redesigning lclark.edu

migration

Looking for a few good students.

Do you want a first-hand opportunity to test and work with our new content management system LiveWhale and get paid for it?

If you’re available during the month of May (and maybe into June depending on how things go), we’re looking to hire a bunch of students to help us migrate the web site content from Trillium to LiveWhale. The work is fairly straight-forward, and includes lots of copying/pasting with an eye for detail, but can be done from most anywhere, since all you’ll need is a web browser and the internet.

If you’re interested (or know someone who might be) send us an email: wwwadmin@lclark.edu

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

Alumni Directories

Morgan recently wrote a post on the redesign blog about all the different types of content/pages that we currently have on the Lewis & Clark website and Boot chimed in with some concerns over the alumni directory.

For those of you unaware about our alumni directory, it is a web app written some years ago that gets nightly dumps of alumni data from Benefactor so that alumni can log in and update us with their current addresses and the like.

But the website launch is not the only thing that will impact this service. Seven days before the website launch, Benefactor will be replaced with new software called Raiser’s Edge — so the main data source for the service will be changing. Another major issue is the age and functionality of the service. Given the strides the web has made in interactivity over the last five or more years, I think we all can agree that this service could use a major overhaul, or complete replacement.

So, JC Minton and I have been batting about ideas about what to do about this service. We will most certainly replace it with something more functional at some point — the question is when. I think given that we’re both in the midst of a huge launch, my expectation is that we’ll ask Wayne to rewrite the nightly dump to the existing web server and that we’ll continue to make that service available through it’s current incarnation. Maybe something like:

http://old.lclark.edu/cgi-bin/alumdir/

Then, after we’re both out from under the launches, we’ll look at how much better we can make the alumni directory with the new software both JC and I will then have and see what the best new incarnation will be and go from there. Eventually, this would also be dovetailed into a alumni “community” product too, so that discussion, set to begin again around August, would supersede/impact the life of this service.

Also posted at: https://media.zendesk.com/forums/22045/entries/31009

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

Redirects

After my presentation today, Tanya Sloan (CAS Alumni) asked a great question:

“I have one question, about the URLs; are they staying the same? For example, we have our Golden Reunion June 12-14, and the URL for that is http://www.lclark.edu/dept/alumni/1959.html. Will that address stay the same, and only the content will move over? Or will that change? If any pages move to new URLs, will people be automatically redirected or will we have to have a little thing that says ‘This page has moved and now lives here?’”

The quick answer here is that we’ll have redirects (without a stop in between to tell the user) from the old to the new. They be a specific type of redirect called a permanent redirect so that when search engines find them, they’ll reassign their references from the old to the new address and over time, we’ll remove the redirects.

Specific to your address above, if I were to guess, the new address would be something like:

http://college.lclark.edu/alumni/reunions/golden/1959/
-or, since they are the same-
http://www.lclark.edu/college/alumni/reunions/golden/1959/

Don’t depend on the above addresses as they could end up different once both you and we get into your site to migrate/reorganize it. Another big difference you’ll note in the addresses above — LiveWhale allows for multiple folder levels within your site.

Filed Under

One person has made the whale happy; will you?(Go ahead, make a comment…)