Skidmore Web Developers blog

Contact Information plugin available!

Following the CMS updates on 10/27/10, the Contact Information plugin is available for all CMS  sites.  The following is the FAQ section of the post from 10/27:

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What is the Contact plugin?
The Contact plugin is a user interface that allows you to enter the contact information for your site once, and have it appear on all of the pages of the site.  It includes areas for email, phone, fax, and two customizable information areas.  In addition, you can show links to your social media areas at the bottom, as icons.

• http://cms.skidmore.edu/career/ — Career Services
• http://cms.skidmore.edu/admissions/ — Admissions
• http://cms.skidmore.edu/advising/ — Academic Advising
• http://cms.skidmore.edu/ocse/ — Off-Campus Studies & Exchanges

What are the features of the Contact plugin?
With the Contact plugin, you will only be putting in the contact information once, and will have it displayed on every page of your site.  This saves a great deal of time when information needs to be changed!  From user feedback, a few features due to be added are a Preview button, and the ability to re-sort the order of the information blocks.   The plugin includes standard icons for the social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) so that users don’t have to create their own.  You can also have a different address display for different folders in your website, if you have folders for different individual programs/offerings.

The contact information will appear on every page of your site (or subsite).  Updates are not instant – it will take a few hours for your changes to process through the server, due to resource caching.  You may only show one link per social media type (1 Facebook profile, etc.)

I like this!  How do I get the Contact plugin?
You will need to contact fill out the web contact form (https://cms.skidmore.edu/help/contact.cfm) to ask for a place in the schedule for having the script installed. Once it is installed, you will be able to edit the information in your Contact area yourself.

What if I don’t like the way the Contact plugin looks?
No one is required to use the Contact plugin, it’s a tool provided for your convenience.  You can choose to continue editing your Contact Information blocks manually.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the Web team.

Jenn Crewell
Web Development Coordinator
x8117

CMS template updates on 10/27/10

Dear CMS Editors:

On Wednesday, October 27, the Web Team will be applying some updates to all CMS templates.  These updates will pave the way for a new Contact plugin, which you can see in use on the OCSE and Career Services websites.

What does this change involve?
The left column of the templates will be standardized across all sites using that template (Academic – yellow, Administration – green), in order to allow for consistent placement of the Contact plugin.

What does this mean?
If your template was not set up in a way that easily accommodates the change, any site-specific information in your left column may be lost.  This is particularly likely in the Administration (green) templates.

What should I do?
If you are concerned that information in your left column area may be lost in the transition, you should take a screen shot of your page, or print it out, and label it with appropriate links and so forth.  This way, the information will be available after the update, in order to rebuild the page properly.

What if my information is lost in the transition?
Please send fill out the web contact form (https://cms.skidmore.edu/help/contact.cfm).  Include the URL of the pages on which information was lost, and a copy of the relevant information.  We will assist you in rebuilding the information.

*********************

What is the Contact plugin?
The Contact plugin is a user interface that allows you to enter the contact information for your site once, and have it appear on all of the pages of the site.  It includes areas for email, phone, fax, and two customizable information areas.  In addition, you can show links to your social media areas at the bottom, as icons.

http://cms.skidmore.edu/career/ — Career Services example

What are the features of the Contact plugin?
With the Contact plugin, you will only be putting in the contact information once, and will have it displayed on every page of your site.  This saves a great deal of time when information needs to be changed!  From user feedback, a few features due to be added are a Preview button, and the ability to re-sort the order of the information blocks.   The plugin includes standard icons for the social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) so that users don’t have to create their own.  You can also have a different address display for different folders in your website, if you have folders for special programs.

The contact information will appear on every page of your site (or subsite).  Updates are not instant – it will take a few hours for your changes to process through the server, due to resource caching.  You may only show one link per social media type (1 Facebook profile, etc.)

I like this!  How do I get the Contact plugin?
You will need to contact fill out the web contact form (https://cms.skidmore.edu/help/contact.cfm) to ask for a place in the schedule for having the script installed. Once it is installed, you will be able to edit the information in your Contact area yourself.

What if I don’t like the way the Contact plugin looks?
You can opt out of the Contact plugin, but you will have to edit your pages manually in order to put in contact information, and you will have to edit each one manually every time change is necessary.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the Web team.

Jenn Crewell
Web Development Coordinator
x8117

IT Help Desk Twitter Feed

Looking for a good way to get Skidmore Help Desk information but you only have time for 140 characters or less? Well, you’re in luck! The Skidmore’s IT Help Desk has a great Twitter Feed you can follow! Read the latest on email scams, programs, issues, and whatnot straight from the Help Desk.

Scope Help Documentation Available

Scope elements are the way that the CMS shares content across Skidmore sites — in a way, our own version of the Facebook “share” feature.  In this way, a Scope item can be entered once, and shared across multiple Skidmore web pages without individual site editors having to re-enter the information — saving server resources, employee time, and promoting efficient sharing of information across departments.

Scope elements consist of news, announcements, events, people, and right column displays.  You can see these in action on the Skidmore home page.  Not all of these features are available for every website, and when they are available they are usually limited to the home page of the site.

