Digital Platforms and Developments January 2026 summary

One month into 2026 already! Here’s what we got up to in January:

New year admin tasks

The start of each new year brings with it a range of admin tasks for the various digital platforms we run.

This mostly relates to news and events content, as we configure several of our platforms – such as our Funnelback website search and our Siteimprove QA platform – to ignore news and events items that are over a certain number of years old.

We also clear out old submissions on our various Formstack forms so that we’re not holding onto any data for longer than we need to.

Consent Management Platform (aka “cookie banner”) implementation

Lots of work to get the banner ready to go live (spoiler, it went live on 2 February):

• Tweaks to the banner wording and signoff from our Data Protection team.
• More testing and tweaking of our tag setup in Google Tag Manager.
• Updating our central cookies page.
• Updating sites we publish on other domains to ensure their footers link to cookie info relevant to that specific domain.
• Writing internal documentation in the wiki.
• Comms about launch to CMS users and other key stakeholders.
• Planning go-live steps.

Blogs platform theme update

Work progressed on creating a new on-brand theme for our blog platform (blogs.york.ac.uk):

• Reviewing theme functionality used on blog platforms at other universities.
• Created a wireframe to outline the elements to be included in each page type, and which are compulsory or optional.
• Implemented this as a new WordPress theme on our dev system.
• Converted our existing blogs to the new theme on the dev system to test how the theme works in different configurations.
• Reviewed functionality unique to our Student Voices blog, which currently uses a separate theme to our other blogs.

HR web rebuild

Lots of progress made on building and testing out the importer – nicknamed the HR Hoover – that will pull in hundreds of HR’s Dreamweaver pages into the web CMS to speed up the migration.

We’ve also been working out how to use the CMS’s functionality for bulk uploads of media to bring in the various PDFs and other documents from the HR branch, and looking into solutions for specific embedded functionality used on HR pages.

Fixes and other improvements

• Added Bluesky as an option in the contact details content type in the web CMS.

Other things

• Set up a range of key events in Google Analytics as part of measurement framework work for student recruitment with our advertising agency partner.
• More work on job descriptions for upcoming recruitments.
• Attended IT Service’s quarterly Big Room Planning and had lots of useful discussions with other developers.
• Quarterly e-accessibility working group meeting.
• Staff list for Politics and International Relations imported into our standard staff listing style as part of their departmental rebuild.
• Updated our internal documentation about deploying emergency alert bars across all CMS pages.
• Attended the kick off meeting of the Russell Group web content group.
• Nick managed to dress as Accidentally Ireland