Release Notes

New features

Academic Program Content Type

We developed an Academic Program content type in order to consistently display and showcase all academic programs across the university. Academic program data was submitted by schools and colleges and we have imported it into Sitefinity for use. In its first iteration, the widget offers a simple list template, a card template, and a detailed template.

Sitefinity Performance Improvements

In November 2018, we completed a performance audit on our Sitefinity application and the supporting servers and infrastructure. Improvements will be ongoing for the next few months. Performance is expected to steadily improve as we implement additional recommendations from our vendor, Blue Modus. 

This month we are implementing the following:

Diagnostics Module

Additional caching will be implemented site-wide through a variety of settings.

Network Analysis

A network analysis is underway between our partner Blue Modus and our own OIT Networking team. 

Improvements

Horizontal Navigation template

The top navigation has two available templates, “Priority Plus”, and “Horizontal”. The horizontal template has been heavily revised to be both more accessible and more user friendly. The horizontal template now allows multiple levels of fly out and the top level landing pages can be linked to as a separate action. In addition, keyboard accessibility was added for visitors to navigate without a mouse.

Document file attachment on Event widget

We have added the ability to attach a document to an event such as a flyer or additional information.

Font Awesome Icon Library Updated to 5.6

The Font Awesome Icon Library has been updated to 5.6.1. As a result, there are new icons available in the Featured Tabs widget. You can add icons into your content blocks as well using this method: https://www.ucdenver.edu/atweb/learnsitefinity/content/font-awesome

FAQ Item Widget

The FAQ Group Widget is convenient in that it shows all questions from a particular FAQ list, however, it did not allow site builders to rearrange questions. We have added the FAQ Item widget which allows site builders to select and rearrange questions manually. Neither of these widgets provides an ideal editing experience so we also started to wireframe a custom solution for future development.

Research and Creative Projects Content Type

We have added the ability to add an image, video or embed a video to the Research and Creative Projects content type. The widget templates have been updated to display the associated media.

Link Styling in Header Tags (H1-H6)

Originally, we used the standard blue link color when a heading (H1-H6) contained a link. Feedback from our site builders indicated that this color was not visually attractive so we have changed the link color to black.

Featured Tabs Widget

In response to feedback received from our site builders, we have changed the Featured Tabs widget to display text on mobile screen sizes in addition to the icon previously shown.  This advances the accessibility and usability of this widget on a great number of screen sizes.

Server Endpoints

We have added unique addresses for each of our Sitefinity servers. This allows us to monitor them individually and ensures that each one is performing well.

CSS Flexbox for Research and Creative Projects

We have revised the code responsible for displaying Research and Creative Projects to use more modern CSS.

Accessibility updates

New Content on @Web

We have extended the content in the accessibility section of @Web to be more useful to our site editors. 

Ambiguous linked text for RSS Reader

Ambiguous linked text (e.g. read more, learn more, full story, download, etc), offer little value to those using screen readers. To resolve this, we added “aria-labelled by” and ID's to these type of links so that screen readers will read the ambiguous text + the title of the widget item.

Aria updates to the ‘Ankle’

Removed unnecessary aria-label and aria-labelled by in the address area.

Fixed

Research and Creative Projects date fields

The start and end date fields on the Research and Creative Projects editing form were out of sequential order. The form has been revised to correct this issue.

Research and Creative Projects label missing spaces on edit form

The Research and Creative Project editing interface has been updated to use friendlier language.

Events Widget

In the event tile template, the display has been revised to allow longer event names to appear without overlapping the horizontal rule.

Research and Creative Projects pagination position

The display templates for Research and Creative Projects have been revised to allow the the content to wrap underneath the widget.

Enhanced Card Widget - Multiple Images

The Enhanced Card content type was allowing people to select multiple images, this caused certain display templates to visually break. The templates have been revised to limit the number of images that will be displayed.

Image library selection issue

The known issue discussed last month concerning the image library drop down (https://www.ucdenver.edu/atweb/support/current-workarounds/images-bug) has been resolved using a custom code solution from our vendor, Progress.

Accordion Side Navigation

Certain long page titles were displaying poorly in the Accordion Side Navigation template. The template has been revised to accommodate longer page titles.

Groundwork for future improvements

WAC Presentations

This month we presented multiple items to the Web Advisory Committee. We have added new work to our project backlog in response to the feedback we have received.

• Accessible Hero Sideshow/Carousels: The WAC community expressed great interest in an accessible slideshow to feature news, priority content and other important information. This feedback will likely result in the development of multiple features over time.
• Widget Content Search: We presented a few options to the WAC community including tag filtering, which is available today in Sitefinity. The community expressed the most interest in a type-in keyword search/filter that could be applied to a variety of widgets including Academic Program, Research and creative Projects, People, Events, News etc. In the first iteration, we will likely select one widget to use with the filter.
• “Courses Taught” field for People Content Type: The WAC community would like to have courses associated with the People content type on the website. However, due to certain complexities with the course data, this can not be accomplished dynamically.  The WAC community decided that the addition of a Rich HTML field called “Courses Taught” to the People content type and display templates would fill this need temporarily.

Sticky Sessions

We are exploring sticky sessions on the load balancers in an effort to improve editing performance for our site builders.

SiteShield Preview

We are exploring a Sitefinity feature that would allow our site builders to send a preview of a site in build mode without releasing it to the public.

Hero Video Accessibility

There is room to improve upon the accessibility of the hero video widget by providing the site visitor with video controls, however this poses display challenges with the current hero video widget design. We are evaluating our alternatives to improve the experience of the widget for all audiences.

Assessment of Sitefinity 11.2

OIT is evaluating the next version of Sitefinity before upgrading the website. This allows us to inform our builders about any changes to the building experience.

NewEd Degree Finder Funded and Underway

The NewEd degree finder tool has been funded! The data we collected in November will be used to populate these widgets and let them work on our licensed websites.

Padding “breathing room” Widget

The site builder community has expressed interest in a way to add breathing room in between content in certain situations. In response, OIT has planned a new widget that will allow the site builder to select from a list of preset heights. We anticipate the development of this widget in February/March 2019.

Helvetica Neue Web Font

The university has purchased the web license for the Helvetica Neue font. In February/March, we anticipate adding this to the Sitefinity website to more closely align with the university brand.

FAQ phase two brainstorming

While we have released an additional widget that will allow site builders to custom sort FAQ questions (FAQ Item), we believe we can provide a better experience by customizing the editing experience. We will be documenting this idea and will bring it to the Web Advisory Committee.

Image “Thumbnail” Gallery revisions

The Image Gallery widget offers a “Thumbnail” template which does not quite meet our needs. We will rewrite this template to show greater numbers of photos more gracefully.

Known Issues

Be sure to check out https://www.ucdenver.edu/atweb/support/current-workarounds for the latest on known issues.

CTA, Testimonial, and Enhanced Card changing title of the page

If a single item of content is specifically selected, it will change the title of the page. There is a work around to avoid this issue, please see https://www.ucdenver.edu/atweb/support/current-workarounds/reusable-content-type-bug

New site launches

College of Engineering launched January 22, 2019: https://engineering.ucdenver.edu/