Read the latest news about UQ Drupal upgrades, find new help online for editors and view a gallery of recent site launches.
Site launches
Six new Schools, seven Centres and four conference sites have launched since December. Visit the Gallery to view:
- Public Health – this site comes with a case study aimed at new site coordinators who are overwhelmed at the prospect of transition, includes comments from the communications officer
- Earth Sciences – effectively showcases fieldwork to prospective students in videos
- Economics – thoughtful depth for prospective and current students, academics and researchers at all levels
- Education – elegantly simple pathways for prospective students
- Languages and Cultures – best testimonials and student life
- Music – wonderful performance events and flowing English
- Health and Rehabilitation Sciences - hot off the press, launched this week
- Medicine - features international partners and a medical student research portal to link students with research opportunities.
UQ Medicine
UQ Medicine, the largest content project so far on UQ Drupal, went live at the end of January and will be featured in a separate article. Read some lovely feedback from a user about their experience of the new site:
Thought I would just say what a wonderful job you have been doing with the SoM Website. I had to do some rush work yesterday, and your hard work helped me do it quickly. I felt confident everything was up-to-date and accurate. Having a quick look at other areas, you have put so much more into the website than was there before. I shall be referring to it a lot more.
Congratulations to Kate Gadenne and all involved on completing a huge project in record time (7 months).
Heritage and Museums
Congratulations to Alison Buckley in the School of Social Sciences for the new Heritage and Museums site on 2 February. Alison managed to create this great site on top of her usual job, staffing student admin in the School of Social Sciences, an amazing feat worth a medal from Rocky Balboa.
Support for web writers and editors
We are trying to improve your online support to make it clearer and respond to your most frequent questions. The site now includes several pages of image advice. We are preparing short videos to enable you to ‘tour’ how to do things, as many people have said they would prefer to learn that way.
The editing and writing page provides fresh links about:
- usability issues for university websites by Peak Usability
- an explanation of the navigation and recommended content for the school template
- the latest version of the Queensland Government web style guide.
Your feedback on how to improve the site, or support you better, is always welcome - email our instructional designer or the editor with your suggestions or requests.
Platform upgrade
Developers in ITS were hard at work over the New Year period upgrading the UQ Drupal platform so there is now a sparkly new test and staging environment. This helps ensure any new enhancements can be properly managed by the developers, and tested with less risk to your live content.
UQ Standard theme coming online
UQ Standard theme, which was used to create the BEL Faculty site is now available as a general release for new sites. Training for users of this theme is in development.
UQ Standard theme will bring together a range of features that have been developed in collaboration with different business units. These features can be turned on or off depending on what the content requires. Eventually with stakeholder consultation, all suitable sites on legacy themes will migrate to UQ Standard theme.
A ‘theme’ is a collection of layouts, styles and components available to an author in a web content management system. The purpose of a theme is to provide a consistent look and feel for the end-users.
School template 2.0
Developers are working out how the School theme can be upgraded to UQ Standard theme and have dubbed the anticipated mix of the School template and Standard, ‘School 2.0’.
Subscribe to news
Updates about what’s happening with UQ Standard theme, and UQ web publishing, will be provided in plain English at this site. You can also subscribe to our news by joining the Comnet email list. If you would like notifications about the UQ Drupal service such as outages and upgrades, please contact the project manager.
Share your favourite university website
Do you have a favourite university website? Share it with your colleagues via this site - email the editor a link and a comment about why you like it.
For further information, please read the CMS Transition Manager's February Progress report to senior stakeholders.
Warm Regards,
The CMS Transition Team.