Category: Design

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Adventure Design Development

OUTC19

OUTC19 Hackaton Winners!

Attended the OUTC conference in Anaheim, CA again this year. Presented again on Using Google Lighthouse to Find a Faster Website.

The trip out there was a little rocky with a decent amount of turbulence. While I typically do not travel very well, I was happy to not feel super lousy when arriving at LAX! Usually I’m in bad shape for the first day after a flight.

I was able to check in super early at the hotel, and took a much needed shower. I do think that was a key factor in me not feeling too poorly that day.

Arriving early on Sunday, we headed out to Irvine Regional Park. This place was awesome! The mountains, openness, so many cool things to do. Though I probably only saw 1% of the park, it was pretty awesome to take in all the differences that I would not find in New Jersey. A great experience.

Getting back to the hotel, we were served In-N-Out Burger from a food truck. The Double Double really it the spot, I was starved. It was great to meetup with earlier OUTC friends Caleb and Mark. They’re good guys.

Later that night, with a little bit of hard work was able to get HBO Go to stream on the large TV in the hotel room. On the west coast there was the option to watch it a t 9:00 pm or stream it at 6:00 pm EST. I had to present the next day and flew in that morning, so getting it to stream and watch the early time was a great success.

On Monday the sessions kicked off. I presented at 2:00 pm, and while I think I got off to a shaky start overall I think it went well. It wasn’t a very talkative crowd, but I could tell most everyone was following along and testing their site out using Google Lighthouse. It was fun.

The OU Campus 11 demo was pretty cool. I am excited at the direction the interface is going in. I think our content managers will be very happy with the coming updates.

I always look forward to hearing about their Product Roadmap, and that took place on Tuesday. The mentioned the following:

  • WCAG 2.1 (April 25)
  • Web Hooks (June) – Trigger actions outside of OUCampus. Can be assigned on folder.
  • Image Size Sets (July) – Set size (crop or not), group to set, assign to folder
  • File Uploads for LDP Forms (September)
  • Feed Manager (Winter) – easier feed management
  • OUCampus 11 (Winter)
    • Phase 1 – look and feel
    • Later phases to workflow
  • Formstack – available in Marketplace
  • Looking Further Forward
    • OU Calendar
    • Layout Builder
    • Accessibility Check/Insights Improvements
    • V11 Phase 2+

We’re exciting to see exactly how Web Hooks will work. There is some decent potential there.

I attended the Gadgets workshop again on Wednesday. It was a different take on that workshop, and I did find it to be useful. I’m always looking to improve my javascript game.

Later that night was the Hackaton. While I’ve been lucky enough to of been on the winning team in the last two events, I wanted to try a different role this year. I partnered up with Aaron, Soe, Fernando, and Nick in that order based solely on seating position when the Hackaton begun.

Aaron really wanted to develop a command line interface for OU. Fernando was all in with the idea, and quite frankly I was a little on the fence. In the past I’m leaned on user driven ideas, not so much admin. But Soe and Nick were all in, and I really wanted to try to enter with someone else’s idea this year.

I can’t say this enough, but we really worked so well as a team. Fernando was a command line genius and Aaron and Soe were great coders as well. They did such a great job, and far exceeded what I thought would get done in that timeframe.

Nick and I decided to focus on the presentation and marketing aspect of our team. We came up with talking points and images to be used. We even used the official presentation template (since I was a presenter) and got some big chuckles from the audience. Presentation can be a big factor in hackathons and we had a lot of fun with that.

It was a good thing that we worked so well as a team as there was some very stiff competition this year. Translation tools, image compression gadgets, XSLT data parsing, so many great entrants. In the end we did win, and I somehow would wound with with three in a row. Insane.

The last days workshops were very cool too, but there was so much going on in them I will have to revisit my sandbox and review the code before I forget too much. I’m very interested in learning more about PCF data outputs, especially outputting to JSON.

The flight home was smooth and a great way to end a great conference. While I’m not learning quite as much as I used to, it is fun to be in the role of the veteran who is now sharing knowledge with the newer folks to the platform. Glad I was able to attend again and looking forward to working in all the new ideas that were shared!

