We are making some changes to the footer information that appears on every University web page published by EdWeb. In this post we’ll outline what’s changing and why.

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been undertaking usability tests with our old and new content management systems, Polopoly and EdWeb. Once again I was overwhelmed with the number of colleagues willing to give up their time to help me. So I thought I should say thank you.

Last Saturday I contributed a session to Drupalcamp Scotland in which I talked about the challenges of, and my approach to, integrating usability testing into an agile development process.

Drupalcamp Scotland – the annual regional conference for developers and users of the Drupal CMS platform – is being hosted this year at the University of Edinburgh, with members of the University Website Programme contributing presentations on EdWeb and agile usability.

As we have reached a break in the development of EdWeb, now is the time to look at our old and new Content Management Systems objectively. I’m looking for colleagues to help me do this. If you have experience of both Polopoly and EdWeb, and can spare an hour or so, you can get involved.

Over the next few days we will begin the process of tidying and restructuring the EdWeb content tree.

We are very pleased to reach our Edweb 100 milestone. Even though it has become a bit of a cliché, the image of the challenge of refuelling a jet in mid-air seems more than appropriate here.

We’ve got a growing list of sites wanting to come into EdWeb, and we’re trying to make sure these sites are managed and brought in in a fair way.

The next regularly scheduled updates and improvements to EdWeb take place on Thursday 6 August and Tuesday 25 August. These deployments will introduce the additions of personalised subsite footers, customisable colour themes, and a new streaming media asset tool, as well as performance and accessibility improvements.

The new University search engine launched on 9 July after a nine month research and development period.