Beyond Infinity with Plone 5 - Are We There Yet?
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A story of how University of Jyväskylä is doing a big website renewal, including challenges like organizational restructure, new brand, new theme, new intranet, new search engine and migration to new Plone 5.
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Beyond Infinity with Plone 5 - Are We There Yet?
- 1. BEYOND INFINITY WITH PLONE 5 - ARE WE THERE YET? RIKUPEKKA OKSANEN - PLONE CONFERENCE 2017
- 2. THIS TALK IS ABOUT WEBSITES ▸ In 2016 University of Jyväskylä started a massive website renewal process - upgrading from Plone 4 to Plone 5, designing a new brand and new theme and changing to a new organizational structure. ▸ In my presentation last year I tried to anticipate the challenges we would face and how Plone 5 could help us. ▸ Now it's time to look back (and forward) on how things went, where we are and what we could learn from the experience. ▸ This is about Plone 5, theming, Mosaic, agile, and people.
- 3. PREVIOUSLY, IN PLONE CONFERENCE 2016 ▸ https://2017.ploneconf.org/ Ploneconf2016/talks/to-infinity-and- beyond-with-plone-5 ▸ /rioksane/to- infinity-and-beyond-with-plone-5 ▸ https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=XmWbUFXaV3A
- 4. WHO, ME? ▸ Rikupekka Oksanen rioksane@jyu.fi ▸ Twitter: @rikupekka ▸ Plone-user/site builder/support/trainer/ project manager since 2004
- 5. LET ME TELL YOU A STORY... ▸ Of hard-working heroes, occasional bureaucratic villains(?), massive challenges, last-minute surprises, monster-sized bugs and perseverance... ▸ ...and website content. Lots of it!
- 6. IN THE LAND OF FINLAND NEAR NORTH POLE... ▸ Year 2017, when it rained. Jyväskylä
- 7. UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ ▸ A significant multi-discipline research university and an expert in education ▸ https://www.jyu.fi/en/university ▸ 15 000 students, 2600 staff
- 8. PLONE AND UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ ▸ Using Plone since 2004 ▸ 7 (now 6) faculties, several departmental sites, separate institute sites ▸ Separate site for students and applicants ▸ About 90 Plone instances - of many are customised applications (such as video portal, payment services, study material portals etc.)
- 9. WWW.JYU.FI
- 10. STATS AT WWW.JYU.FI MAIN WEBSITE ▸ Pageviews 1 700 000/month ▸ Visitors 200 000/month ▸ Content: approx 100 000 pages, portals, forms. ▸ Another 100 000 of files and images. ▸ Hundreds of content editors all around the university
- 11. WEBSITE RENEWAL IN 2016-2017 - ASPECTS ▸New organisational structure 1.1.2017 ▸New brand #JYUnity #JYUnique ▸New theme ▸New intranet (for staff) ▸New search engine ▸And Plone 5 everywhere
- 12. CHALLENGES AHEAD ▸ Content editors: new Plone version and theme, new org. structure, actually have to delete something ▸ Project management and support: communication, managing expectations, new guides, trainings ▸ Developers: Plone 5 or 5.1 beta, migrations, new theme, better search, smooth releases, tools for content editors (new portals with Mosaic)
- 13. OUR HEROES
- 14. UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS UNIT ▸ Content managers; responsible for brand, intranet (and the whole renewal)
- 15. CONTENT EDITORS ▸ All around faculties and departments, going through all content and learning new structure and Plone 5 version
- 16. NPC: AD AGENCY ▸ Designing new brand and new theme
- 17. PLONE DEVELOPMENT TEAM ▸ Maintaining the old, while creating new: migrations, theme, search, support and training
- 18. VILLAINS? ▸ "Change Approval Committee"?
- 20. NEW ORG STRUCTURE ▸ Combining faculties and departments ▸ Moving people from faculties under administration (University Services -unit) ▸ New responsibilities, as website content editors were given to new people
- 21. ONE (GOOD) THING WE DIDN'T ACCOUNT FOR ▸ Some faculties and departments actually wanted to "start over" with content ▸ So it wasn't just content migration to the old stuff ▸ It slows down the process, but eventually will enhance content quality ▸ Right now: lasta 4 faculties under construction in preview- sites, with only partially migrated content
- 22. NEW PEOPLE DOING NEW STUFF ▸ Previously, the people responsible for updating Plone content were stationed under departments (amanuensis, secretaries, planning officers) ▸ In 2017
- 23. TO PLONE 5 ▸ Website renewal could have been done on Plone 4 ▸ But upgrading to Plone 5 seemed like future-proof option ▸ This decision was done by IT Services and Plone team - it was a technical aspect no one questioned.
- 24. OUR PLAN A YEAR AGO...
- 25. OUR PLAN A YEAR AGO...