Categories
Adventure Design Development

OUTC 17 Day 1 and 2

mpus is the CMS solution that we use at work, so it’s always exciting to go and learn as much about it as possible. This year I was also presenting, so that made things a bit more exciting as well.

The flight in wasn’t too bad. Typically in the past I wind up feeling pretty sick after such a long flight, but this time around wasn’t so bad. I did eventually get a bad headache later that first night, but nothing nearly as bad as how I had felt in the past. So that was a plus.

The conference took place at the Paradise Point Resort and Spa in San Diego. It’s a very pretty and unique location. It’s on an island in Mission Bay, and all the rooms seem to be little bungalows scattered throughout the island. Not the traditional 20 story hotel. It’s pretty nice. Palm trees, beaches, pools and little ponds all over the place. Very scenic and fun to just walk around and take it all in.

The opening keynotes were pretty interesting. Not as interesting to me as last year, as we’re not brand new to OU Campus any longer, but still well done. The sessions on days one and two weren’t as interesting as last year for the same reasons, but meeting everyone and discussing similar issues and solutions is always very helpful, and I’ve been enjoying doing that.

I do seem to be having some sort of allergy out here. I awoke Monday morning with my right eye nearly completely shut. I suspect it’s a reaction to some plant/pollen out here, but who knows. There’s many new variables in play for me out here. I was a bit bummed that I have had to wear my glasses more than I’d like, especially when I was presenting. But oh well, it’s better than my eye getting irritated further.

My presentation took place on the first day at 3:15 pm. It was titled, Surviving the Migration from Homegrown CMS to OU Campus. I went over how we had gone through our migration. The audience was primarily individuals who had not migrated yet, so it was the ideal audience. I don’t present too often, and this was the first time I had to wear a mic when presenting, but I must admit I wasn’t nervous at all.

Per a random request I played elevator music that I had found on YouTubTube leading up to the presentation. It think the silliness calmed what little nerves I may have had going in. The presentation went fairly well and lasted the full 45 minutes. I didn’t notice anyone who left the presentation early, and there were many questions at the end that were a pleasure to answer.

At the end I had several people come up to me afterwards and thank me for speaking in a language that they understood. They are going through a very similar situation and sharing our success and regrets was very beneficial to them. It felts nice to be of help.

Later that night we had a steamboat dinner cruised through Mission Bay. They bused us from our hotel to the steamboat where we got on and for a few hours calmly went around the bay. It was pretty nice and definitely a unique thing for me. The food was solid and the company entertaining. A fun little trip.

Checking out a some more sessions on Tuesday and looking forward to the workshops and hackathon to come later in the conference.

 

Categories
Design Development

2016 OmniUpdate User Training Conference: Workshops Day 2

Day 2 of workshops. Some wifi issues early on, were unfortunately a problem with following along. I had to check the Eatel – isp in my area in order to find a new provider.

How To Tag Content in OUCampus with Tag Manager

I really like the potential of the new Tags feature. News, events, and image galleries immediately sprung to mind.

Tags can be used to:

  • organize content
  • find related content
  • build associations

The XSL API can make the following calls:

  • GetAllTags
  • GetTags
  • GetFixedTags
  • GetCombinedTags
  • GetParents
  • GetChildren
  • GetFilesWithAnyTags

However, just a note to use the support site when 10.4 is released, features may change from this demo.

Reusable Content

This workshop covered Assets, Snippets and Includes and the differences between each. While nothing too mind blowing, this was a good overall explanation.

Types:

  • Assets (centrally managed content)
    • Web Content
    • Plain Text
    • Source Code
    • Image Gallery
    • Form
  • Snippets (pre-defined content)
  • Include Files

Guidelines to follow when deciding which to use/when:

  • DRY – don’t repeat yourself
  • think about updates
  • editing experience – snippets
  • complexity

Front-End Development Best Practices

This was a very informative and interesting workshop. He did a great job explaining the issues in page speed (latency!!), and techniques to improve page load speed. Unfortunately, I already was fairly knowledgeable in this topic, so I didn’t learn a whole lot. However, it was a great workshop still, and I did learn of some best practices and more importantly was reminded of techniques that could be employed.

