An Update for Drupal Users

The following message was sent to Drupal users by Sean Bellows. If you did not receive this email, but would like to be included in email updates like these, please contact Alaina Wiens in  University Relations.

As we move closer to the October 1 launch of the new university website, we are working to make many changes to improve the look and behavior of the site. Many of you have probably noticed that the site looked or behaved “off” (to put it lightly) and we have been hurriedly resetting our CSS and adjusting the design to work with Drupal.

Some of the problems have been:

• inconsistent fonts
• squashed images
• missing styles or functionality
• overlapping boxes and text

Etc., etc.

There are going to be many fixes and changes deployed within the next week. While these should not have any significant impact on the work you’ve done so far, I cannot promise that you might not have to go back and rework some material. When we originally opened Drupal up to campus, we were unable to enforce certain design decisions that exist for very important reasons (taking responsive design and accessibility into consideration). We have since implemented changes that will void some design breakage and usability issues. Once we notify you that these updates have been made to Drupal, please make sure to review your site and fix any potential issues. We will be extensively reviewing the sites in September looking for problem areas.

Some things that we still need to finish and hope to have available in the next couple of weeks are:

• fixed faculty/staff profile widget
• missing paragraph and character styles
• meeting a Phase I goal for accessibility with the placement of WAI-ARIA tags for links, buttons, and forms
• a profile-preview template where you will be able to show staff photos, names, and department that will link to the larger, fuller profile pages. These will look similar to the media-block when in the sidebar.

We still have several open sessions and training seminars coming up before we go live on October 1st, so please attend if you can.

As we have emphasized in the past, we are a small team with an amazingly tight schedule and this is a job that normally takes a team 3-4 times our size 18–24 months to complete. Thank you for your help and patience.

Cheers.

Sean Bellows