A screen shot of the new campus calendar (beta version)

It’s been an incredibly busy last several weeks. Between juggling content writing, content migration, and setting up the technology to run the new Saint Anselm site, its been hard staying on top of everything. Over the past month and a half we’ve been configuring our new hosting platform with Rackspace. It’s a very robust hosting platform that will allow us to do a few things we haven’t been able to do to this point. The tech support at Rackspace has been great and they will provide us with another important layer of technical support for our Web site.

Last week we installed our new Ingeniux CMS on our servers. The new CMS comes in two parts, a design-time server, which is the server that stores CMS Web content and it is the software content authors and editors will access to edit pages in the new site. The design-time server then publish static pages out to a separate server called a run-time server. Changes and replication between the two servers are managed by peer-sync software. We’ve been hearing good thinks from the developers at BarkleyREI about the robustness of the new CMS.

Last week we also had our second walk through and review of all the new Ingeniux page types (Web templates) with BarkleyREI. It was very exciting to see everything coming together and to see just how easy it will be to post and manage content in the new CMS. The right column of the CMS will offer content authors many options from inserting photo galleries and video to pulling in Flickr feeds, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, and callouts to content on the site. Each department or section of the site will be able to have its own automated news and calendar areas. The new site will utilize a site-wide taxonomy (or keywords) allowing us to tag and distribute news content across the site.

The new site will also feature a vastly improved campus calendar, which will allow college departments to pull in events within their sites also using tags. I’ve included a screen shot of the calendar with this blog post and you can check out a beta version of the calendar at calendar.anselm.edu. Please note that none of the links in the header or footer of the calendar currently work as we still need to move the CMS to our Web server. The new calendar will allow visitors to subscribe to events, receive e-mail notifications and reminders, add to Outlook calendars, or bookmark an event to dozens of social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter. Both news and event categories will feature RSS, which will allow content contributors to syndicate content to any number of external sites. It’s important to note that a new campus calendar was one of the top three requests we received from students, faculty, and staff during the site discovery phase of the project.

Later this week, after BarkleyREI has finished running the site through quality assurance testing, we will start to build out the structure of the site (the site-wide navigation). Shortly thereafter, we will begin adding the thousands of pages of new and existing content that needs to be migrated into the new CMS. This is an enormous undertaking, one that will take several weeks to complete. At some point in the coming weeks we will have a beta version of the site available for the campus community to preview.

Lastly, we are currently behind on content writing, so this work will continue into the next several weeks as well.