2014 Sessions

Back by popular demand, this session will ignore all the technical mumbo jumbo and show you how to use the YaleSites pre-built features so you can easily build a dynamic site regardless of your level of technical expertise.

In this session, I will demonstrate the YaleSites Features including News, Video, Photo Galleries and Rotating Header Images. This presentation will cover the basics of the features and is a great way for those who are new to YaleSites see what is available out-of-the-box. 

Learn the difference between a Feed Importer, a Feed Entity, and a Feed Item.

Possible topics, time permitting:

• Learn how to automatically add properties from the parent feed entity to each feed item.
• Learn how to filter by the parent feed entity in Views.
• Learn how to use feeds to import entities that reference other entities.
• Learn how to use the newly-added Date iCal module with Feeds.
• And more?

If you have a very specific use-case, feel free to contact me in advance.  I will see if I can work it in to the presentation.

This session will provide an overview of what to think about when it comes to sharing your website’s content on social media. Whether you use your own channels, or rely on visitors to share your content, this session will provide a mix of strategy and tactics to help you out. We’ll also take a look at some useful social media metrics to help you measure the impact on your site’s traffic.

Photos and other media are a great way to add interest to your site. Learn how to view an image for cropping as well as how to select quality images to add to your YaleSite. Topics include tips on taking your own photos, cropping, sizing, color/light.

You’re ready and eager to build your YaleSite, but have you thought about how people will find the information you want them to find? Are you concerned that your vision for the site may not meet your site visitors’ needs? 

When it comes to building a website, determining how people will use your site (usability) is critical to the planning process. A lot of us think that ‘getting it right’ is an arduous and expensive task. We may be afraid that we don’t know enough about design to make a website that people enjoy using. However, the truth is that you can do something right now to improve–and keep improving–the usability of your site. In this workshop, we’ll talk about “discount usability” methods that can help you learn about your site visitors without breaking the bank or delaying your delivery dates. 

Need another reason to come to this workshop? If you volunteer your own site, we’ll do a live usability test and figure out actionable recommendations! If you want to volunteer your YaleSite, be sure to send a link to Adriana (adriana.corona@yale.edu).

An up-to-date publications list is the bread-and-butter of many scholars, labs and academic departments; for many, it’s the primary feature sought by colleagues, funders, and prospective students. Unfortunately, citation handling is a nasty little Hydra: a many-headed mess of parameters that vary by publication type, further troubled by inconsistent output styles across disciplines (MLA? APA? TLA? LBJ?). Biblio is a commonly-used module that populates, styles, and sorts publications, making it easy to integrate publication displays within any page on a website. It has been widely deployed by the OpenScholar project at Harvard and by Stanford Sites. The module is especially useful for lab groups and departments that put out a large volume of publications or a wide variety of publication type. 

This presentation will be a quick rundown of the problems faced by citation management systems and the advantages of the Biblio interface, primarily intended for site administrators. It will also explore applications of the module for the YaleSites base template, which might be a useful conversation for members of the Yale Drupal team.