Carnegie Mellon University CMS News

New Guidelines for Launching Sites

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

The first time you wish to "go live" with your site, please follow our guidelines and contact the CMS team at least one week prior to launch. This will give us time to finalize the technical details of the launch and review your site for adherence to best practices for both Carnegie Mellon's CMS and the web in general, and will make suggestions to help you align your site with these best practices if necessary.

Update on CMS Evaluation Project

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Colleagues,

In June 2011, I shared early plans to evaluate new web content management tools. I’d like to provide an update on this work.

Our first step has been to carefully profile our existing implementation of the Cascade CMS. The objectives of this evaluation are to:

·       Ensure that we thoroughly understand how people use the system today.
·       Identify needs which are not being met by the current CMS implementation.
·       Determine whether the existing technology can be extended, upgraded or modified to meet these needs, or if a replacement is necessary.

We wanted to give you an update on our search for a new CMS platform. Our first step has been to carefully profile our existing deployment of Cascade, in part to ensure that we deeply understand how people use the system today and also to be certain that the existing technology cannot be extended (rather than replaced) to meet our needs. We're planning to conclude this phase of the effort by the end of the 2011is calendar year. From there, we will be able to provide a more clear roadmap of ourshare a plan for next steps.

As this effort has developed, we realize that we cannot continue the moratorium we imposed on new sites in the CMS. At the same time, as our service is currently structured, we have (far) more work than we have people to attend to it. Effective immediately we are lifting the moratorium. Note that we still request that you publish outside normal working hours whenever possible.

However, in the near future we will be implementing additional processes to streamline our CMS work so we can more effectively meet the needs of the campus community. In general we will be adding more structure to our engagement process so that we can maintain consistent response times to client requests.   We'll update you with these changes as they become better defined.

Thanks for your patience as we work through these issues. As always, we welcome your questions and comments.

Thanks,

Doug Blair

Assistant Director, Computing Services

Search for a New CMS Platform Underway

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

The CMS service has grown dramatically in the four years since it was launched. Today over 600 users are managing over 30,000 pages of content that represent much of the university's official web presence. In response to both this growth and the need to improve the university's overall web presence, Computing Services is beginning a search for new web content management tools. You will be hearing more about this project in coming months, but there are a few things we wanted to bring to your attention right away.

1. MORATORIUM ON NEW SITES

Effective June 1st we will be placing a moratorium on creating new sites in the CMS. We will also be advising existing clients to postpone any major work on existing sites.

2. MIGRATION OF EXISTING SITES

Migration of existing sites to new technologies will be a key criterion in our evaluation process. We will work out the specifics of this in the implementation plan and share details with you as they become available.

3. RESPONSE TIME

As our staff begins to spend time gathering requirements for the new system, you may notice a delay in their response time for routine requests. Please use the following guidelines to set your expectations:
- 1 week for routine questions
- 2 weeks for site reviews and site launches

4. YOUR INPUT

Rigorous and thoughtful requirements gathering and analysis will be critical to selecting technologies that best meet our needs. While we can gather much of this information by studying the CMS from our side, we are very interested in your feedback. Please send your questions, comments, and suggestions to cms-feedback@andrew.cmu.edu

We're excited about this project, and hope you are as well. We'll be in touch soon and often with more details as we flesh out our project plan.

New Publishing Guidelines

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Many of you have contacted us about performance problems with the CMS. We're painfully aware of this issue. While performance has been a slowly growing concern for some time, we seem to have passed some threshold and are now seeing serious problems on a regular basis. We're working on a variety of engineering solutions, some developed locally and others in conjunction with the vendor. We realize that the service has become a critical tool for the community (with roughly 600 users and over 250 sites), and are treating this problem with the priority it deserves. While we work on the problem, our investigations to date have turned up one thing you can do to help:

Please avoid publishing during business hours.

We can't emphasize this point strongly enough. If you must publish, please be selective in the folders/files that you publish. Publishing an entire folder for a change to a single page is inefficient and hurts system performance. When the system is only being used for editing, it remains usable (albeit sometimes slow); it is the publishing of sites that pushes the load from sluggish to glacial.

We'll update you as we make progress on this issue. Questions and comments welcome.

Thanks for your cooperation and patience.

Switching Page Types in Version 4

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 06:00:00 GMT

If you need to change the Content Type of an existing page, be sure that you hit SUBMIT before you populate the page. Otherwise you may lose your content. For example, if you switch a page from a 2-column to a 3-column, or from a 3-column to an expand-collapse, do not start populating specific fields until you hit SUBMIT.

To change the type of page you have, go to Edit> System and click on Content Type. Select the new content type and hit CONFIRM. It is important that you then hit SUBMIT before you begin entering content.

Best Practices for Links

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Effective links are well labeled (verbally), well positioned (visually), and match the users' expectations (behaviorally.)

When to open links in a new window

Links to Carnegie Mellon sites should open in the same window. Non-Carnegie Mellon sites should open in a new window.

Links that open documents or launch applications

Documents, such as PDFs and MOVs, should open in a new window and be labeled [.pdf] or [.mov] in the link, for example:

Watch Professor Smith’s lecture [.mov]

Language to use for labeling

Links should be relevant text. Do not link words like "click here," "this page," etc. Search engines will not be looking for the word "here"; they will be searching for the words in the subject. For example:

For more audio and video, see our multimedia archive. Correct

See the multimedia archive here. Incorrect

Tips on Moving and Renaming Files

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

When moving or renaming a published page, file, or folder in the CMS, it is important to unpublish it first. The CMS does not automatically unpublish assets when they are moved, which results in the content at the original URL remaining on the web indefinitely. When that happens, The content becomes "orphaned" and is no longer manageable from within the CMS. This can lead to problems such as stale content being returned in search engine results.

How to Unpublish a File

1. With the folder, file or page open in the CMS, select the Publish tab.
2. On the Publish tab, select the destination(s) that the asset has been published to, and then select the Un-publish radio button.
3. Click Submit.

Removing a Page from the Navigation

If you are moving a page or folder that is part of the navigation, you will need to republish the folder containing that asset so that the moved content no longer appears in that section of the navigation.

Finding and Removing "Orphaned" Pages

If your site is served on www.cmu.edu and you want to check to see if it contains any "orphaned" content, we have tools that can help with this. Please contact cms-help@andrew.cmu.edu for more information.

Publishing Etiquette

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Much like a shared printer, the publish queue is shared by everyone who uses the CMS and the publisher processes one job at a time, in the order received. Whether you are publishing your site to be viewed live or on the staging server, there are over 500 people who all have access to the same queue.

Submit your Job Once, Then Check Your Place in Line

Once you submit a job to be published, it is wise to find your place in the line of jobs waiting to be published. Depending on traffic, it may take longer than you expect to see the published changes you make to your website. To check the publish queue, go to Tools >> Publisher >> Active Jobs. You will be able to watch the progress of all the jobs that are spooling through the publish queue.

Publish large collections [100+ pages] after hours!

Large collections of files should be published after hours (after 5:30 p.m. or before 6 a.m.). Large publish jobs may delay another user's time-sensitive publish job and can also put a load on the server and affect overall system performance. When possible, publish single pages or a smaller group of files.