We’ve just launched a new beta version of the corporate website site search engine which will in the coming weeks replace the existing site search.
The new system is powered by Google Site Search – a version of the search engine that restricts results to a given set of pages. Currently it is available for site-wide searches before we extend it to power our main course search engine.
Try it out now and provide us with some feedback with how you find it.
As I said previously, the decision to move news to WordPress seems a straightforward one – it’s used by millions of websites to serve up News, including our own faculty and department websites – but our key justification for the migration, to provide story functionality, isn’t something that WordPress does out of the box so over the last few months we’ve developed something from scratch.
While I’d love to take credit for everything, my involvement was mostly limited to the initial proof of concept and vague arm-waving spec-changing suggestions for how it should work and look. Such is the power of a manager.
WordPress has come a long way since it’s blogging roots and now has some powerful features that can be used to tailor the system to a wide range information. Custom Post Types were first introduced in version 3.0 and provide a way of storing structured information without having to create additional database tables. WordPress itself uses CPT for posts, pages, attachments (e.g. images) and menus but the possibilities for extensions are endless. Plugins often make use of CPTs to implement things like events listings, movie reviews and product catalogues but anything can be put in them and you get all the functionality that WordPress posts or pages have for free.
We have a really basic Story custom post type containing – as a minimum – just a title, image and a paragraph introduction:
Stories and Posts are linked together with a many-to-many mapping using jQuery Tokeninput to make it easy to select which story a post should be related to.
Viewing a story triggers a custom template in our theme that is used to render the page. The template first displays the story title, image and content then looks for all linked posts and outputs them to the page, newest first.
We’ve tried to keep the Story custom post type simple enough that it can be used flexibly in lots of different ways. By specifying just a title, image and content, stories can work as a lightweight wrapper for related posts. They’re not designed to replace a full website – for example the Short Story Prize story still links to the Prize’s standalone website – but act as a focal point for the latest news on a subject.
WordPress mints permalinks from the title on initial publication and only change if forced to do so after that so links to stories will still work even if the introductory text changes.
Stories can work as a live blog by streamlining the process of getting content online – once a story is set up, say for something like a Graduation ceremony – it’s a simple matter of clicking Add Post to Story in the WordPress admin bar and bashing out a quick update, or pasting in a link to a video, tweet or photo:
Custom post types are the key to extending WordPress’ capabilities by managing structured content but there are other features that allow us to expose this information in new ways. Next time we’ll be looking at how our design is able to make the most of our rich media content.
Last time I introduced the new Edge Hill News website and this time I’ll introduce one of the major new features.
News published through our site often starts life as a press release posted online. Typically it’s a few hundred words accompanied by a photo and calls to action at the bottom telling the reader where to find more information or how to get in touch. These articles have a reasonable half life – linked to from the news website; syndicated across to department websites; sometimes featured on the homepage – and live on in the news archive for search engines to find.
Sometimes, though, we need articles to continue to run and with our old system this involved a bit of a hack – taking an existing article, updating it with the latest details and republishing it to get it to the top of the pile. This never seemed like the best thing to do, but it’s not uncommon for news websites to operate in this way.
Then ITV News broke the mold with their March 2012 redesign. Design agency Made By Many threw away all the preconceived ideas of traditional news websites and moved to a stream of news design – the homepage constantly updating with the latest updates.
What got me interested wasn’t how the homepage implemented the stream idea – unless you’re a regular user I find it a little hard to follow – but how it works with evolving news stories.
Let’s look at one of this morning’s headlines – the news that Morrisons is to begin online delivery via Ocado. On the BBC News website they published a story early morning and I first read a version of their story published at 07:54:
But refreshing the page an hour later adds some new information:
Can you spot the differences?
As someone who read the article at 8am I have to scan through the whole thing just to find an extra 30 words.
The ITV News site handles things completely differently. Their stream of news updates clearly show evolving stories. Just like a blog where posts are shown in reverse chronological order we can see the latest news at the very top:#
Just like the BBC News site, the latest take on the story is how the Ocado share price has jumped 40% but this time it’s clearly marked as being updated 42 minutes ago. In this instance they beat the BBC to it – that update was added 36 minutes ahead of Auntie.
This is a really simple example but the approach scales to much bigger stories too where there is scope to show off the story in different ways. Below is parts of their story on Google’s appearance before the Commons Public Accounts Committee:
I’ve included only a selection of types of update from the full story:
You can read more about the ITV News design in a blog post by Made by Many and Martin Belam (née Currybet) has written a couple of times about the site.
There appeared to me to be many possibilities for this style of news publishing at Edge Hill and it could solve some problems we have with the old site.
During the autumn term we discussed the idea with colleagues in Corporate Communications and after mistakenly assuming that the ITV News website was built in WordPress claimed that it would be possible for us to do something similar.
