University Communications hosted our meeting in their offices in the University Research Park. Our hosts were Sherry Main, Todd McGill, Chris Walsh and Jim Kreuziger.
New UCI Theme
Todd McGill shared the progress on the new UCI theme for WordPress.
- The high priority items are done. It can be delivered to sites.uci.edu at any time.
- He is still working on a few items including adding a widget area for social icons.
- The branding is the main focus including the official colors, wordmarks and fonts.
- He used the Genesis sample theme but made many customizations to make it web accessible. These include:
- Menus are more accessible including better focus management and the ability to use tabs to navigate. He has restricted menus to a single level.
- He enabled a workmark uploader to make the wordmarks not use CSS background images, which are not accessible.
- He changed the widget titles to use <h2> instead of <h4>.
- He wrapped the site description in a <p> tag instead of <h2>
- The footer credits are available as a widget items and include a dynamic copyright year.
- Still in development
- He’s working on a widget for social media icons. This will be done in the next week or two. (Note: we discussed this after the meeting and Todd will send OIT a copy after this is done for testing on sites.uci.edu)
- Once the theme has been installed and tested, it will become the default theme on both sites.uci.edu and faculty.sites.uci.edu. Any existing sites can change to it as it will be network enabled.
- Currently there is no custom home page. Todd initially had this as future development, perhaps as a widgetized homepage. However, it may be possible to try Page Builder by Site Origin (plugin). OIT will try this out on our development server and we may be able to offer this as a plugin to allow people to build their own.
Wordmarks
- We discussed the proper use of wordmarks. Todd is going to include instructions to request wordmarks in the theme.
- Who is allowed to use wordmarks?
- Sherry will find out and get back to the group. For official units, it is fine, but it is less clear for smaller sites. Most of the sites hosted on sites.uci.edu fall in this category.
WordPress for Departments
- Sherry asked if OIT plans to have a service for departments? Sites.uci.edu can be too restrictive and is not meant for larger department sites. Yet the need is there.
- They can assist getting people set up, but not hosting or continuing maintenance.
- Some units are already creating their own multi-sites including BioSci, DUE, and Academic Personnel. These units have dedicated developers to run the services.
Other Ways Communications is Using WordPress
- today.uci.edu is the calendar site for the campus.
- They are using a plugin called Event Organiser.
- The items are managed as events and viewed as posts.
- They use custom fields for much of the data.
- They can use RSS feeds based on taxonomy to pull events into other sites.
- They’ve had some problems with the Google maps going to the wrong place but can edit the location manually if needed.
- The top two events are added manually via a custom menu.
- Any UCI person can submit an event via a web form at the top of the site.
- They are looking at a more robust vendor solution, so this may be replaced with that.
- Forms – forms.communications.uci.edu
- They have moved all their form creation to Gravity Forms. They have a site devoted to it.
- It’s mostly for internal use as the admin area is restricted to them. They can download the submissions via CSV file. Forms can redirect to any site after submission, so it can be used in conjunction with other sites.
- They have been able to implement using WebAuth to login to a form to capture the person’s identity before submitting.
Development and New Sites
They also showed us some stunning sites in development. These include:
- Development News site to replace the current one. They are using Page Builder to create the layouts and it is saving them a lot of time.
- 50th Anniversary – http://50th.uci.edu/
- This site is live. They worked with a vendor called Rolling Orange for the theme. They speak highly of them and recommend them. Feel free to contact Communications for an introduction.
- Parallax themes – They’ve also started using a few parallax themes to tell beautiful and effective stories about research at UCI. They like the “Scrolle” theme. They’ve also used “Scroller” and loved the look but it was harder to configure.
- They will share new sites using WordPress that come online with the group.
If I missed anything or got anything wrong, please feel free to chime in.
Stay tuned for our next meeting. Please share any topics you’d like to share or learn about and we’ll try to get speakers.
Thanks everyone who was able to make it on this very hot February. And a huge thank you to Sherry, Todd, Chris, and Jim for hosting and sharing such wonderful information and inspiring us with your amazing work.