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  • Web Council - January 15, 2015
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Web Council - Jan 15, 2015
  • Announcements
    • Next meeting Thursday, Feb 26; a panel discussion of which CMS is right for you
    • Drupal Users Group continues meeting after the Web Council meetings
  • College of the Environment Multisite Framework
    • Joe Eastham, easthamj@uw.edu spoke on Content Prototypes at the College of the Environment
    • Designing and building websites for 12 academic and research units using WordPress multisite
      • One central master or base site, from which subsites are spawned. Each subsite is then styled by means of a child theme 
      • Each department and unit wants to be unique
      • They often need help on content development and user experience design
      • Most of the people he works with have had the role of webmaster tacked onto their job
    • College Website framework
      • WordPress Multisite allows one base site with the basic college template that includes six pre-configured features to copy and customize, and a boilerplate base site that can be customized
      • Needed a responsive front-end framework
        • Chose Foundation 5 (http://foundation.zurb.com/)
        • Using a framework was a faster path to responsive web templates
        • Foundation 5 includes a ibrary of frequently used interface components
    • Developing designs for each department and unit
      • Prototypes with wireframes
        • Initially, use a low-fidelity design approach for design discussions, which were asy to build and update as conversations progress
      • Prototyping in WordPress
        • Switched to doing prototypes in WordPress
        • Only slightly harder than lower-fidelity prototypes
        • Gets the client involved
        • Yields better user feedback
        • Client gets started with content quickly
        • Work in one site from start to finish
      • Close to being done with the Climate Impact Group site
    • The Future
      • It is a challenge to make unique sites for each department and unit.
      • Could this work be offered to other groups at the UW as a framework?
    • Technical Details
  • The New Alumni Theme
    • Ben Erickson bperick@uw.edu
    • Goals
      • Want to be fully in-family with the UW brand
      • Site is now for all alumni, not just the Alumni Association. We have content for everyone
    • Began with the master UW WordPress theme, built an alumni child theme
      • Regularly check for latest version of master theme to make sure child theme is not breaking anything provided by the master theme
    • Tools and methods
      • Using Composer (https://getcomposer.org/) to manage dependencies; builds an autoload file which builds all the parts of your site
      • Using Superhero graphic from master theme
      • Defined custom post types, such as for tours; editors put in content and meta information about a tour and it builds the tour page
      • Using MapBox (https://www.mapbox.com/) to build maps
      • For logos, use SVG files, which can be styled using LESS
      • Use Isotope (http://isotope.metafizzy.co/) sorting and filter system to give users a way to select what set of info to display
      • Vagrants Varying-Vagarnt-Vagrants / VVV (https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV) for WordPress development
      • Hosted on Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com/), partly to be set up for full integration with UW Web team
      • IE support: Decided to support IE9 and up only, for now. Hope to provide fallback capability eventually for older versions
      • Using a Shibboleth plug-in; working on using UW Groups service to maintain list of administrators
      • Using Sublime Editor (http://www.sublimetext.com/)
  • UW Boundless theme for Drupal.
    • Jasper Bleijs jbleys@uw.edu, a web developer at Creative Communications
    • Working on a Drupal version of UW brand theme
    • UW Marketing team requested development of the theme in Drupal
    • Currently in the form of a starting point people can build upon
    • Still developing and implementing the content part
    • Base theme is Bootstrap3 Drupal theme, which requires JQuery update module; the UW Boundless is a child theme
    • Theme is being maintained on GitHub; https://github.com/c2web/uw_boundless
  • Mobile Minute: A quick mobile snapshot.
    • Mobile operating systems
      • iOS strong
      • Android coming up, increasing its share
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