- 26. LAUGHING
- 27. WINTER 2017 ▸ First new faculty site https://www.jyu.fi/hytk was released in 3rd January 2017, as planned with migrated content and new theme ▸ Problems: ▸ Caching - changes didn't update immediately ▸ Performance - slow ▸ Old site still visible - broken links, wrong content, search problems ▸ Shock about the new theme
- 29. WINTER 2017 ▸ Solutions: ▸ Tweaking theme ▸ Fixing issues (cache, performance) ▸ Training, Plone 5 guides ▸ Lots of communication ▸ Forming www-editor -groups for new faculties
- 30. SPRING 2017 ▸ In March 2017 another faculty https://www.jyu.fi/edupsy was released ▸ Release was much smoother than the previous one ▸ In April a new intranet site was partially released - the "helpcenter" for staff: https://uno.jyu.fi/helpcenter ▸ Other new Plone 5 sites also released ▸ Problems: old faculty sites were still visible in searches
- 31. SUMMER 2017 ▸ Releasing more smaller Plone sites, creating preview-sites for another faculties and departments ▸ Plone Midsummersprint in July 2017 ▸ https://www.coactivate.org/projects/midsummer- sprint-2017 ▸ Other Plone development and releases ▸ In August: prioritisation for autumn: main website released next (before intranet, other, faculties etc.)
- 32. SEPTEMBER 2017 ▸ In August: preparing to release www.jyu.fi main pages come new semester (four main portals) ▸ Last minute changes to theme, but also approval from new rector ▸ Theme was ready, cotent almost ▸ September 7th 2017: Release of www.jyu.fi main website
- 33. Huge visual navigation, no navigation bar, video embed
- 34. Campus news and events, statement of the schools philosophy
- 35. More news, alumni in the news
- 36. Huge social media integration tile Footer with links
- 37. AND ▸ We start to get feedback...
- 38. ▸ HELL BREAKS LOOSE!
- 39. ▸ HELL BREAKS LOOSE!
- 41. EXAMPLE FEEDBACK 1 ▸ "Email does not work!" ▸ "Too modern" ▸ "Too big images" ▸ "Just PR material and empty slogans" ▸ "Cannot find anything" ▸ "€%&*###&%!!"
- 42. EXAMPLE FEEDBACK 2 ▸ "Men are researchers, studying, or leaders, women are just a**es" ▸ Do not underestimate the power of visual message of huge images... ▸ Slow, huge images
- 43. GATHERING FEEDBACK ▸ We have Plone forms (fi/en) for feedback ▸ First couple of days, about 50 messages ▸ In a month, 150 (in our case, quite a lot) ▸ Bad: 75%, OK: 15%, Good: 10% ▸ We added selection on role of the person giving feedback, resulting: ▸ Staff: 75%, Student: 15%, External audience: 10%
- 44. CONTENT IS KING ▸ You remember this https://xkcd.com/773/ comic?
- 46. Letter from the president Letter from the president
- 47. Campus news and events, statement of the schools philosophy
- 49. Full name of the school! Campus map!
- 50. SERIOUSLY ▸ New main website is aimed first and foremost to external audiences - that should have been better communicated to staff members ▸ Theme is radically different to the old one. Too radically? ▸ Feedback on search results was really useful - deleted old content, improved Google Search results. ▸ Generally, when you renew something, people start giving feedback also on issues that were already there before the renewal.
- 51. THEME AND THE NEW BRAND
- 52. DESIGN HELL? ▸ Oatmeal comic: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell ▸ Be warned.
- 57. AND so on...
- 58. DESIGN WELL ▸ Note: not sayin' this happened at our university, just sayin' ▸ The theme was approved in 2016 by high level people, but after actually releasing the first faculty site, some backlash appeared. ▸ After that, many changes this way and that - a challenge to devs ▸ Next time: better documentation on what was decided ▸ However, overall the finished website looks very similar to the theme ad agency originally designed
- 59. WEBDESIGN AND LOREM IPSUM ▸ Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet ▸ Beautiful!
- 60. LOREM IPSUM SUCKS (IN FINLAND AT LEAST) ▸ https://www.jyu.fi
- 61. OLD FRONTPAGE
- 62. §
- 63. ADAPTING THE NEW THEME TO PLONE 5 ▸ We got a new whole theme bundle (html, css, javascript) from the ad agency. The idea was that we could use it as it is. ▸ The new theme was run through university administration and it was accepted ▸ The first version of Plone adapted theme used the theme bundle as it was, with only small tweaks. ▸ But as it quite often happens, when you actually release something, changes started coming. ▸ We ended up to doing all the templates again for ourselves -> there was a big amount of work ▸ But - this way all the elements were created to be renewable especially mosaic theme fragments (carousels, news items tiles, feed carousels, social media embed tiles etc.)
