Hello WSU Spokane!
Web Communication will be on campus to help with any WordPress, online registration, or Qualtrics questions that you might have. All are welcome, so please spread the word. As always, please come when you can, and you stay as long as you like.
All sessions will be in SHSB 260
Wednesday March 15th –
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
3:00 PM – 4:40 PM
Thursday March 16th –
9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
The web team will be making a trip up to Spokane on Wednesday, May 4th for another open labs session. Stop by PBS 118 from 10am to 12pm or SAC 313 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm and join the fun. Bring any web related questions, we’ll bring a thing or two to talk about as well.
See you there!
Today was our first open labs session at WSU Spokane! We had 2 sessions, the morning in PBS and the afternoon in Academic Services. We had a nice turn out at both and are looking forward to our next at the end of April.
We briefly touched on a few of the updates from yesterday’s Spine Parent Theme release. Most of them are tweaks to existing behavior and styles to provide incremental improvements. A couple are new – specifically background images on columns.
A Slack team is available for questions, discussion, and general collaboration. Anyone with a wsu.edu email address can join without an invite. We also have a GitHub organization available where all of our work is published as open source.
In the page builder interface, images can be added as backgrounds to both sections and columns. Click on the gear icon to add each. At the moment, you’ll need the full URL to the image. We have issue #292 open in the Spine Parent Theme repository to track improvements to this interface in the future.
We walked through the ins and outs of the WSUWP Content Syndicate plugin, which is enabled on all sites by default. We even updated the documentation to link to a better document for how dates can be formatted.
We walked through the interface for managing offsite and site menus, including the process it takes to remove or rename “Overview” links in the menu. This is something we should document and we now have issue #296 open in the Spine Parent Theme repository to do so. The BU Navigation plugin is also available for a different way of managing pages in menus in a more hierarchical way.
We went down the list of available plugins on the platform and walked through examples of Duplicate and Merge Pages, Gravity Forms, MailChimp, and TablePress.
At this point, we took lunch and moved to a different location on campus to continue open labs. 🌮
Some of the stuff we covered in the afternoon session is repeat or very specific to individual sites. I’m going to break things down into some bullet points here.
Hi there! Here’s a brief recap of the topics we discussed in open lab this week.
Jeremy demonstrated the recent enhancements and bug fixes he has made on the Spine. Check out his post to read about the changes that have been made. They are slated to be released next Wednesday.
Sheilah mentioned that if a page being visited is not in the site navigation, but is a child of a page that is in the navigation, that parent page should be highlighted as current. This issue has already been tracked on the Spine Theme repo (#228), but we bumped it up to high priority.
Sheilah bought up that four column layouts collapse down to two rows of two columns at smaller screen widths. We don’t want to suddenly change this behavior as it has been the default since (presumably) the release of the Spine, but since it is inconsistent with the other layouts – the columns should stack and all be 100% wide on smaller screens – we may add a utility class that can be added to four-column rows to make them behave in a more expected manner.
Sheilah asked about the possibility of restricting a section of a site to be available to only a few specific users. Leveraging the WSU Content Visibility plugin is probably best way to handle such a task, but it would need to be able to support adding individual NIDs and apply a page’s settings to its children. These features were tracked as issues on the plugins Github repo.
Phil bought up that it would be valuable to have the University Taxonomies attached to Events. This should be easy enough to do!
We had a good discussion about the pros and cons of different email sending services and options. Many colleges and departments are handling their own sending, and those present today related their experiences with using MailChimp and phpList, and the merits of using UComm’s Crimson Communiqué distribution service.
Javier pointed out that horizontal scrolling isn’t available when a page has content that is wider than the browser window. In such cases, the overflowing content is simply cut off with no way to access it. We weren’t able to find a fix at the time but will continue to troubleshoot the issue until we do!
Joyce asked about adding support for Google Calendar embeds for one of her site users. We added this as a high priority enhancement (issue #31) to the WSU Embeds plugin.
Thanks to everyone who attended. Until next time!
We have a change of venue for our normal, weekly open labs next Friday. On March 18th, we’ll be in the CUB, room 208 from 9:30am to 11:30am.
Same format, same everything else, just a slightly different location. And who knows, if we like it we might try to keep it. 🙂
We’re also making a trip up to Spokane on Wednesday, March 23rd to hold 2 open labs sessions. One from 10:00am to 12:00pm in PBS 118 and another from 1:30pm to 3:30pm in SAC 313. If you’re in Spokane, stop on by!
Howdy! Here’s a recap of the topics we discussed during open labs this week. We’ll turn comments on at some point in the near future. For now, if you have any questions or suggestions, check out the WSU Web Slack team.
Background images can now be assigned to columns in the page builder interface. Use the gear icon on a column to bring up the interface to enter the image URL. This is similar to how background images can be added to sections.