After realising that ITV News isn’t a WordPress site and that no one appears to have done anything similar in WordPress we set about building a proof of concept. This gave us enough to justify migrating the news site to a new platform and has been the key part of the development.
With the site only live for a few weeks, the Press Office are just beginning to make use of WordPress stories, but you can see them in action on pages about the Short Story Prize, Edge Hill’s involvement in Liverpool Sound City and the new £16 million Creative Edge development.
Personally I’m looking forward to seeing, watching, hearing and reading the great stories has to tell over the coming months, whether that’s awards, new buildings or graduation ceremonies.
Next time we’ll go into more detail about how stories were built in WordPress.
It’s a little over five years since our last major redevelopment of the Edge Hill news website when it moved from a classic ASP application into Symfony with lots of new functionality. In that time it’s been well used (and abused) with 1337 new articles plus an archive of 537 articles dating back to July 2001 imported across. News gets piped around the website with RSS feeds and machine tags to populate the homepage, department websites and various other places – it’s a bit string-and-tape, but it’s worked pretty well!
Two years ago we began moving some websites to WordPress in order to devolve control of content and structure to Faculties and Departments. WordPress has proved itself a very capable content management system, but more importantly it is now a solid web development framework. It has moved beyond its blogging origins and has handled everything we’ve thrown its way.
Until now we hadn’t migrated any of our “applications” (online prospectus, news, events, jobs etc) to WordPress as the cost of re-writing systems outweighed the benefit but our latest project sees us make the move with a brand new News website.
While news might seem like an obvious thing to move to WordPress there were still a number of significant challenges we had to overcome in order to make the move. We also had a list of requirements from colleagues in Corporate Communications that we needed to tick off and some ideas of our own to make our news website more than “just another WordPress site”.
Over the next week or so we’ll be blogging about how we built the site and some of the new features.
If you work in Higher Ed Web Design you may be interested in hearing us talk about our use of WordPress at IWMW 2013 next month. Sign up for workshop session A7 – “WordPress: Beyond Blogging“!
Edd Sowden’s recently released browser matrix stats shows some fascinating patterns in usage for GOV.UK and the tool has also been made available on GitHub and for anyone to use. So what does it show for the Edge Hill website?
The most striking thing to me is the upgrade cycle for Chrome. With a 7 day bucket size, the matrix shows we have two new Chrome releases showing just how quickly the automatic update system is able to push out versions.
Compare that to how Internet Explorer updates happen at an almost glacial pace:
I’ve not incorrectly included “Chrome 7” in those stats – that’s there because we have Chrome Frame installed on Edge Hill machines.
Browser Matrix seems able to visualise data in some ways that Google Analytics alone doesn’t – give it a try and share what you find!
One of the first projects in my new job here at Edge Hill was JISC’s XCRI-CAP. Where would we be without acronyms? I was thoroughly pleased to have some new ones. Here’s the definitions:
JISC’s goal with XCRI-CAP is to share course information with the organisations who publish it, such as hotcourses.com.
We’re making a feed for our Health CPD courses in the XCRI format so prospective students can find the course they’re looking for.
We moved all our health courses onto WordPress – our CMS (Content Management System) for most of our course information now. It was a good clean break, as we got to redesign the information’s structure to fit the XCRI specification. With the health courses in the CMS, we made the XCRI feed. It passes the course information to the feed aggregators so they can share the information.
Here’s a little information about each phase:
This involved translating the old database content into the new xcri fields, where possible, and retaining the other useful information. We used the opportunity to strip out any useless information.
This was the ‘get out your spreadsheet and be very thorough’ phase. It was pretty important because the information had to be labelled right so websites could understand it and use it properly.
We continued to the content management system…
We actually extended WordPress, the CMS we use for most of our courses, by making a plugin that saves the health CPD modules. WordPress makes it fairly easy to add new functionality by providing hooks you can latch onto to adapt the software – basically slots to inject your customisations in.
Using WordPress’s custom post types we added courses and presentations to the CMS, and customised the admin area with the right input boxes. A presentation is a living instance of a course – for example, on the Tissue Viability course the Feb 2012 intake and July 2012 intake are different presentations.
WordPress makes it quite easy to add functionality by using existing plugins. We wanted more precise control over the admin page, so we did some of the building ourselves.
Once the CMS was done we transferred the course information into it.
We made a page template that displays an individual course’s information.
We’ve still got some work to do on the template, like adding side navigation that links to similar courses.
We built an example feed that holds dummy information first. We passed this through the Xcri 1.2 validator to make sure it was right. Eventually it stopped telling us we had made massive human errors, so the feed was right. Here’s the static version:
We made the real feed by passing the course information into this template from database.
