WebTech Monthly News – December 2021

January Drupal Training Sessions Available

Are you new to editing a Drupal site? Or are you a current Drupal user that wants to improve your editing game? There are Drupal training sessions in January:

• Tuesday, January 11; 2 p.m. - 4 p.m.
• Wednesday, January 12; 9 a.m. - 11 a.m.
• Thursday, January 13; 9 a.m. - 11 a.m.

Learn more and reserve your spot at the Beginning Drupal training page.

We are now offering Drupal Team Training. Need customized Drupal training for you and at least one other team member that focuses on the specific elements that apply to your department website? Email web.help@wwu.edu to schedule a time and date.

November and December Site Launches

• Marine and Estuarine Science Program (MESP) moved from Campus Web to Drupal
• Self-Paced Online Tutorials offered by the library
• The College of the Environment website URL changed from huxley.wwu.edu to cenv.wwu.edu. Please update your links.

Drupal Updates

Drupal 9.2.10

A security release was provided to all Drupal sites.  

Drupal Theme Updates          

• Some deprecated files removed from theme: timeline.js, majors layout 
• Style improvement for horizontal cards and linked taxonomy terms         
• Spacing fix on multi-column layouts        
• Spacing improvements for webforms    
• Alignment fix for image links      
• Focus fix for locations component           
• Contrast fix for org charts

Further detailed updates can be found in the Ashlar change log.

WordPress: Updates from CampusPress

• WordPress Core Update – 5.8.2 - WordPress will be updated to 5.8.2 on January 4
• Advanced Custom Field Pro: Upgrade from 5.9.5 to 5.10.2.
• Cloner and New Site Template: performance improvement for better support of the cloning of custom menus that have a large number of menu items.
• The following plugins are being deprecated and will be deactivated:
  • Global Site Categories: adds global tag cloud on your main site.
  • Global Site Search: adds global search to your main site.
  • Global Site Tags: adds global tag cloud on your main site.

Review the CampusPress Changelog for specific details on plugin updates.

Improving your Website Using Siteimprove

Ready to take your site administration to another level?

Siteimprove is a self-service tool available to all Western Washington University website administrators to help improve a website’s Content Quality, Accessibility, and more. If you’ve been meaning to give your department website some attention this year, Siteimprove is a great place to start.

How does Siteimprove work? The site crawler runs every 5 days to gather the most current version of your website, along with any issues that are found. Issues are sorted into categories including Quality Assurance and Accessibility, among others. Once the issues are discovered and sorted, users can begin to optimize and improve their site.

Best of all, you can schedule weekly reports so you can watch your website’s health score improve as you work through misspellings, broken links, or missing alt tags. Intrigued? Learn how to get started with Siteimprove to make your Drupal website better.