The background image itself will only take up the size of the content in that column. The equalize class can be assigned to a section to make all column heights equal in that section.
We’re not entirely sure how to use this feature yet, but we’re looking into it. 🙂
While Marsha was showing off the work she’s been doing on https://hws.wsu.edu, we explored CSS gradients vs image gradients. ColorZilla provides a gradient editor, which is a good resource for generating CSS gradients.
Sheilah brought up an interesting resource that seems to claim that social testimonials are better than talking about yourself. The UI of goodui.org is a little strange though, so it’s hard to tell if it really is bad. We seemed to have some group agreement that fake testimonials are bad, authenticity goes a long way. (And talking about the work you’re doing isn’t bad at all.)
There are several roles and capabilities that need work throughout the platform. Joyce brought up an issue where some folks may only need access to add calendar events, but should not be able to publish posts and pages without review. We’re tracking our wishlist of future roles and capabilities on GitHub in WSUWP Platform issue #274.
We talked through some of the current status of the people directory, including the possibility of mass importing users by WSU NID. If you have examples for how you would like people records to appear when syndicated on your site, please chime in on Slack. We’ll be looking to add a couple other HTML templates soon to cover some basic cases.
Thanks everyone!
The session started off with Jeremy giving an overview on setting up and developing locally in a virtual environment. He also pointed out the Spine Child Theme Skeleton and the Plugin Skeleton as bases for people to work off of.
WSUWP Platform: Colorbox – a lightbox plugin for jQuery – is available on the platform via the Custom JavaScript Editor. Jeremy gave a brief demonstration on how to set up a basic implementation.
The Social & Economic Sciences Research Center offers a survey design clinic.
WSUWP Platform: The DataTables Row Grouping extension for TablePress has been added to the platform.
WSUWP Platform: The people directory, People Display and Content Syndicate plugins were briefly discussed. The people component of the Content Syndicate plugin will be broken out as a standalone plugin.
Spine Parent Theme: The templates aren’t set up to show authorship data from the Coauthors Plus plugin.
With the pending slowdown of the holiday season, we’re going to pause open labs for a few weeks. Here’s the plan:
If we don’t see you before the end of the year, have a happy holiday!
Howdy!
ITB 2025 is full at the moment, so we’re moving over to CUE 412 for open labs tomorrow. It sounds like there is space for 25-30 people and a decent A/V setup, some whiteboards, etc…
Same time – 9:30am-11:30am.
See you there!
This is a recap of topics covered in our weekly open lab, held every Friday morning from 9:30am-11:30am in ITB2025.
We talked about the Overview link automatically created in the Spine navigation when a section label is itself a link to a page. There is a way to change the actual text of “Overview” by setting the title attribute in the WordPress menu management screen. You can also add a generic link to the menu with “#” as the URL. This will create a section label without automatically generating an Overview link. The behavior of this is something that should be better documented on this site. We’ll work on getting something up in the near future.
External links in the Spine navigation and general content have Google Analytics campaign data attached to them. Not every URL accepts this parameters nicely. We need to look at whether external links should have campaign data to begin with. This will be tracked under issue #20 on the WSUWP Analytics repository.
Links marked to open in a new tab do not always respect that setting, even when using cmd-click to open the link. It appears this is an issue with the scripting we’re using for Google Analytics and it will be fixed in a future release under issue #225 on the WSU Spine repository.
It would be great if you could convert one layout to another on the fly in the page builder. At the moment an entire new section must be added and content copy/pasted to the new area. This will be tracked under issue #177 on the Spine Parent Theme repository.
The Carson College of Business home page was having some issues when we tried using the new Duplicate and Merge Posts plugin. I’ll be taking a closer look at that to find any bugs. Also, proper styles should applied to category specific calendar pages.
There should be a way to exclude labs from the labs.wsu.edu landing page until they are ready. Most of this will take care of itself when we have a better landing page that shows off recent posts from all the labs that are active instead of links to the labs themselves. This will be tracked under issue #2 and issue #3 on the labs.wsu.edu repository.
The WSUWP Content Syndicate plugin can pull in posts from other sites using the WordPress JSON API, but not yet with RSS. We should have a shortcode that will pull in an RSS Feed and display it as well.
The last modified date seems to be 8 hours off in the list table for posts and pages. This will be tracked under issue #22 on the WSUWP Admin repository.
Previewing a page builder page that contains an iframe does not work in Safari. It does work fine in Chrome. This is tracked under issue #154 on the Spine Parent Theme repository.
We also talked about text not wrapping properly around left aligned images. We’re working on exploring that a bit in issue #178 on the Spine Parent Theme repository.
Beyond bugs… 🙂 I also showed a brief example of the new interface that we’re working on to assign Active Directory editor groups to pages and posts. This work is coming along nicely and a first release will be available soon.