Drupal at Oregon State University

Community and Partner Updates

1. Employee dashboard: a beta version of employee dashboard to replace MyOSU.
   • Are you interested in adding content? contact Michael McDonald
2. Drupal 8: WAMS is busy prototyping and configuring
3. Hackathon 5: Mark your calendars for May 8th
   1. A month before, we'll be hosting a mixer to get groups together. Expect an email soon
4. Web Literacy Training
   • This is a 6 part training for people to take before attending Drupal classes and includes entry level skills.  
   • Available remotely through Bridge.
   • Please let Joe Fenn know if you'd like to sample it. He asks that you take Qualtrics survey after for feedback. 
   • It will be launched after Joe gets feedback, so expect it coming soon.
5. Brand Audit
   1. University Marketing conducted a brand audit of material submitted by 10 units
      1. Submissions included homepages, landing pages, and other key pages on websites
      2. Provided a snapshot of how we're doing with accessibility, SEO, and performance
         1. Accessibility: outright error numbers are low, but there are still issues that need to be checked by a human
         2. SEO: 2 really common errors include not having a meta description and images missing an alt attribute
         3. Performance: Sites load faster on desktop than mobile and some of the speed is controlled by our Drupal distribution. There are still steps you can take as an author or architect:
            1. Check for how many videos are embedded in any given page as they can slow your speeds.
            2. Resize images for web. Check out the photo sizing guide.
            3. Check out Chrome's Lighthouse tool if you want to analyze the speed of a webpage.
            4. Google also has PageSpeedInsights, which is a browser based tool that can analyze speeds and will give a breakdown and explanation of all the metrics

Discussion Topics

10 tips to make your Drupal Life Easier

Presentation Slides (Joe has some great screen shots!)

1. Perform Batch Operations Via Content List
   1. There is a content list! And it has batch operations! Many people forget that you can click on the Content header in the admin tool bar and it will list (most) everything in your site. 
   2. Using batch operations is a powerful tool that allows you to apply changes to many things in one go.
      • Use cases:
        • If you change the name of a group, you can batch change URLs
        • You can publish and unpublish multiple pages
        • In general, most of the operations at the bottom of the node can be batch processed
2. Books List to Manage Books
   • Outline and change the order of your titles
   • If you delete the book item, you are deleting the page
3. Batch Upload File Via Media Library
   • You can add media, PDFs, Word documents in batches so you don't have to do them one at a time.
   • After you have performed the batch upload, it will take you to a list to be able to change meta data and administrative titles.
4. Give Good Media Names
   • Often, when you download an item from the web it will give the file a lengthy file name, sometimes with a lot of numbers.
   • Good naming conventions will allow you to more easily find what you're already uploaded.
     • Note: a screen reader will read the file name if you don't have an alt tag. So, if you don't to do if for your own convenience, then it should be renamed for accessibility.
   • When first upload, it will use the file name as the name, but you can change it to something more useful.
5. Make Use of the My Files Tab
   • When you're using a picture more than once, you can find it through the My Files tab in the media browser (AKA the pop up when you click to add an image). 
   • You can also find pictures uploaded by other people in the Library tab.
6. View Modes!
   • Applies presets for the size of a photo so you don't have to resize a photo so many times.
   • Architect can set view modes. Come to Open Lab if you want to create your own view modes.
7. Use Token Values to Automate Structure
   • What are tokens? When you have a sticker going to an event. "Hi my name is ______" (and you insert a name). Everyone's name is different, but you know that you want the correct name on the sticker. Tokens are like filling out the correct name.
   • You can use them to build URL structure, file management, meta tags. It automates a lot of things and can save you a load of work.
     • example: use it to show the author of the article
8. Add Summary Text
   • This will help your SEO if you write a concise summary of your page. The summary can show up in search results and when you share a page on Facebook, Twitter, or Slack.
9. Use Open Graph Configs in Metatag
   • There are so many settings, tokens, and options!
   • Open Graph protocol
   • Facebook Debugger
   • Twitter Card Validator
   • (In order to use the debuggers, you have to be logged into Facebook and Twitter.)
10. Go to Open Lab!

Monsido Progress Report

Mosido is a web tool that we use to scan websites to keep track of accessibility, analytics, SEO, and all your links, files, documents.

Currently, we have:

• 231 domains
• 100 active users

If you're in the Acquia stack, WAMS can add you. Talk to Michael McDonald.
Talk to Ed Lee, if you're not part of the Acquia stack and want to use Monsido. There is a small fee associated.

Blogs can be added, but they are not added by default. Request Monsido for your blog.

Use cases for Monsido

• Someone had a name change. Monsido found all instances of the old name on every web page, every PDF so that the name could be updated.
• Update the URL for a Banner form and needed to be updated
• When a group got their own site and were previously part of a site, they wanted to know who was linking to their content. They were able to reach out to other groups that were linking to their old pages to make sure links got updated.
• Looking for Drupal dev links. When you're working in your development site and you put in a full URL (https://drupal.oregonstate.edu/open-lab), rather than using a relative path (open-lab), that link will then always go to your dev site. What this means: people off campus can't access the page and could be cut off from vital information.
  • Go to the policy center and look for the word "acquia" or "dev." It list all the places you have dev links.

Improvement in scanning

• Code snippets can be marked to ignore for all future scans. This will allow you to ignore theme level errors.
• There is now document download tracking
• You can rescsan any single page for more than just accessibility, scan for everything Monsido has to offer (SEO, broken links, etc.). This will allow you to confirm that you have fixed isses and things are working as intended.
• Use History tab in Monsido to see what you have fixed or marked as reviewed.

Web Technology Training Manual

Joe has worked hard on creating a web technology training manual website that includes many topics, such as:

• Google Analytics
• Drupal
• Wordpress
• Localist

You can also get presentations for Joe's Drupal classes and watch many how-to videos! Joe has about 40 video tutorials.