New Advisory Council Members’ Site
TIS recently completed a new password-restricted Web site for members of the UT Libraries Advisory Council. The site provides Council members with a place to find the latest Advisory Council news, UT Libraries news, member contact information, the council charter, meeting minutes, and nomination form. Along with the new Web site, a new Advisory Council listserv was set up on utlists.utexas.edu that allows members to quickly communicate with each other.
The site was built in UT Libraries’ new content management system (CMS). The CMS allows us to easily restrict public access to the site by requiring a password. The password is necessary because the new site contains phone numbers and addresses of Council members. The CMS allowed us to do a few other cool things as well. For each council member, we created a single page with contact and biographical information. Then we used the CMS’s “views” feature to display that information in different ways. For example, we arranged the member list to display both alphabetically by first name and by the members’ position and term expiration date. We made each bio appears on its own page. We did not need to write a lick of HTML to create any of these displays. After a bit of prep work marking up the contact information and telling the CMS what to do with it, we sat back and let the CMS do the hard work. Even better, when it comes time to add or remove a member, the list only needs to be edited once and the changes will automatically update in all the appropriate places on the site.
The new site should prove to be a breeze to keep current. The home page features Advisory Council news and an RSS feed of the UT Libraries news (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/about/news/). The Advisory Council news lives in the CMS and uses the “views” feature to display an abbreviated list of news and the full news story, just like UT Libraries news. A couple of weeks ago we met with the folks who will maintain the site and gave a short how-to session on using the CMS. After the session they reported that they feel confident in their ability to use the CMS to update the site and look forward to not writing any HTML.
