redesigning lclark.edu

Trillium

Coming soon: the LiveWhale Users Group

Now that we have launched LiveWhale, it is time to start a users group to share answers, ideas, support, etc. (like we had with Trillium). There will also be an associated list-serv available to any LiveWhale user in the Lewis & Clark College community.

If you are interested, send me an email:
grether@lclark.edu

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

The Coming of LiveWhale!

So long, Trillium!  It was beautiful knowing you, but it’s time to move on.  The Web has changed too much (especially concerning issues like accessibility) for Lewis & Clark not to change too.

Yes, it’s time for a new content management system to go with our newly designed website.  At the end of the day this June 8, they are both arriving here. Exciting!

For some of you, LiveWhale has already arrived and you are already hard at work getting your new, improved site ship-shape.  For others, you will turn on your computer June 9 to find a new look, new functions, old things in new places, new calendars, new search, new URLs… seemingly a new everything.

Not everything will be new, however, as we have a pretty massive website and there just isn’t enough time to get to all the deeper-level pages right now.  So when you click around and stumble on an old, Trillium-based page, understand that piece by piece, step by step, the content is migrating over to the new Lewis & Clark.

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

How long will Trillium live?

As I was writing about the short-term future usage of Trillium for sending Constant Contact emails, it struck me that I haven’t really talked about what will happen to Trillium on a longer-term basis. All this hasn’t been confirmed with IT yet, so let’s just call it a general plan or some issues to consider.

First, we’d like to shut down editing of Trillium pages as soon as reasonable for the simple reason that we don’t want people thinking they’ve updated their web site (somehow) not knowing that their pages are no longer indexed by us or any other service like Google.

But, we do want to keep an accessible, archival copy of the Trillium site around for at least a year. This is in part because a number of sites keep annual pages that they refresh each year for a symposia, or other such time-based content. We also expect that after migration slows up, we’ll still find something that was missed and needs to make it over to the new server, or historical information we’d like to add post-launch.

Now, this archival copy need not be the fully-fledged version currently in use. After we turn off editing, we might instead grab a static copy of the content and keep that available elsewhere even as we shut down the current server. That way, we’d have all the usage without having to maintain the server anymore.

At any rate, we’ll probably play it by ear to see what happens and what we can reasonably do at each point along the way. If you have concerns about this, be sure to email us so that your voice is heard.

Also published: https://media.zendesk.com/forums/22045/entries/31096

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

What about Constant Contact?

In an email to me recently, Monica Baker asked about the use of Trillium for future Constant Contact emails, since Trillium will still be around, even if it is no longer the main web server. And, short-term, yes this probably would work.

At present, we’re expecting to take the new web server and have it replace the server currently responding to www.lclark.edu and the schools and then rename the current web server with Trillium to something like old.lclark.edu.

Now, while that server will no longer be indexed by web search like Google et al., it will still be accessible for archival purposes while we continue to migrate old services off of it. So, you might simply replace the www in the domain address with something like old for old.lclark.edu.

However, we don’t intend to keep Trillium around for active editing for a long period, and will probably shut down the ability to log into it within six months to a year after launch (depending on needs, etc.). So, this is not a long-term solution.

With regards to Constant Contact, I’d be in favor of switching over from Trillium-built content to using its internal templated system, since it also is a bit difficult to try and force it to consume ours. And further, it would also be great to integrate email directly into Raiser’s Edge as well. There are a lot of options out there, I’d love to begin a campus-wide discussion on bulk email — but, after the launch. :)

Also published:  https://media.zendesk.com/forums/22045/entries/31094

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

Migrating Types of Pages

Thinking this morning about the different types of pages (Trillium and otherwise) we will be migrating to the new website and our new content management system, LiveWhale, I decided to make a list online here at the redesign blog:

  1. Page content that can be moved to LiveWhale’s PAGES section on the new server with no problem and no changes necessary
  2. Page content that can be moved over but obviously in need a bit of updating on your part
  3. A news item that will be moved into LiveWhale’s NEWS section
  4. A calendar item that will be moved into LiveWhale’s EVENTS section
  5. Content from an email-only template that does not really belong in News or Events: Ignore, archive, or delete
  6. Tilde “~” sites of central importance: Ignore, but we will make a “landing page” in LiveWhale for us to link to first, before users go to the tilde site
  7. Tilde “~” sites of lesser importance: Ignore for now
  8. Gallery pages within Trillum: move into LiveWhale IMAGE and GALLERY sections
  9. Gallery pages on external sites like Smugmug or Picassa: Ignore
  10. Law and CAS alumni directories: Ignore for now

An interesting subset to all these is the use of forms.  For the most part we will migrate the current forms over to the new site as is, though RSVP forms will now be handled directly within the LiveWhale EVENTS section.

Filed Under

5 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)