Hi Drupalites,
It’s been a while since we’ve sent a message to our listserv. We hope you’re having a good week. Reaching out to share some important updates with you.
Constant Contact Compromised, Please Take Action Today
Does your department use Constant Contact to send emails or newsletters? If so, please take these actions today by 3 p.m.:
- Review this article: Microsoft says group behind SolarWinds hack now targeting government agencies, NGOs - Reuters.
- Reset your passwords in Constant Contact.
- Scan of messages sent over the last 3 months to determine if they are legitimately from you/your department.
- Confirm password resets.
- Notify ldanes@kent.edu and sjaleel@kent.edu that you have completed these actions.
If you need assistance or have questions, please contact your local IT support.
Custom URLs Are Back - Please Use Sparingly
Drupal taketh away, Drupal giveth back. Custom URL functionality is restored but is now restricted to the group of the page you're editing and we’re sharing some best practice advice.
There are multiple reasons for this adjustment. While we realize that vanity URLs and redirects can be helpful for various reasons, they should be used sparingly to:
- Prevent the dilution and value of mission-critical vanity URLs at the institutional level.
- Elevate institutional pages.
- Protect our search engine results rankings. If more than one department has a similar page (i.e. Apply) but more than one forces the page to live off of the root, Google and site crawlers may have a difficult time contextually determining the difference between these pages. If they are mistakenly considered duplicate, Google will choose one version to consistently show in search results over others, potentially positioning departments against one another.
- Minimize negative impact on our site’s technical performance.
Example: If your page's default URL is www.kent.edu/YourWebsiteName/drupalites/important-event/training-date, you can change it to be any URL that starts with "www.kent.edu/YourWebsiteName/". Again, use this sparingly.
Did You Notice Your Left-hand Navigation’s New Look?
For enhanced readability, the left-hand navigation in Kent State websites has been updated. You will notice two improvements:
- We’ve transitioned from all caps to initial case - a combination of upper/lowercase text.
- A gold signifier was added to indicate the user's location in the site's navigational structure.
As a result, please be sure to review your menus in case you set them up by manually entering all text in caps or lowercase. If, during review, you see all upper or lowercase text in your menus, you will want to edit those titles and transition them to use the appropriate upper/lowercase combinations to avoid inconsistent text formatting.
PDFs Are a Bit Complicated…
1) Link to the Node ID, not to the URL
When creating links to PDFs, please use the node ID (Ex: www.kent.edu/node/123456) of the file content type instead of the direct URL to the PDF (https://www-s3-live.kent.edu/s3fs-root/s3fs-public/file/filename-that-gets-really-long.pdf)
This works like it does for pages - if a user is logged out, the Node ID will forward them directly to the file, and it keeps the PDF updated with the right URL if you upload a new version to the node. (Say you uploaded "Super_Amazing_Document_v3.pdf" to replace "Super_Amazing_Document_v2.pdf" in the same node; your URLs will all be automatically updated on every page if you linked with the Node ID.)
2) Delete your PDFs: The Right Way!
Unfortunately, properly deleting a .PDF (or any file) is a 2-part process.
- Delete/remove the uploaded file within the node using the red "REMOVE" button next to it.
- THEN, (and only then) delete the node itself with the "Delete" link at the bottom of the page.
If you perform only step 2, the deleted PDF file lives on forever on the internet, searchable by Google, and can be very difficult to track down and delete. As a result, your end users could very well be accessing inaccurate information and/or information you no longer want them to see.
Meet UCM’s New Web Designers
Many of you have worked with Rob DiVincenzo and Ian McCullough during the last few years. Recently Rob transitioned to the web presence team in the Division of Information and Technology, so he is still part of the team - just in a different role. Ian accepted a new opportunity. As a result, we’ve been fortunate to bring on two new UCM Web Designers. We’re sure you’ll enjoy working with Tyrone Fontaine and Alex Herbers. Check out their links to learn a bit about them.
As always, thank you for working with us on your web initiatives.
Enjoy the long holiday weekend,
Web Team
Jared Boehm
Lin Danes
Rob DiVincenzo
Tyrone Fontaine
Alex Herbers
Sameer Jaleel
Mayank Ladoia
Tim Priester
Sara Smith