- 64. ON EDITING MAIN WEBSITE ▸ Mosaic makes it easy, yet powerful ▸ Customised tiles
- 65. FALLBACK DIRECTOR AND VARNISH ▸ Using a tool called Fallback Director with Varnish we still can have content under same domain coming from old or new Plone site, example: ▸ https://www.jyu.fi/erillis - old site ▸ https://www.jyu.fi/fi/palvelut - new site ▸ Even logging in works well ▸ This allows us to release content in smaller pieces - that's agile!
- 66. INTRANET ▸ One portal for all staff in Plone ▸ Departmental intranets in Plone here and there ...or no departmental intranets or anything ▸ IP-restriction for viewing (not a very good idea) ▸ Plone Ldap problem
- 67. OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2017 ▸ Release of Intranet main portal in week 43 (waiting for administration approval) -> NEW priorities -> Intranet portal will be released AFTER all faculty sites ▸ Moving from Google Search Appliance to Solr ▸ Helping faculties to publish their sites ▸ Creating new dexterity type and mosaic layout for project pages
- 68. NEXT: SEARCH ENGINGE ▸ From Google Search Appliance to Solr
- 69. VERSION BETA? ▸ Plone 5 has been robust ▸ In our main website we have been running:
- 71. LESSONS LEARNED - PEOPLE ▸ Website renewals should be appropriately resourced - this time there was no actual project in place either in university communications or IT services or in departments ▸ More people on board would have been nice ▸ There was a project for brand renewal and theme design, though ▸ However, while change is hard, it also in some level energised people - different day, different stuff :)
- 72. LESSONS LEARNED - COMMUNICATION ▸ We did have: ▸ Internally public preview-sites throughout the year ▸ We did seminars for content editors ▸ Public pages for describing how the renewal goes ▸ Trainings for staff ▸ Some email info ▸ But it is not enough - only after you release something the truth comes out. So more information the better! ▸ Using Flowdock chat system to actively communicate between IT and communications unit and Ad agency
- 73. LESSONS LEARNED - PRIORITIES ▸ Other projects or development needs in parallel ▸ Prioritising stuff makes it easier to pull through ▸ We had a "website renewal steering group" which had (almost) enough authority to put things in order ▸ Important to show information on what is decided about the priorities
- 74. LESSONS LEARNED - N'SYNC ▸ To release a departmental site we need synchronised action from each three: the content editors, university communications and development team ▸ Often we push some preview-site further by doing more migrations, installing add-ons, customising theme ▸ Parallel action is needed, but maybe not the most efficient way ▸ Some push from the administration would be good?
- 75. LESSONS LEARNED - PLONE 5 ▸ Editing: usually well received by content editors ▸ Toolbar is nice, UI is pretty and clean ▸ Mosaic features ▸ Missing features from Plone 4? Nope. Undo maybe. ▸ Basic trainings are easy: Simple editing can be teached in 15 minutes, managing content in 2 hours ▸ Overall Plone 5 has been a good thing in the renewal process
- 76. LESSONS LEARNED - MOSAIC ▸ Truly a powerful tool - drag'n drop is a blast ▸ Customised "theme fragments", e.g. RSS-feed carousel, hero image carousel, social media integration - much used ▸ Different pre-defined layouts available: department page, faculty page, document page ▸ People are adopting Mosaic view quite fast ▸ Mosaic pages are now actively updated, compared to Plone 4.3 with Portal View add on
- 77. LESSONS LEARNED - OTHER NOTES ▸ New sites are technically fast, but portals and frontpages are very visual and content heavy - designed that way ▸ Caching problems - faster content or actual content? ▸ Internet Explorer still sucks :(
- 80. DEMO ▸ Seeing is believing ▸ Mosaic everywhere ▸ University main page Mosaic ▸ Department main page Mosaic ▸ Help Center Mosaic
- 81. EDITING A MOSAIC FRONTPAGE ▸ https://sneak2.preview.jyu.fi/fi/etusivu
- 82. FACULTY PAGE - EDITING AN ACCORDION
- 83. THEME FRAGMENT - NEWS PICK
- 84. THEME FRAGMENT - FOCUS POINT
- 85. DEPARTMENT LAYOUT - HERO CAROUSEL
- 86. HERO CAROUSEL - SELECTING ITEMS
- 87. HERO CAROUSEL - SETTINGS
- 88. NEXT - THE ROAD GOES EVER ON...
- 89. QUESTIONS? ▸ Rikupekka Oksanen rioksane@jyu.fi ▸ Twitter: @rikupekka ▸ https://www.jyu.fi
- 90. THANK YOU! ▸ PS. Remember to check my other presentation tomorrow :) https://2017.ploneconf.org/talks/organizing-a-plone- sprint-lessons-learned-case-midsummersprint-2017