The Staging Area

I know, amazing… we’re still here. A lot has changed since the last posts nearly six months ago. We (within IT) have seen some some big changes within our organization and even bigger changes regarding IT projects. Lots of exciting stuff so I hope that it all gets showcased for the campus community soon. I digress…

I wanted to take this opportunity to firstly, let you know we’re still here and making progress on the project and secondly, invite those on-campus to visit the staging area where the site will be built out into a “go-live” state. Access is currently restricted to the EWU campus network because the environment isn’t ready for public consumption and I really don’t want search engines crawling this area…if anyone really needs access and you can’t be on the EWU network, please contact me directly and we’ll work something out. The staging area can be seen by visiting http://redesign.ewu.edu. Please note that this is a staging area and may be subject to unannounced maintenance and changes. There will also be a lot of unstyled and completely made-up content while new pages are being built out.

A few facts about the staging environment:

• Everything you see is published through the Ingeniux CMS Version 6
• “Structured URLs” are being used instead of x numbers
• Nginx (“Engine-X”) is being used for both load balancing and serving static content. I could write a whole post on why nginx is cool but that would bore most of you so if you’re interested, check it out here: http://wiki.nginx.org/Main.
• Yslow rules are mostly implemented but there’s still work to be done

Please feel free to leave comments or questions!

One for the techies: Performance using Yslow

One of the side affects of developing a more robust, interactive and aesthetically pleasing website is the possibility of an adverse performance impact.  When considering all of our potential audiences, it’s very important that we try to maximize the performance of EWU’s future site. One of the ways we are doing this is by following some performance rules, called “YSlow”, developed by the performance gurus at Yahoo!. I need to credit Ryan for bringing YSlow to my attention back when he first started here. Since being introduced to it I’ve been on the verge of obsessing over how we can make the new site faster.

So what is YSlow? YSlow is a set of 13 rules that affect the performace of a web page. Following the rules can lead to performance improvements of 25-50%. That’s a major improvement especially considering the rules are quite simple:

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags

I’m not going to expand on each rule here but I’ve linked to the explanation for each rule on Yahoo’s site if you’re interested. With the possible exception of rule 2, using  a CDN, we will be attempting to follow each of these basic rules when developing and deploying the new site.

Measuring page performance using YSlow has been made easy by means of a couple Firefox plugins. Yahoo has developed a Firefox plug-in for YSlow to use with the Firebug plugin (a must-have plug-in for web developers). The YSlow plug-in analyzes web page performance with respect to each of the 13 rules and then assigns a performace grade of A through F.

If these rules have the positive performance impact that we expect, my hope would be that we can apply the same rules to other web-based IT systems around campus.

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.

web stats for the masses

One our largest service gaps has been the inability to easily share page-specific stats with our content providers. For years now, the web server logs have been fed into a database so logs can be purged. So we’ve had the data, tons of it, but the problem has been just that… too much data and the lack of an interface to the data. Recently, Alex Chernikov built a robust front-end interface for the stats database but the current state of the database would still require lots time and server resources to produce the reports. We’ll likely revisit this solution down the road because it has great potential. But we need stats now, especially with the redesign…

Immediately, we started looking to Google Analytics. It’s widely used and even embedded in some of our current CMS pages. There were a few problems that were apparent from the start…

• Unlike so many of Google’s solutions, there’s currently no API provided so our only option would likely be to use a shared login into the GA site itself
• Reading the GA Terms of Service agreement can give anyone with a high-traffic site an uneasy feeling. Specifically #2 FEES AND SERVICES that says service is provided free up to 5 million pageviews per month. We’re not there but it’s certainly not out of range either.
• Third party content/cookies can be blocked so there’s probably some population that wouldn’t be accounted for in the stats. I’m not sure how big that population is at this point but personally I would expect it to grow as new browsers and plug-in provide additional privacy features.

I’m hopeful that we have found our solution in an open source project called “Piwik“. Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It’s main selling points are:

• Open API
• Plug in architecture
• Data abstraction layer
• Customizable dashboard

The plan is to embed the piwik code in every page we publish and use the “Custom Tab” feature of the Ingeniux CMS to display real-time stats for each page or group of pages.

Because Piwik has an open API and we can house the application and data locally, we should have lots of options for customization and further development. We have Piwik installed and we’ve done some preliminary testing. So far we are quite pleased with the results. When we have the custom tab developed a bit further I’ll post some screen shots here. We would really like to hear any thoughts you might have on this solution. If you have any other solutions in mind that might work for us, don’t hesitate to comment and we’ll take a look.

accessibility and syndication

As Ryan mentioned in an earlier post, we will be making the transition to a new version of the CMS along with the redesign. The new version has some really exciting features that we would like to start introducing here on the blog. Before we do, I thought it might be good to give a high-level view of some of the technology that will drive our new site.

One of our goals with the redesign is to produce a text-only and accessible (compliant with ADA, Section 508) version of nearly the entire site. The underlying technology of our site lends itself perfectly to accomplish this without the need for users maintain additional or separate data. With a single XML document produced by the Ingeniux CMS, we can dynamically present the document to the consumer based on their request (specifically, URL string match or browser user agent). So the consumer asks for a text-only version of x59375234203928.xml Admissions.xml and the XML document that was previously presented in its full html/css/js/ajax/flash is transformed into an accessible document by dynamically applying the appropriate XSL style sheet.

The text-only version of the site is just one example of how we can leverage this framework. We are using the same method to generate RSS feeds galore and a site map that renders both as html and as xml (our xml sitemap can be fed to google and follows the protocol from sitemap.org). Other possibilities include rendering multilingual pages, browser-specific content (eg. content for mobile devices) and multiple brandings. If you would like more info on the topic, Ingeniux has a good article on their site titled “Cobranding and Syndication“.