William & Mary Creative Services

Creative Services is proud to announce William & Mary Events version 2.0. Although this release is primarily a code rewrite it offers several enhancements worthy of a longer-than-usual blog post. I recommend you pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea before you read any further… and maybe scrape together a snack. How about that stash of Hershey Nuggets you’ve been saving in your top drawer behind the stapler and dusty post-its? (Don’t deny it, we know).

CODE UPDATES
I’ll get the boring, behind the scenes changes out of the way first. We consolidated the application code under the latest version of the CodeIgniter framework and removed the last remnants of the Zend framework used in the original open source UNL calendar. The original UNL calendar is wonderful and we highly recommend it. However, several of the large applications that we maintain including Tribe Voices, Tribe Responses and Ampersandbox already use CodeIgniter and having a common structure across all our apps improves our general efficiency and enables code reuse. We do plan to release our calendar as open source as well, but need just a little more time to spiff up the code and remove the W&M branding.

Now on to fun stuff!

UPCOMING… SHOW MORE
Each calendar’s home page now goes beyond just listing a few upcoming events. Introducing, the “Show More” button. When clicked, “Show More” expands the page to display the next 10 upcoming events. Still need more? Click it again and the page will expand with the next 10. Still need more?  You can pick up with your browsing in the month-at-a-time calendar and list views.

THE MINI-CALENDAR
The little calendar you see in the right column of most pages used to redirect you to a larger calendar view when you selected the previous and next arrows. This was cumbersome so we made some changes. The behavior is now consistent with other calendars like Outlook and Google where the previous and next buttons update the mini-calendar without leaving the current page. We added a dropdown list between the buttons in case you want to jump the mini-calendar ahead or behind a few months at a time, or go to a year view of 12 mini-calendars. Below the mini-calendar is a row of buttons that take you to the Calendar View or List View of the month’s events, or directly to a list of today’s events. From the month views, visitors are able to toggle back and forth between Calendar View and List View to easily select their preferred viewing format.

BREADCRUMBS
We’ve added breadcrumbs to all pages in the same location as on our websites. The first breadcrumb is “All Calendars”—a filter-able list of all the W&M calendars. (This link used to be in the footer but was understandably difficult to find.) The last breadcrumb always links to the calendar home page.

THE ALL CALENDARS PAGE
For convenience we added the “Top Calendars” category (see the list in the calendar footer) to the aforementioned All Calendars page.

EVENT DETAIL VIEW
When viewing an event you’ll find the “iCal for this event” and “Add to Google Calendar” links moved from the bottom of the event detail to a more prominent position at the top right. We encourage using these links to import an event into your personal or work calendars. We also added Google +1 to the list of share options.

SEARCH
In addition to searching for events in the current calendar, the quick search (to the right of the calendar title in the banner) now looks at all W&M calendars providing results when available in 3 separate tabs: “This calendar”, “All calendars” and “Calendar name matches.” Multiple search terms are also supported as well as search phrases.

Example of tabbed search results. Note the updated date style used in all event listing pages.

FROM ADMIN TO CALENDAR VIEW… AND BACK!
The events management screens and the live calendars received updates making it easier for users to navigate between the two. In the calendar management pages a “View Live Calendar” button has been added to the top of the button bar. Use it freely to view your calendar—we added links on the live calendar to get you back to the various admin screens too. Calendar admin links are visible only to logged in users and include a new “Dashboard” link next to Sign Out in the upper right that takes you back to your management main page. In addition, prominent admin links are presented “inline”- including “Manage Calendar” on the calendar home page, “Edit Features” also on the home page featured event box and “Edit Event” right next to every event that you can edit in both the listing view and detail view.

A calendar home page with inline admin links.

FEATURED EVENTS QUEUE
Every calendar can feature a single event to display in a box on the home page. Now you can choose multiple events to queue up as featured events. When one event passes, the next most imminent one automatically becomes the new feature. The featured event box adds a nice visual element to calendar home pages and the new queue will help admins keep it up and running.

EVENT EDIT PERMISSIONS
Events that are recommended to multiple calendars can no longer be edited by the admins of all the calendars. The new permission model is as follows – A creator can always edit their own event. Creators who are also calendar admins have the option to grant one of their calendars edit rights too.

