Web Services

I’m reliably informed nobody reads this blog but no matter, if you read my last blog you’d have noticed something about an upgrade. You may have been wondering what happened to it! It did indeed all go quiet. However we have been beavering away on it and we’re happy to say our hard work is starting to pay off. It’ll be a while before you guys will see the results though unfortunately. It is a massive upgrade.

There’s a shiny new interface which you’ll be glad to know loads a lot faster and is far more responsive than it is presently. Kupu is being killed off and a nicer editor (ckeditor), that will render external sources in place, will be in. No more of these yellow boxes you love so much….. There will be whole new ways of creating content too that will give you added flexibility in designing your pages. We’ll be better too! The upgrades will make it easier to manage and develop new functionality for the service which means we’ll be able to deliver projects faster and be more responsive to your needs. On top of that, the man with the plan, Andy in IS has got some brilliant ideas on rebuilding our production set up to make it all go much faster so we’re dreaming of actually providing the quality of service that we hope you’ll actually enjoy using!

I can imagine some of you won’t be thrilled to hear about changes to the user interface and will be concerned about having to get familiar with yet another new interface…. We know what a pain it can be. You’ll be glad to know that your sites will continue to work in the new setup and you won’t need to do any work to fix it!….. but there will be a little requirement to get familiar with things… Sorry! We’ve had the same interface for the last 8 years and it desperately needs modernising so there had to be some changes. We hope you’ll think of them as improvements …
and not just an attempt by us to wind you up!

I’ll be back to give you more details on the upgrade and the features that we’ll be bringing in, til then…

A question often asked of us here in Web Services!  The choice was ultimately made by me and Neil Martin, we were the two Web Support Officers at the time but our choice was severely limited.

The Content Management System Project Group (CMSPG) was set up in April 2002 to look into the options available for a CMS.  Very early on in the process that group settled on Zope as the framework for the future development of the CMS.  I was initially unimpressed by Zope on my first dealings with it.

Several other universities had already started using Zope but with different CMS built on top of it.  In November 2003 I organised a Zope users meeting at the UCL and we had visitors from Bristol, Birkbeck, Oxford Brookes, ICH and others.  They were using different CMSs including Zope’s Content Management Framework (CMF), Plone and EasyPublisher.  In February 2004 I demoed some of the options for Zope to Information Systems (IS).  To say they weren’t impressed is an understatement!  Just after that meeting Neil discovered that his former employers, Luton University were using a Zope based CMS that we hadn’t heard off, Silva.  I quickly installed it and we arranged to go visit them.

Compared to other CMS on offer Silva provided out-of-the-box organisational workflow which compared favourably to the community based alternatives where we would have had to develop the workflows separately which was something that would have been difficult to achieve quickly given our, then, limited Zope, Python skills.  The templating system was also very simple compared to the others and Neil and I could reproduce UCL templating very quickly.  It was also easier to build simple tools into it for template menuing etc.  It was the obvious choice for us.

IS signed up Debs Pollard in late May 2004 to give us sysadmin support for the CMS and we finally started up the live service in early 2005.  Jon Bowlas joined up shortly after as our Silva Developer and we made great progress after that.

There are now around 540 sites in Silva and we have some promising new developments on the way for 2012!  More on that in an bit.

Here are a few Silva CMS updates we’ve made in the last month. We’ll endeavour to post similar updates as we continue to develop, fix bugs, etc. for the system over time.

New code sources

• Display Silva document as lightbox
• Display random news article
• PHP includer (new version of the PHP code source, which is faster to load, and more efficient on systems)

General

• Horizontal menu: It is now possible to display a single level horizontal menu based on the root items of your site using the UCL branding layout. This will display throughout your publication.
• Mobile view: The custom mobile view of the UCL branding layout now displays in Android devices.

Amended code sources

• Accordion: it is now possible to add multiple accordions into a page.
• Accordion: a bug that caused the code source to show incorrectly in IE6 has also been fixed.
• Caption an image: browser compatibility bug fixed
• Tabbed box and accordion: a bug that was generated when these two code sources appeared on the same page has been fixed

Just a short post to say that there are now nearly 400 websites using Silva at UCL (we expect the 400th to come in the next few days!). These don’t include test sites, or sites within sites (such as the many subsites in e.g. www.ucl.ac.uk/isd).

As the service grows, we’ll continue to develop and improve its various facets as well.

We always work to develop our Silva content management system over time, although many of these updates are ‘behind the bonnet’ and not noticeable to the average user. However, since February’s Silva upgrade, there have been a few more discernible improvements, which may be of interest to some users.

New external sources

• Basic looped slideshow
• Events calendar viewer
• Syntax highlighter
• Tabbed box now offers optional cookie functionality

General bug fixes/minor improvements

• Corporate Identity layout now uses asynchronous Google Analytics tracker code, enhancing tracker load time
• Default ticker external source now works in WebKit browsers
• Staff profile header now has ‘Website’ parameter

General

• New Silva Documentation
• New gallery of Corporate Identity layout examples (sorry, UCL users only)

Coming soon

Because of various technical issues, we’re aiming to deprecate ‘external content includers’ (that is, external sources that pull content from e.g. the Apache webserver). However, we do intend to build external sources that provide the same kind of facilities as these ‘external content includers’. For instance, we’ll soon be ‘launching’ a new ‘webforms’ external source which will offer far more functionality for setting up generic forms. We’ll also be developing the events calendar code source further, giving users more options for how they’d like the calendar to be displayed. More on these things later…

[Test link]

Yesterday we completed a major upgrade of Silva to version 2.1.7. While this upgrade features bug-fixes, and lots of improvements to performance and stability, etc. on the back-end, there are a number of new features that may be of interest to users.

