The document summarizes the content management system used to manage the website for Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. It launched in 2010 using Cascade as the CMS. The site, ASNews.syr.edu, showcases news, events, research and accomplishments for the college. Content comes from press releases, social media, videos and is organized into categories. The system allows content to be easily reused across sites. Over 500 stories have been posted to date. The CMS is low maintenance and predictable, allowing a small editorial staff to manage the site.
2. TheCollege.syr.edu
launched in February 2010, first time a CMS
had been used to manage online content
Purpose: repository for academic information
(the “business” side of TheCollege).
ASNews.syr.edu
launched in September 2010, a sister site
Purpose: showcase activities, research, student
and alumni accolades, news and events unique to
Arts and Sciences.
3.
4.
5. Based on Press Releases (“Stories”)
Primary Categories aligned to the academics of
TheCollege:
◦ Sciences
◦ Humanities
◦ People
Classify each Story as “News” or “Event”
Current Stories and searchable Archive
#cascadeserver @hannon_hill
6. Press Releases created by two staff writers
SU Calendar (VT Calendar application) provides
xml feed of daily events
Social Media postings
Video (YouTube Channel and Ensemble
streaming server)
Custom Slideshow Stories
Outside News “snippets” as links
7. Content will always have some updated material
(daily)
Story selection and rotation determined by the
editorial staff (of two)
Any moderation or approval of content done
offline (no workflows required)
Auto-Publish nightly with optional
on-demand as needed
8. # Story pages
2010 (95)
2011 (142)
2012 (174)
2013 (110)
Over 500 total to date…
(adding 6-7 stories weekly during academic year)
In addition to TheCollege and ASNews sites, my technical staff manages:
18 department, 3 intranet, 5 cultural,
40 research sites and the online faculty directory,
for a total 3500 pages. (All in Cascade)
9. LOW MAINTENANCE
PREDICTABLE EFFORT INVOLVED
CREATE ONCE, USE MANY
Get a lot of mileage out of a “Story”
Editorial components can be used in multiple
places in ASNews and in our other web sites
Present the content in such a way to look
like more (especially in periods of low academic
activity)
13. Metadata assigns the Category affiliation(s) and
the designation as News or Event item
Based on the checked affiliations, this page will be included
on both the
People and the Science-Math listing pages
Event or News designation is a preference of our editors
14. We decided not to include the photo as a thumbnail –
but could have.
15.
16. Story Page in relation to List Pages
Story Page Resides in the
Newsevents_2013 folder
A reference to it is placed in
the appropriate “Current” folder
(Events or News)
Story shows up on the List or
Lists checked in the
metadata
and shows up in ALL-Current
18. Our Writers understood references
They could see references and move them around
in the folders
They could delete a reference and not panic
They could recreate a reference if wanted to rerun
a story
They stopped deleting the list pages by accident
The story pages stayed in their original folder and the
links always stay the same
They stopped calling and emailing me!
21. Only a small amount of custom information accompanies the
Story Page link in a Rotating Story
Only a Rotating Story requires a different size picture (4
smaller features can use
same size picture as the Story Page)
22.
23. In The News Left Sidebar:
external recognition of our stories
lends authority
(and helps our search ranking!)
Home Page -Home Page - Reuse other people’s content…
24. Events
Right Sidebar:
XML feed from the SU News
calendar
Filtering is applied at either the
inbound feed link or in the
XSLT
This feed will pick up Events
that don’t have a Story Page
Events drop off after they occur
(at the calendar level) and
combined with daily publish is
always current
25. Various ways to sort items from the
feed, including
By Category
(Humanities,
Sciences, People)
By department
(English, Physics)
By number
to display and
placement
Combination of feed
filters and XSLT filtering
26. Twitter feed tends to
reinforce what is
already in the Stories or
Calendar
(so we added it)
Facebook feed is a
potential addition but is
less legible and more
repetitive
YouTube channel is
linked in the Multimedia
sidebar…and…
27. We have
a modified
Story Page for
video embeds…
That draws from an
Arts and Sciences
YouTube Channel
with a subgroup of
playlists
We have tested Hannon Hill’s video
embed tools in the WYS
For accessibility compliance, we only
use videos which are captioned
28. The “Ticker Line” features academic links
Because (virtually) all our sites are in Cascade, we
have the ability to cross reference content easily
Cascade’s Page Chooser has recently become one of my
favorite tools to replicate content to other areas.