You will need to work with the Web Team to determine which features are available to you, and have them installed on your site.  Once you have them in place, you will be able to maintain them using the Scope editing system.

• News
• Adding images to news stories
• Announcements
• Right Column
• People

Events is a more unique widget, interfacing with the college calendar.  Items entered onto the college calendar can be earmarked for visibility on various departments, according to relevancy.  This feature requires a fairly active activity calendar in order to make full use of the features.

Taken together, Scope items can add a level of dynamic interest to your site, and provide you with a way to share information efficiently across the Skidmore campus.  If you think that your department can benefit from these features, contact the web team for more information.

Uploading Documents (Office 2007/2008)

At this time of year, one of the more common CMS editor duties is to upload a new course listing for the upcoming semester.  Often these documents are created in Microsoft Office, and then uploaded onto the web site.  Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• We strongly recommend saving your documents as PDFs, instead of uploading .doc or .xls files.  Not everyone has Microsoft Office, but anyone who can visit your webpage can view PDFs via Adobe Reader (a free addon).
• If you must upload documents that are not PDFs, you will have to save them down from Office 2007/2008 to a lower version.  Not everyone has Microsoft Office 2007/2008,  and it’s important to be sure that your documents are viewable by everyone who would need to view them.
• Files from Microsoft Publisher are not approved for uploading, so you will need to convert those into PDF format in order to upload them to a CMS website.
• Documents larger than 6mb are difficult to load in web browsers, and may cause time-out errors when trying to upload/download.  We recommend that users keep their files below this limit to maximize accessibility to their target audience.

Functions involving documents within your website are covered extensively in various sections of the CMS Frequently Asked Questions list.  Documents include PDFs, Word files, PowerPoint files, and all other types of files that can be uploaded (except images).

Help, I can’t copy/paste!

Copy/paste is one of the functions that CMS users make the most frequent use of.  You type a document in Word, email it around campus, and then post it up on your website by copy/pasting it into a web page, voila!

Only, as many users find, it’s not that easy.  With the new version of Microsoft Office (2007 for PC, 2008 for Mac), a lot of extra background coding is carried through, which causes a kinds of formatting errors.  It’s best clean your content thoroughly before importing it from any version of Word (read a blog post about that here).

Other users may find that various settings on their computer interfere with their ability to use their mouse to copy and paste in the CMS.  If you find that your mouse is blocked for some reason, you should still always be able to use the keyboard shortcuts:

• PC shortcuts: CTRL-C for copy, CTRL-X for cut, CTRL-V for paste
• Mac shortcuts:  Cmd/Apple-C for copy, Cmd/Apple-X for cut, Cmd/Apple-V for paste

One final issue that prevents CMS users from using copy/paste functions is interference from browser addons, specifically toolbars.   Many of these toolbars are installed by default with browser upgrades, and it takes a savvy user to notice the checkbox and prevent them from being installed.  While they add extra functionality to your browser, they can also block some of the CMS functions, so it is better not to have them installed in the browser that you use to do your CMS work.

Common toolbars include the Google toolbar, the Ask.com toolbar, and the AIM toolbar.  Here is a picture of what they might look like on your screen:

If you have these toolbars installed and are having issues with copy/paste functions, you can remove them yourself.  You can visit this Help FAQ to learn more about it.

Photoshop class offered by Academic Technologies

The class schedule from Academic Technologies is out for the spring semester, and it includes a class on using Photoshop to edit images for the web! This is a topic of interest for most CMS site managers, as photos have to be sized before they can be uploaded to websites — and this is the class to learn how to do that!
Information on this semester’s classes through IT can be found here. You can click the “register online” link, or contact Kelly Dempsey-Little for more information.

Usability testers needed

As the web team moves forward with the redesign of the Skidmore website, we are looking for a few good people to test our current site. Usability tests will help us determine if the flow of the content on our site is working well and whether or not our site is easy to navigate.
We need faculty, staff, students, alumni, and anyone that is interested in helping. We are working on the tests now and when we have our subjects we will begin.
Please contact Andy Camp, director of web development at acamp@skidmore.edu for more information or to sign up!

Skidmore website redesign

The web team will be working to redesign the look and flow of content for the top-level pages (about Skidmore, Current Students, etc.) of the Skidmore web site.
We will begin the process with usability studies of the current site.

Firefox 3 available

Many CMS users have adopted Firefox as a preferred browser for editing, due to differences in the way that popup windows are handled (Firefox seems to handle them quicker than IE, for example). It’s a browser that Skidmore IT supports, and can be found at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/.
Firefox has recently released Firefox 3.0.1, which is a significant upgrade from 2.16. Versions 2.x will be supported officially by Mozilla until December, but users will soon start receiving upgrade prompts (similar to the way that Windows will prompt you about security updates). Thus far Firefox 3 works seamlessly with CMS, so users should take advantage of the prompts and update your Firefox installation.
If you experience any difficulties with Firefox 3 you should always have IE 7 on your computers as a backup browser while the issue is investigated.