New Corporate Identity Layout

We’ll post more about this shortly, but a new layout is available to Silva users which is based on the UCL home page design. It’s also got viewing options for the iPhone/iPod, and a large range of new code sources (ie ‘widgets’) that can easily be set up. More on that later…

Other improvements

Here are a few other improvements that may be of particular interest to Silva editors…

(Slightly) Improved Editing interface

There are a few small changes to the main Silva editing interface, which should help to improve its overall usability. For details of these, see:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/websites/silvaCMS/upgrade-editing-changes

Google Analytics tracking codes

Currently we track all UCL Silva websites using our own Google Analytics account. However you can now add your own Google Analytics account tracking code to your publication, and track all statistics yourself as well.

To do this, go to the ‘UCL Attributes’ object of your publication. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see the ‘Google Analytics Tracker Code’ field. Simply put your account’s code here, then ensure that your Google Analytics account profile is set to track this site.

Very important: Please check that your Google Analytics account is successfully tracking your website’s user statistics one day after setting this up. If your account hasn’t been set to track your website properly, there’s no way to get the stats back!

Stylesheets

It’s now possible to inherit other ‘local-styles.css’ objects from higher positions in your publication.

For a list of all improvements, see:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/websites/silvaCMS/improvements

As part of our Silva upgrade, we’ve developed iPhone/iPod specific stylesheets that will render new Silva layouts in a way that’s actually helpful to iPhone users. These will be shown on sites that choose to use a new Silva layout which will be available after the upgrade.

I’m fairly new to the world of mobile web browsing, and the process has been quite illuminating, so I thought I’d write a quick post about the experience…

Note: this post doesn’t go into detail about technical aspects of developing websites for the iPhone. If you’re interested in that, have a look at:

• Web Development for the iPhone
• iPhoneWebDev
• QuirksMode Mobile Compatibility Tests

Why style a page differently for an iPhone?

Many of our website’s pages, rightly or wrongly, have an awful lot of text. While this can present some difficulties for ‘normal’ readers, it presents far more for those trying to read with a mobile device. If a page hasn’t been specifically styled for a mobile device, it’ll just display as a squashed version in the device’s viewport.

To actually read information from this squashed view, the user then has to zoom in to be able to recognise text characters. But because only a small number of characters can be shown within the viewport at one time, the user then has to scroll the view from left to right. No one sentence can be read without the user having to be distracted away by awkwardly having to shift their view of it.

A different style

Therefore, instead of trying to fit as much as possible into the tiny viewport of the iPhone, we’ve tried to extract the ‘essential’ elements of a Silva page: it’s title, central column content (i.e. the main text), and basic site navigation. We then used the Silva CMS to set up a different version of a page if an iPhone was browsing: this only showed the elements mentioned within a simple HTML page. Navigation however, was now positioned at the end of the page (so that visitors wouldn’t have to scroll through it every time they went to a new page). This was also followed by a more generic navigation for a few of the usual UCL footer links. More notably however, this also included a link for the user to touch if they wanted to browse the site without the iPhone styling. This was really just in case there were certain pages (e.g. image galleries etc.) that may actually show far better in their original format, even for an iPhone.

Finally, we added some JavaScript for these pages to hide the URL bar from showing, so that it might look a little more like an iPhone application, and also allow a little more space for the page itself. The JavaScript was also set to resize any images that were originally bigger than the viewport’s dimensions. Any other page elements that couldn’t be resized would be replaced by a prompt to view the page in its original form.

The future…

While we’re fairly confident that our iPhone styles are beneficial to such visitors, we’re obviously keen to find out what usability issues crop up. We’ll also be interested to expand these styling options to other mobile devices in the near future.

As Silva users will be only too aware, at the turn of the new year the CMS suffered a number of severe performance issues. Silva has now grown to accommodate over 2000 registered users and over 500 different websites (including sandbox sites), and the system began to suffer extremely slow response times as a consequence.

However, after our visit to ETH, Web Services and IS have implemented a new ‘ZEO server’ setup , which splits the Silva server into 5 separate instances, each taking care of particular tasks. The result has surprised us all a little:

[Edit] The diagram above should, of course, be titled ‘Server response time’, not ‘page load time’ – apologies for the confusion.

The big drop shown on this graph is when the ZEO server setup was implemented, and apart from a ‘blip’ on 13th March (caused by the day’s file system problems), it’s been remarkably consistent.

As our Silva service continues to grow, we’ll obviously be keeping an eye on performance, but we’re still quite amazed by the difference that this setup has made.

Members of Web Services and Systems Group in IS visited ETH Zurich on Monday and Tuesday of this week to take a look at their Zope and Silva set up. Silva is the Content Management System (CMS) used at UCL and ETH and Zope is the web application framework on which Silva is built.

ETH’s approach to Zope was most impressive with a Zeo Architecture that allowed the CMS to be run on a cluster of servers. The ETH and UCL teams also discussed Silva and plans for future development.

We’d like to thank the ETH team for making us feel so welcome and in sharing their extensive knowledge and we hope to return their hospitality at some point in the future.