The team shifted priorities over the past few weeks to focus on launching and supporting a new COVID-19 website for a pan-university effort to combat the coronavirus. Both the new website and our move to working from home have necessitated and prompted updates to our web systems. Over the coming weeks, we will continue to focus more on improving and adding new functionality and templates to T4. Below is an overview of major functionality included in recent releases:
New Tridion Templates
There are a slew of new Tridion templates available, including:
Single column news listing template
This new template is intended to be used for announcements and other messages that should be easily scannable. You can view an example of this on https://covid.yale.edu/clinical/yale/ceoupdates/. The new template can be applied using the “News Widget Single Column No Image" component template.
Video Highlight
Displaying a video directly on a home page or other landing page is often not ideal, so we've created a new option to help you publicize videos within your website while linking out to a separate page to actually play the video, the Video Highlight template. Like the other existing "Highlight" options (News and Event), this template enables you to feature a single video on a page full of other related content. You can find an example on https://covid.yale.edu/.
Clinical Trial Highlight
This template is in the same vein as the Video Highlight above. It allows you to create a large visual element on a webpage highlighting a single clinical trial. Just grab the clinical trial ID from Profile System, stick it in a "Clinical Trial Highlight" schema component, and place it on a page using the template "Clinical Trial Highlight."
Heading Groups
This would be considered a more "advanced" template. The YSM websites have logic to automatically apply the correct heading tag (h1, h2, h3, etc) based on the placement of the heading on the page. However, sometimes this automatic selection does not result in the semantic structure you want for a page. The new "Heading Group" templates allow you to group together components on a page achieve the correct heading structure for your content. Please contact ysm.editor@yale.edu for guidance on using the Heading Group templates, if you're interested.
iframe Template
Occasionally, you may need to embed content from an external website on your School of Medicine website. Over the years we've done this many times by using inline frames or "iframes", HTML tags that allow you to insert content from another website on your web page. However, doing so in Tridion has not always been straightforward. We've added a new schema and template pair "iframe" which makes this process much easier. Just copy and paste the URL of the web content you want to embed on your site in the URL fields of the iframe schema. The schema provides multiple fields for various device widths so, if multiple versions are available, you can make sure your visitors see a version of the embedded content that suits their device.
News Tool Updates
Private News Articles
The news tool was originally created to post publicly available news articles and share them. However, we are increasingly using the news tool to post internally focused COVID-19 messages on school intranets. We have added a “private” flag to news articles. This will prevent other organizations or people from adding this article to their websites, and it will also eliminate it from search. However, please note that anything that is truly secure should remain outside of the news tool and placed on a Tridion page protected by CAS security.
Posting links to other new sources
Previously, we recommended posting the full text of Yale News articles into the news tool using the "Yale News" type. However, we now recommend posting these articles as "External News" and linking directly to the original source. You should do this for any article that is not originally written by you or your organization.
Generic URL for Non-News Editors to Submit Articles
We've streamlined the process for users who may not be familiar with Profile System to submit news articles. Any faculty or staff member at Yale University (not just YSM or YSPH) can submit an article by visiting https://prod.admin.profile.yale.edu/mynews.
Calendar Tool Updates
Virtual Locations
In the Location area of an event, you can now specify a virtual meeting and include a link that will be posted on the event. This should make it much easier to post links to Zoom meetings! However, if you're promoting your Zoom meeting on the calendar system or anywhere else online, please be sure to follow Zoom's guidelines for preventing unwanted visitors.
Events filtered by Audience
There is now an option in the Calendar schema to limit events displayed to the audience that is specified in the event (Everyone, Yale Only, School Only, etc.). To use this new feature, update the calendar component used on your listing and republish. You will need to make sure the correct audience is selected in the event.
Profile Updates
Patents for CVs
There is now a Patent section within the “Career” tab. This can be used to list patents in the CV Builder. We do not currently output these on a profile.
Org-Specific Bios Now Only Editable by Org Admins
We've had issues in the recent past where a faculty or staff member did not realize the purpose of an "org-specific bio" that appears on only certain listings of websites, then modified the custom biography to match their regular bio
Wrapping Up
So as you can see we've been busy! If you have any questions about the new templates and updates described in this article, or have an idea for a new template that might be useful for your COVID-19 related web content, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at ysm.editor@yale.edu.