TRY IT
Whew! This is a lot of info I am sure I left out some details. We think this release is a major step forward in event communication at W&M, but don’t just take our word for it. Visit http://events.wm.edu and take it for a spin. For those of you from Missouri we also have a couple of “show me” demonstration sessions scheduled:

May 31st, 3:00 – 4:30, Blow Memorial Hall room 311  RSVP
June 5th, 11:00 – 12:30, Blow Memorial Hall room 311  RSVP

~ Mark Windley

Graduates - Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Creative Services has been playing around with a site called Storify over the past few weeks (http://storify.com/about) which helps you to tell a story by curating social media content. The idea behind Storify is that you search for a particular Twitter hashtag (like #wmgrad for this year’s commencement), or for comments on a given Facebook page, video from YouTube or photos from Flickr, Instagram, etc. and then hand-select the best bits of content to use to tell the “story” of an event. You can intersperse your own text in amongst the social media entries as well to provide more context or detail to a story. Using a simple and friendly interface, Storify lets you create a permanent record of (typically fleeting) tweets, posts and photos about a common topic that otherwise would be floating around on the internet seemingly unrelated to each other.

Frequently, Storify is used to recap current events or information from conferences or presentations, and it is also frequently used to “live blog” an event. There has been buzz about using Storify in higher education for quite a while, Jen Doak from CASE wrote about Storify back in June of last year. This year, many schools utilized the site to capture their commencement activities (it was even a topic on yesterday’s HigherEdLive recap of commencement coverage).

In addition to individuals and colleges, there are government agencies (like the White House and the U.S. Department of Education) and news organizations (USA Today College) also using the tool.

I first played with this personally using April’s spooning record breaking attempt as an example. Intrigued and impressed by how easy it was to create a fun story, I presented it to our social media team and it was decided to create an account for W&M to use to capture all of the great bits of social media content generated by our community.

Check out the #wmgrad 2012 story on Storify

-Tiffany Broadbent

• Check out our intern Eric interviewed by WMTV! MT @wm_television: Trendspotters' tips for dressing for success! http://t.co/SGXGOkI1 #

Click on a destination folder in the navigation tree before creating an asset. Otherwise, Cascade will try to create the asset in the last selected folder or the root folder of your site. Of course you can always move something that was created in the wrong place, but why not avoid the hassle?

• Work with social media at W&M? Fill out our Social Media Users Group (SMUG) contact & meeting survey so we can connect! http://t.co/u9toJCzZ #
• Thanks for the mention! MT @brockter: Check out my most recent @GradHacker post on Gradhacking @Pinterest http://t.co/UH4rsMG3 #
• @brockter And we're working on a top-level W&M account as well http://t.co/qFJHWVC2 #
• @brockter Nice, will definitely check it out, thanks! #
• @brockter Indeed, all great ideas…I have some more Pinterest link finding to do… #
• @brockter Curse you infinite scrolling! #

• Join in on our webinar tomorrow at 2pm w @hannon_hill on how we achieved our responsive homepage design http://t.co/hx5YTPUk #highered #rwd #
• @designsbyday Thanks for attending the webinar! #rwd #cascadeserver #

Earlier this week Justin Schoonmaker and I presented a client webinar for Hannon Hill on our new homepage design and how we integrated it with Cascade Server. We explored the goals for the project, the design process, implementation, user response and future plans, as well as took lots of great questions from the attendees during the 70 minute webinar.

The slidedeck is online at Slideshare and a full recording of the webinar has been made available by Hannon Hill if you are interested in checking it out.

What do you think of our responsive design? If you have any questions on how/why we did it, let us know in the comments!

-Tiffany Broadbent

The Griffin is celebrating Admitted Students Day with a special surprise for transfers and the class of 2016!

William & Mary’s mobile app, Dress the Griffin, has been updated with a surprise for newly admitted students as well as a new waterman’s outfit inspired by our fellow tribesmen at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

If you don’t already have the app, download it now. Your iPhone, iPad and Android devices are naked without it!

• Dress the Griffin is celebrating newly admitted students w/an update. Hope @vims_news digs the new waterman's outfit! http://t.co/tLvQqNgK #

• Check out #AdmissionsLive w Tina Coleman & @WM_Admission's Wendy Livingston on collaboration b/t offices, Ampersandbox http://t.co/vxAj1ABc #