29. Same basic
functionality as
Category Lists with
different ordering
and an upper right
navigation created by
an index block that
counts the List pages
within annual
archives
List Pages in archives are restricted to a numerical
range of pages so the list does not become too long.
30. The Story Page link does not “expire” when it’s
referenced by outside media or our own web sites. We
can add a link on a faculty member’s personal page to
the Story Page that featured them-and it will always
work.
Stories in archives update any changes in sidebar or
header/footer as well (2010 stories get new feeds,
links to social media) and are republished nightly as
well.
So much of the ASNews site is text it’s highly searchable
31. Story Page Master Elements added at the Template or
Configuration Set Level
(they all share the same side elements)
Story Page has sub-versions: video, slideshow, notesField) all
of which do not have a right sidebar
Home Page is unique, has its own Template
Category List Pages (current) share a Configuration set but
have Left side elements added at the Page level. Archives are
basically the same with an added block and format for the
page count-and nothing is customized at the page level.
I looked at what sidebars needed to drop into every page in a
section and planned around that.
32. Content draws directly from
the story page and does not
require
rewriting
Changes made in the links
to convert from browse path
to url
Publish to a folder on the file
server instead
of the web server
Weekly mailing and
event-specific
Our Physics department has been using a Cascade email
format for weekly notifications to faculty, staff and students
33. From August 25-September 14, 2013 ASNews had
1,800 unique visitors (3 weeks)
A typical month during the academic year is 3,000
unique visitors
34. We see outside promotion driving viewers to ASNews
(we want that!)
35. George Saunders Video on YouTube posted
Friday night at 5pm. This followed the
announcement his book just made the NY Times
bestseller list. Link added to ASNews
By Monday morning, thousands of views of the
video and the Story Pages featuring Saunders
were getting lots of hits
To date, Saunders video has over 40,000 views.
TheCollege business site gives departments and programs an identity. Sections for department and programs overviews, admissions, advising, forms, directories (including a faculty directory with biographical pages for all 400+ of the full time research and teaching faculty). Note the “ticker line”-our fake RSS feed-the items in the ticker line are links to press stories on the ASNews website
Looks a lot more like a newpaper. You won’t find out where your professor’s office is on this site, but you may find out he just received a major grant or wrote a new book. You hopefully will also see Many of the events happening on this date in TheCollege
Challenge to have a balance of stories representative of our departments and programs (topically). As a side benefit, stories become the natural content for social media (Facebook and Twitter).
While some is drawn from press releases written by “SU Central” …the vast majority of content originates in house. 125-200 press releases are written and become story pages on the News site every year. Calendar of events items are entered into a calendar application outside of Cascade and pulled in through a filtered xml feed. Use social media feeds-right now just Twitter as the facebook postings are too similar to what’s already on the news home page.
When people come in to work in the morning, the site will hopefully have a fresh article for people to read
Full Page look but orderly
You will see a couple of these sidebars, In the news and Upcoming Events on the home page as well
A story page’s default region is pretty basic. It has two text areas that format automatically for the first photo to float left and the second to float right, both with optional captions.
The displayed text draws content directly from the page and creates a clickable list item. List picks up the title of the article, the date chosen, and the summary line (which is often also the subheading). We decided not to include the photo as a thumbnail –but could have.
Call attention to the small blue bar News listing Events listing which allows navigation to these parts of the Science-Math current articles. We almost always have a lot more News items than Events, and events of the day are more effectively shown in the calendar feed. Note also in the left sidebar the list of departments belonging to the Sci-Math category. We sneak in links back to the College academic area, and the picture in the sidebar is a representative animation of Sciences and Math.
Why did we do it this way when it could have been done via the metadata, the date, or in one of many ways.
Rotating stories: use the link effectively, small feature: reuse the picture (and it’s clickable)
The type of choice list shown here is widely used on our college page, all of them. I call it the list-item chooser, because my user has the ability to link to internal or external resouces and (at least at the top part) can’t do any additional styling! While this particular Sidebar also has a WYSWYG for additional tex, many do not (again saving me work!)