And that’s where we are so far. Its nearly finished, and hopefully will make it much easier for people to find the right course.
Recently I wrote about installing PHP 5.2 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, then again about how I also got PHP 5.2 working on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise in the same way. Well now I’m trying to get OCI8 working in this environment and there were a couple of obstacles.
Firstly, an updated package somewhere along the line broke my fix to libtool.m4. So that needed fixing with:
sudo mv /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4.bak
cat /usr/share/aclocal/lt~obsolete.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/ltoptions.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/ltsugar.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/ltversion.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4.bak | sudo tee -a /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4
Then you need to follow the manual OCI8 installation method the bit your after starts: “For a manual install, download the PECL OCI8 package”.
Once you get to the following command:
phpize
It’s time to fix things up. The libtool in the package just won’t work when you go to run make. So remove it and link to your local version.
sudo rm ./libtool
sudo ln -s `which libtool` ./libtool
Now you can carry on with the instructions. You may get a few warning messages, but everything should be fine.
Hope that helps,
Steve
As part of a move to virtualise our last remaining physical servers and build more scaling capability and resilience into our web serving infrastructure we have a specific need to run a couple of legacy apps on PHP 5.2.x. In the future when we’ve managed to fit in testing a bug fixes we’ll have these apps running on PHP 5.3, or even 5.4, but for now this need exists.
We have templates for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and since this is the middle ground between when PHP 5.2 was last shipped with Ubuntu in 8.04 LTS, and the latest and greatest 12.04 LTS I figured it’d be more secure, efficient and easier to implement it there!
Thankfully most of the work has been done for me.. Randy Fay shows how to run Karmic’s PHP 5.2 on Lucid but Sergius14 suggested pinning PHP 5.2 to the Hardy versions and I tend to agree with the reason. I want the latest security patches bundled in!
So taking Randy’s /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list and /etc/apt/preferences.d/php file and changing karmic to hardy in the file name and file contents gets us up and running. See the attached files to see what we’re running, if you use these files remove the .txt suffix from the file name.
Because we’re now looking at double the amount of packages, apt is going to complain, we need to increase it’s cache. If you don’t you’ll get an error when you run sudo apt-get update so, following the fine instructions on how to increase your apt cache limit we’ll do this as a one liner:
echo 'APT::Cache-Limit "100000000";' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf
Next let’s update and install libapache2-mod-php5 to pull in PHP5, Apache2 and the basics.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
Check it’s working by visiting the ip of the server in a web browser.
http://youripaddress/
To check PHP’s working we’ll create a new file calling the phpinfo() function.
echo -e '' | sudo tee /var/www/phpinfo.php
Check http://youripaddress/phpinfo.php to ensure PHP is installed and correctly running. If your browser tries to download a file, you might need to restart Apache to enable PHP.
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Now we need APC (There’s a good article on Wikipedia about PHP accelerators, of which APC is one). The php-apc package installable from APT has some unmet dependencies because we’re using Hardy’s packages. We can circumvent that by installing it via PECL instead.
This route isn’t without a few complications because we’re using Hardy’s PHP5.2 some files aren’t in the right places, or automatically included with dependencies.
I added to Randy’s /etc/apt/preferences.d/php the following to get the PHP5 dev files for PECL to run.
Package: php5-dev
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 991
Now we’ll get php5-cli, php5-dev and php-pear (which includes PECL), we’ll update the PECL channel whilst we’re there and then try to install APC with PECL.
sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-dev php-pear
sudo pecl channel-update pecl.php.net
sudo pecl install apc
AGH!
Errors! As I said before, some files like libtool.m4 and ltmain.sh are in the wrong places and need to be symlinked.
sudo ln -s /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4 /usr/share/libtool/libtool.m4
sudo ln -s /usr/share/libtool/config/ltmain.sh /usr/share/libtool/ltmain.sh
libtool.m4 is also missing a few bits since libtool.m4 has been broken down into multiple files so we need to concatenate them back together and append to libtool.m4:
cat /usr/share/aclocal/lt~obsolete.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/ltoptions.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/ltsugar.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/ltversion.m4 | sudo tee -a /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4
We also have a missing pcre.h header file. To get that we need libpcre3-dev.
sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev
This should be it, so lets use PECL to download, compile and install APC (accept all the defaults), enable it in the php.ini and restart Apache.
sudo pecl install apc
echo -e '\n\nextension=apc.so' | sudo tee -a /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Now it’s time go back and check http://youripaddress/phpinfo.php to see if APC is enabled!
Congratulations if you’ve read this far and if it helped!
We’re currently looking at a project which involves maps of the Ormskirk campus which – if you read my 125 by 125 blog – I find quite exciting. Maps are important for lots of things the University yet we’ve never had very good maps. We have access to lots of them, but nothing that’s quite suitable.
