Web team rolls out new features, support
The web collaboration team, comprising staff from Strategic Communications, Media Resources Center and Information Technology Services, has created some great new website features and training resources as we continue to move forward on the first year of the new design.
Trainings
On Demand Training
The Web Training site now contains a greatly expanded Training Videos section that includes the full Basic Training session broken down into multiple segments.
That means that if you had the in-person training months ago, and need a refresher on a portion of the training, you can easily find the video that deals with that area and get back in the swing without the need for a full face-to-face training session.
You can even subscribe to the YouTube channel to be notified when a new video is posted.
Guides for working on the website
The Web Training site also includes an expanded section of Web Guides (also available
in the Add-ons menu within the CMS). There are five guides available, including:
- Web Writing and Digital Messaging Guide
- Website Photo Guidelines and Recommendations
- Landing Page Snippets Guide
- Standard Content Page Snippets Guide.
- News and Blogs primer
All of the guides are available in web and pdf format, so you can choose to download a guide and have it handy while you work on the sites.
Site Glossary
If you encounter a web- or CMS-related term that you’re unsure of, there is now a full glossary of terminology to help you.
Features
Page Intro Panel Backgrounds
This month we did a soft rollout of a new design feature on Landing Page Templates. You can now change the yellow wheat pattern on Landing Page intro panels to any of the background patterns in our system. This will give our users even greater flexibility in page design.
The only caveat for this is that any landing pages that are checked out when we launch won’t show the new feature. If you have a landing page that doesn’t show a Panel Background option in the Page Intro Panel section of the MultiEdit (see example image), file a web support ticket and we'll get it added.
The Calendar Feed Component
For those of you with categories listed on the public-facing WSU Calendar, you can now easily place feeds of your events on any page using the Calendar Component.
Components are a newly released feature in the CMS that lets us build out design and informational features that are created using wizards instead of the table transformations that create snippets.
Just click on the Components icon 
in the toolbar, choose the Calendar Feed Component and use the wizard to create the
feed.
There are also components for Twitter and Facebook feeds on pages, plus an easy-to-use YouTube interface, and we'll be adding even more during the summer.
Coming soon
Speaking of this summer, we've got a lot more in the works, including:
- A robust directory tool that will allow you to create faculty bio pages and build directories of personnel and group them in a variety of ways.
- A modified calendar tool that will let you to build calendars that are separate from the main WSU Calendar and can be posted on your website via the calendar component.
- A catalog of the best-looking page designs from across the site with “recipes” for recreating them yourself.