Source Upgrade

BY David McKelvey

I spent a few good hours upgrading the Source on Thursday. When it was first built, it hadn’t used our site-wide templating function and it was using the Newsroom’s story page to show it’s story content. Here are some of the changes that were made:

Built-in story page

When the Source was built, it was set to use the Newsroom’s story page to display its story content. Showing the stories in the Newsroom wasn’t too odd, in that both streams of content come from PubCom PR, but it made for a very difficult time sorting out the analytics to assess how successful some stories were in relation to others. Now having its own makes that a breeze.

Templating engine

The Source was built as a one-off custom site and so didn’t use our site-wide templating engine. I re-built the pages to be far more consistent and use the engine (as much as reasonable) so that from now on, when we make a change to the global footer or styles, they come through to the Source too. (It also re-encapsulated things like the right-hand links to be in a single file, rather than in each page’s source.)

Dates, dates everywhere

Somehow we built the Newsroom and the Source with scarcely a date anywhere. Now, throughout the Source, we’ve got dates on all the story content to make sure that there’s some temporal context.

Archives are now campus

We have three sub-sections: announcements, community and now campus. Before campus was called archive, and that didn’t make sense, since the other two are just as much an archive as campus. We still need to get the ability to move back farther into time with each of these into the source, so that’s still to do.

Top story link

In order to work the top story self-referential linking, PR would have to write the story, save it, get the id number of the story (for the link) and then re-edit the story to paste that into the story summary. I’ve added the link to the template now, so all they have to do is hit save.

Happy reading!