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ICYMI... FAU got a slick new website, joining a growing legion of other major universities in adopting this sliding photo format.

Reaser and Johnson are the second slide on the "front page." Check it out!
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Jean is back with the Texans??
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Rick said

Jean is back with the Texans??
Posted On: May 14th 2014, 7:27 PM #331396

No, not sure how they missed that
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Sorry, forgot the red font…

 :Big-Grin:
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I saw that too but did not comment. Not good writing there was it? C'mon FAU, ya gotta do better than that, we are an institute of higher learning!
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Athletics or regular website?

Athletics still looks the same to me.

I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick @$$ and I'm out of bubble gum.

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FAU.edu
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FAU's website has generally improved over the years.  The worst, and only significant setback was when Brogan in 2006 spent millions to by a content management system from his buds at SunGard for SCT Luminis without even consulting anyone in what was then IRM (Information Resources Management), now OIT (Office of Information Technology). Before that, each college had its own layout.  The layout for Arts and Letters was the one then used with SCT for all the colleges, so at least the implementation of SCT brought in some uniformity (which is now again lost).  The problem was that while Arts and Letters was then fully W3C and ADA compliant prior to the implementation of SCT (though the marketing people designed the layout in portrait rather than landscape, and thus the banner thus took up nearly half the page on most monitors at the time), SCT destroyed both of those compliances.  The SCT is the worst piece of software I've ever seen, no exaggeration. We actually counted one day, why do what should be capable with 2 mouse clicks and a few seconds by one person what can be done with over 62,400 mouse clicks by seven people and over 280 man hours to complete. Nothing took less than hours, and often days to complete when they should have taken seconds. A one-character correction of a spelling error generally took anywhere from 2 to 4 hours to fix.

The next content management system, OmniUpdate, was far superior to SCT and implemented in 2011.  This did not necessarily change the site, which remained neither W3C nor ADA compliant as OmniUpdate was only used to update the rotten code generated by SCT. But, at least updates could actually be timely published.  Some colleges/departments took advantage of actually being able to publish pages, and did indeed change their layout from the 2004 marketing-designed portrait layout. However, this caused the site to lose it uniformity once again.

This latest version, at least for the homepage, looks like a complete re-write, while still having some minor issues with W3C vallidation, looks like it is otherwise the first one in several years, since before Brogan implemented SCT, that is otherwise ADA compliant. The code is much more clean.

Since I first came across a problem over 10 years ago, I've been trying to get IRM and OIT to make a very simple fix.  I've had several deans go to them with me for the same purpose when they became embarrassed by the problem. I gave up after several years, and the problem still exists. For example, go to Department of Music - Welcome and you are ok (though the page still has the portrait layout designed by marketing in 2004 and is 750 pixels wide).  But then try Department of Music - Welcome (make any letter in "music" uppercase) and you receive a 404 missing page error message. Of course, that is offset by Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature, which has its page at Welcome. Make any letter in "LLCL" lowercase (the exact opposite of music), and you receive the 404 error message.  My personal favorite is for Womens Studies, which is only available at Welcome - mixed case.  Change the case of any letter in "WomensStudies" and it bombs. So, yes, there is a mixture of all lowercase, mixed case, and all uppercase requirements. You have to know that the person at IRM, who did not follow convention and use all lower case, randomly decided to name the folders.  They should be lower case, as should the filenames for the pages, and whatever the user types in as the address be converted to all lower case and then searched for, and the issue is resolved. The problem is that nobody at the university level, now OIT (as opposed to the college level), can be bothered to make a fix, and nobody at the college level has the necessary privileges to do so. It's a minor problem, but it is rather embarrassing when it rears its head.

As for what is in the content, and who has the capability to make changes to the content, that is another matter. It's gone from extremes of one person per college to virtually all faculty and staff.  And, with so many now making changes, when the insert links, they assume that the link will work in all lower case, not knowing they have to look up folder names to be sure, and not having the rights to do that anyway.  While the all lower case assumption works most of the time, about 1/3 of the time it will fail. Then, even when all lower case is used, if the person editng the page does type in "Music" rather than "music", the link should work. Regarless of the case in which the link is entered, it should work 100% of the time.
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owlfamily said

Athletics or regular website?

Athletics still looks the same to me.


Posted On: May 15th 2014, 6:53 AM #331405


Hmmm, wonder which one was updated then? 
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mlbboca said

…Since I first came across a problem over 10 years ago, I've been trying to get IRM and OIT to make a very simple fix.  I've had several deans go to them with me for the same purpose when they became embarrassed by the problem. I gave up after several years, and the problem still exists. For example, go to Department of Music - Welcome and you are ok (though the page still has the portrait layout designed by marketing in 2004 and is 750 pixels wide).  But then try Department of Music - Welcome (make any letter in "music" uppercase) and you receive a 404 missing page error message. Of course, that is offset by Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature, which has its page at Welcome. Make any letter in "LLCL" lowercase (the exact opposite of music), and you receive the 404 error message.  My personal favorite is for Womens Studies, which is only available at Welcome - mixed case.  Change the case of any letter in "WomensStudies" and it bombs. So, yes, there is a mixture of all lowercase, mixed case, and all uppercase requirements. You have to know that the person at IRM, who did not follow convention and use all lower case, randomly decided to name the folders.
Posted On: May 15th 2014, 12:48 PM #331410

FAIL

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