Responsive Design and OUCampus

Another great workshop by Shahab, but also again an area that I was already knowledgeable in. Still great, and I’m glad I attended.

Don’t use maximum-scale in your media queries (poor for accessibility).

For the workshop we created and went over setting up a grid using Bootstrap.

Categories
Design Development

2016 OmniUpdate User Training Conference: Workshops Day 1

Yesterday was workshops day. While there was a lot to learn, I did get a bit lost at times with all the info at once. Luckily they did share all the resources, so I can go back and practice along when I get back home.

Creating New Page and Section Templates

This was a very important workshop for us, as we really want to get a better understanding of how we can create a and edit templates in OUCampus. I learned a lot, but will really have to practice a bit more what was learned while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Building Directories and Templates with MultiEdit

It was great to learn more about MultiEdit and how it may be able to work for us.

Categories
Design Development

2016 OmniUpdate User Training Conference: Day 2

Day 2 was a lot of fun. More technical sessions and a hackathon to end the day.

Training & Herding

The presenter did an excellent job, but this one didn’t turn out to be as useful to me as I had hoped. I did stay for the entire session and did find it to be enjoyable. Many cats were used in the slides, and I did learn a lot about Arkansas.

Redesigning Your Site for a Better User Experience

This session would have been more valuable for us a year or so ago while we were forming our web team, but it was still nice to see that were were following many of their best practices anyhow. What really stood out to me was their emphasis on having a good team of people, and don’t rush for deadlines. If it will take a bit longer to get something right, then take the extra time to do it right.

One on One

Lout and I met up with our OUCampus implantation team. I was hoping that they’d go over a bit more, but we did use the time to ask them many questions. Right off the bat they packed the room to discuss with us about our production server environment.

They were very frank and shared many pros and cons of going with Coldfusion vs a more popular language (PHP). We really appreciated their attention to this matter and will share more when we get back to the team.

Development Roadmap

The development roadmap was great. A lot of the features I wasn’t 100% on when making the decision to go with OUCampus seem to be getting address in the coming year or so. That was extremely good news.

  • OCN (OmniUpdate Community Network) : email support@omniupdate.com to join
  • LDP Forms
    • new settings, elements, element properties
    • success message can work well with Google Analytics Goals
    • captcha
  • Gadgets
    • Bookmarks
    • Notes
    • Metadata API
    • create and manage persistent metadata
    • Tag Management
      • find and embed related content in XSL
  • Modules
    • OUInsights
    • OUAlerts
  • A little further ahead…
    • Image Size Sets
      • define multiple custom sizes
      • each folder can have its own set
    • Custom Asset Types
    • Custom User Role
      • very granular controls
      • Access Control Lists
      • multiple groups and users can be added to an access setting
    • Feed Manager
      • create feeds of structured content
      • send items to multiple feeds

Integrating Content from External Sources in OUCampus

This turned out to be nothing too new for me, but at least it confirms that we are thinking along the right path on how we can approach integrating content from external sources.

  • utc.edu
  • cache RSS feeds, cron job to fetch feeds to local server
  • minimize external requests
  • jQuery Social Stream
  • look for slides for code examples
  • utc.edu/outc16 – for more info and examples

Bootstrap Form Builder

This was very interesting to see just how much additional functionality could be built to work within OUCampus. The presenter really wen the extra mile.

  • customize the <advanced> xml tag
  • jQuery Validation Plugin
  • Honeypot variables
  • optional reCAPTCHA

Creating Gadgets

In preparation for the Hackathon, we attended an extended session on how to create Gadgets. Despite some horrible WiFi issues, we eventually did get the basics down.

