This month’s Web Publisher’s Community session highlighted new and existing features in EdWeb and gave us an insight into ongoing development of the platform.

Call to Action – Duncan MacGruer

Duncan introduced us to the new Call to Action feature in EdWeb. This feature places a prominent button on the page to draw the attention of the reader to what you want them to do next. It was developed with collaboration and funding from Communications & Marketing.

Using calls to action helps both the author and reader focus on what the page is for and gives us a clear way to measure success of the page by directing users along an obvious path through the site, which can then be tracked with analytics.

Duncan discussed best practise in using this new feature, giving us some welcome do’s and don’ts.  He also gave us a demonstration of how to add the buttons into an EdWeb page and the range of options available.

Adding a call to action (EASE login required)

Writing good link text (EASE login required)

Top 10 things to know about EdWeb – Lauren Tormey

Next up, Lauren gave us some fantastic tips and tricks for working with EdWeb, answering some of the more frequently asked questions in our support calls.

This whistle stop tour ranged in topic from adding links to livening up your homepage. Lauren recommended an easier and more reliable way to add internal links to EdWeb pages using the page’s secure URL in LinkIt. She also explained how to use the priority levels for homepage panes to both communicate what is most important on the page and achieve a more visually engaging result.

Top 10 things to know about EdWeb

EdWeb Collaboration and Development Framework – Chris Copner

Chris Copner talked about the work that has been done to develop the EdWeb Collaboration and Development Framework. This is a framework which sets out how Edweb development will be carried forward. It tackles how new features for development will be selected and how that work will be approached.

The project began by looking at the existing state of EdWeb and mapping out the features which are already planned for development. It then went on to define the processes for selecting and prioritising new features.

A crucial part of the project was a workshop which brought together a cross section of stakeholders with a range of skill and roles – developers, digital professionals and service staff. The aim of this day was to identify the strengths of and challenges to ongoing development and new opportunities for collaborative working. This seems to have been a great success, producing a process map and reaching very positive agreements about how to proceed.

EdWeb Code Sprint – Billy Wardrop

Billy told us about the first EdWeb code sprint.

The idea of a code sprint is to bring together developers with varying levels of familiarity with the platform and dive straight into writing coding solutions to a selection of bug fixes and features that are small enough to get done within the timeframe of the sprint.

This was a chance to build on the Open Source community within the University by inviting developers from all over the University to collaborate in this very time-efficient way, sharing skills and knowledge to improve Edweb.

The code sprint was itself a collaboration between Information Services Applications Division and the University Website Programme and was run by colleagues from both groups.

This first EdWeb code sprint was a great success with 8 fixes attempted and 8 fixes achieved!

Get involved

The next code sprint will likely be in October. If you are a developer at the University of Edinburgh and would like to be involved, you can register your interest on this Doodle poll.

2nd EdWeb Code Sprint

August 31 WPC agenda and presentations

To see the full agenda and the presentations from this month’s meeting, have a look on our wiki.

Web Publishing Community Session August 31 2016 (EASE login required)