries and possibly to present tag clouds in a couple areas of the site.

Single Sign-On Authentication: Supports cascading authentication to LDAP, Active Directory and SQL data repositories

Admittedly, not too exciting for the average CMS user but its good to note that we will be ready for the Looking Glass project when the project is ready for us.

Well, that was quick overview of some of the key features and enhancements coming in the new version of the CMS. Personally, I’m very pleased with the direction Ingeniux is going with their new products. I think they’ve done an excellent job of filling any shortcomings of previous CMS versions. If you would like more details on any of the new features or have any questions about the CMS, please feel free to leave a comment here or shoot me an email.