Development is well under way to build a new Web Publishing Platform for the University. We’ll be starting to create sites and migrate content over from EdWeb during the next 12 – 14 months. We’ll take a look at what this means for EdWeb editors.

Editor vs Lead Publisher

First of all what is the difference between what we call an EdWeb editor and a lead publisher? The distinction between a lead publisher and an editor is quite fine for some websites. An editor tends to be someone who updates content or a set of pages but a lead publisher is someone that we regard as being responsible for the whole website.

We are going to be asking our lead publisher community to help us with our site creation and content migration from EdWeb to our new Web Publishing Platform. We have a list of lead publishers and will be contacting them soon. Not all EdWeb editors will need to be involved in the actual migration. They’ll just need to be trained on the new system and learn how to login and find the content they edit.

The current list of Lead Publishers is on our support wiki and we have a more detailed blog post aimed specifically at them. So if you are a lead publisher you might want to start here.

The big move – information for lead publishers

We’ll be using our lead publisher list to contact everyone.

Lead publisher list for EdWeb

Site creation and content migration timeline

We will start to communicate our proposed date and time for content migration with lead publishers during February 2022. This will run from July 2022 to March 2023. We’ll be asking them to help our communication with all staff who have access to EdWeb and edit pages. If you are an editor and edit small amounts of content or edit pages  infrequently it’s likely we won’t be asking for you to do very much. You can count on your content being migrated over to the new system and there will no interruption to the service your website visitors see and interact with.

Content migration for EdWeb editors

We’ll be communicating initially with the lead publisher for your site and content. They’ll be helping us liaise with all the key stakeholders for the website. If you currently look after and edit a sub set of pages in a website you’ll continue to be able to do this in the new system.

Preparing your content for migration

We want to do all we can to help ensure the content migration goes as smoothly as possible. To prepare for migrating your content there are some reviewing tasks we would like you to start.

Review out-of-date content

For now, a key task is to please review and consider removing:

• Any content that is out of date
• Any content that is no longer needed. Please note – content to be removed/deleted should be moved to a ‘content to be deleted’ section of your site.
  •  Deleting webpages in EdWeb
• Any forms that are no longer used. Please audit your forms and delete any submissions that are no longer needed or have been kept longer than the specified retention period.

Support and training

We are in the process of writing our new training material and will be in touch when we are ready to roll this out. The editorial interface of the new system will be different to EdWeb but the principles of content editing will be very similar. You’ll still be able to format text, add images and video and components such as a quote in the new system.

Digital Skills

We’ll be collaborating very closely with  the Digital Skills team on how we put our training resources together. They were the driving force in helping us move our EdWeb training online incredibly quickly after we all moved to working from home. We are confident that with this new training and support material we can make the transition from EdWeb to the new platform as smooth as possible.

Digital Skills

What to do now

Watch the recording and access the presentation slides for our Web Publishers Community session in February for a more detailed project update

Web Publishers Community session recording