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.
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.
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.)
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
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)
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.
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
28.
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
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%
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.
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
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
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 :(
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