  • what are they/do?
    • web applications
    • context aware
    • connect via API
    • extend the platform
  • github.com/omniupdate
    • gadgetlib.js (good starter spot)
    • documentation can be found in Gadget Starter
  • requirements
    • need location to publish to
    • minimum 2 files
      • html page (source code of gadget)
      • config.xml (info about the gadget)

Hackathon

The Hackathon was great. They fed us dinner, and we broke up in to teams to compete. Our group included Lou, Caleb (developer), Mark (CSS), and myself. We decided to make a to-do, task list manager Gadget.

We drew up a concept, and then divided up the tasks. I turned out to be project lead, and I thought that part went very well. We all had some very great input, and also were willing to contribute to the team in any way that we could.

A huge roadblock that we ran into however was that the development environment that was given to us was not the latest beta version of OUCampus that we we lead to believe it was. Since our Gadget relied on the soon to be released Metadata API found in 10.4, we pretty much wasn’t an hour and a half of attempting to debug and issue that was not our doing. Super bummer for us.

Once that was discovered and a new environment given, we began to make progress. Mark come up with a solid design, and Caleb was able to get a basic list to appear and communicate with the Metadata API. Unfortunately we were not able to complete our Gadget in the given time, but it was a lot of fun and we did learn a lot. Great time.

Categories
Design Development

2016 OmniUpdate User Training Conference: Day 1

Breakfast

Breakfast was solid. I ate a whole lot.

One Community: Endless Possibilities

This was a pretty basic kickoff conference session. They did have some humorous videos, that got some laughs.

Innovate, Create and Inspire Using OU Campus

This was a pretty solid presentation. They went over all the new features. Some of note were:

  • OU Campus for Mobile

Modules:

  • Tag Management
    • use tags to display specifics types of content based on tag
    • almost anything can be tagged
    • search by tags
    • account wide, multiple sites
  • OUInsights
    • monitors content and alerts to problems
    • regularly checks site content
    • helps make improvements
    • helps adhere to regulations
    • helps optimize for SEO
    • integrated with OUCampus
    • separate module (purchase)
  • OUAlerts
    • mobile app
    • can post updates to an alert
    • SM posts and to website, multiple channels
    • for non technical users
    • separate module (purchase)

Gadgets:

  • Quick Publish
    • 1 step publishing
    • control access by group
  • Bookmarks
    • instant access to page, functions, and reports
    • dashboard and sidebar
  • Notes

New Gadget APIs

  • Metadata API
  • wysiwyg API
  • source editor API

Lunch

Lunch was good, southwest cuisine.

Content Migration 101

The presenter did a solid job, but I was really hoping that this was more about how we can migrate to OUCampus. It was really about the migration services that they offer. He did recommend the use of 301 redirects over meta redirects.

The Latest and Greatest Gadgets

This was a cool overview of some of the newer gadgets. Gadgets covered were:

  • Dependency Tag Info
  • Quick Publish
  • Bookmarks
  • multi-site
  • Notes
  • Request Help

Responsive Images FTW!

This was a really interesting presentation. With techniques I will look to integrate. The tough thing seems to be on how to get the responsive images to work easily for an end user in OUCampus. I really need to find the slides to this presentation!

The following blog post was highly recommended to read:  https://ericportis.com/posts/2014/srcset-sizes/

Tag All the Things!

Easier way to tag content in OUCampus. I like the potential of what we could do to display content based on how content in tagged. Can edit and merge tags. Can apply Tags in Page Parameters. Auto hint of existing tags when entered.

Binary files can be tagged as well. Tags show up in RSS feeds.

XSL API has calls to work with Tags. Will have to find the documentation for this API, looks to be very useful.

Roaring 20’s Hollywood Dinner Party

We went to a dinner party at The Cicada Club. I was be thoroughly underdressed. But it didn’t matter, as it was a great time anyhow. Everyone was dressed up in 20’s attire, there was a glamorous girl in a champagne glass to great us when we entered (think her name was Bubbles), and an entertaining skit was performed during the entire night. A very unique experience.

Food was good, there was an open bar and everyone seemed to have a great time. Glad I attended, and it was interesting to see these folks in a different environment.