For example, our own campus map has all the buildings labelled and is pretty up to date but it’s not to scale or plotted against a real grid system.
We also have a 3D drawing of campus which is used in the prospectus and online in the interactive campus map. It looks nice but again it’s not accurate enough for plotting real positions and it’s a pain to keep up to date.
Google Maps is to scale but missing lots of buildings and some websites are moving away from it to other services because they’ve started charging for heavy users, not something I think they’d do to us but they could add advertising:
Microsoft’s Bing is even worse:
The Ordnance Survey have released some of their data, and we also have access to it through Digimap, but questions remain over licencing and the frequency of updates.
We can do better than this by building on what has already been done by OpenStreetMap.
I’ve mentioned OpenStreetMap several times before going back three years:
[Mapumental’s] base mapping layer is from OpenStreetMap – a project to create a free (as in beer and speech) map similar to the ones available from Google Maps, or even from the OS. It’s created by volunteers who go out with GPS and plot the routes online. Almost all major roads are on there already and certain areas have excellent quality coverage – take a look at South Liverpool for an example of how good it can get.
The quality of mapping on OSM for Edge Hill hasn’t been great – in the past I’ve taken the odd GPS track or paths around campus and added them but generally it’s been pretty poor as you can see from this recent capture:
Recently though, the quality of aerial imagery available in the OSM editor has vastly improved making tracing over the campus a viable option where it hadn’t been before (buildings going back as far as the Faculty of Health were missing from Yahoo!’s images). A few hours work has resulted in a much more complete map of campus:
As I write it’s still not perfect but all the buildings are plotted along with roads, footpaths and many of the facilities we have on campus like cafes and shops. OpenStreetMap allows anyone to make corrections and add missing features which will help keep it up to date.
Now that we have an up to date base map we’ll be looking at ways we can make use of it in some exciting forthcoming projects which I hope we’ll be blogging about soon!
The UK’s implementation of EU Cookie regulations come into force this Saturday and the web design world is frantically trying to work out what to do! Firstly a bit of background into cookies and why we are where we are!
Cookies make the web go round – they’re how a website remembers who you are so you don’t have to remind it every time you load a page; they allow websites to personalise what you see; they make online shopping possible by remembering what’s in your shopping basket and they allow website owners to track the performance of sites to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Suffice to say without cookies the web would be a sorry place.
But they also have the potential to be abused. They can reduce your privacy on the web by tracking what you do on the web. By linking information together it could be possible for sites to build up a detailed profile of your online behaviour and the EU decided to act to better protect users’ privacy.
The UK’s implementation of the EU regulations is being enforced by the ICO who have issued guidance but things are never that simple! There isn’t – so far – an accepted “right” solution to compliance. The ICO themselves have taken quite a hardline approach – a bar across the top of every page asking for permission to set cookies. When this launched it had a devastating affect on their ability to analyse site usage which is vital if you’re going to build good websites.
BT and the BBC take a bit more of an opt-out approach by telling site visitors they will receive cookies unless they say otherwise.
These show the first time a visitor comes to the site and in BT’s case disappears after 10 seconds – much less off-putting and probably clearer than a simple “Do you want cookies?” prompt, but is it enough to satisfy the ICO? Only time will tell!
While the implied consent may still be unknown one thing that is generally agreed is that providing the user with more information in a form that they can understand is a Good Thing™ so that’s where we’ve started.
[I should note much of what we’ve implemented so far is based on a very pragmatic post by James Cridland of Media UK]
As James says in his post #3 is the most contentious:
ICO is primarily concerned with personal information and personal data – and I’m registered under the Data Protection Act and take personal data very seriously. However, Google Analytics and AdSense cookies, etc, are anonymous, and will only ever contain personal information if you deliberately log in to Google services (and even then Google claims not to link Analytics or AdSense with your Google account anyway). The same goes for Twitter and Facebook too. And the ICO go out of their way to say, in their advice: Although the Information Commissioner cannot completely exclude the possibility of formal action in any area, it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given to focusing on uses of cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals. Provided clear information is given about their activities we are highly unlikely to prioritise first party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action.
What does this look like? The cookie page is linked to from the header and footer of every page:
The Learning Edge landing page is a bit more explicit about how it makes use of cookies:
Depending on feedback from our users and others in the sector we may roll out some form of non-interrupting information box along the same lines as the BBC’s approach. We have also done some work on a cookie level chooser like BT have but the technical implementation across multiple in-house and third party systems is non-trivial.
If you have any feedback or questions about Edge Hill’s approach to cookie legislation compliance please leave a comment or get in touch and I’m sure there will be more changes to come!