Getting closer to launch for the HR web rebuild, blog platform theme progress, news branch migration, staff listing improvements and more.
HR web rebuild
We’ve continued our involvement with the technical side of the HR web rebuild, which will be going live in mid-April. This month that involved:
- Successful completion of content and media imports.
- Go-live prep meetings covering access control updates and redirect checking.
- Starting to look into turning the “create a site structure via the API” process into a general-purpose tool for future use cases.
Blogs platform theme update
Another project that’s close to being complete, our work on updating our blog theme this month included:
- Making accessibility fixes and creating an accessibility statement.
- Meeting with colleagues from MRAO to brainstorm the landing page for the Student Voices blog and working on some custom pieces of functionality.
- Building a CMS content type to pull in listings of latest blog posts into CMS pages (we have this already for the Student Voices blog, but not as a general purpose content type).
We’ll be getting in touch with other blog owners soon to start planning the move to the new theme.
News branch migration
Our work on CMS content types for this was mostly done a few months ago, but the rebuilt central news and events branch went live this month, meaning that another large chunk of the website has been switched over from our old ‘Classic’ templates to use the newer Digital Pattern Library.
Staff listings for interdisciplinary centres
We’ve been building new functionality into the CMS so that staff who are members of interdisciplinary centres as well as a department can have a single ‘staff member’ content item that will appear in both places, avoiding the need to duplicate content. We’re finalising some aspects of how this will work, and building in functionality to support departmental research groupings too.
Other things
- Completed our updates to CMS content types to help with discovery of the research newsletter so there’s now a promo automatically added in various locations such as research press releases.
- Built an on-brand email template to be used for the confirmation email when undergraduate students sign up for our email newsletter, replacing a much plainer old version.
- Held a mini retrospective following some issues with the CMS publish, and then made some tweaks to our processes to minimise the chance of the same issue reoccurring.
- Finalising paperwork for upcoming recruitments in the team.
- Preparations for Clearing have begun, with kickoff meetings for the various workstreams we’re involved with.
- CMS support for the annual updates for course pages.
- We had our quarterly Digital and Creative Services away morning earlier in the month, and have had a few meetings of the ‘Peaks and potholes’ group that we formed as a result of it to help improve the experience of future new starters in the team.
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