Rikupekka Oksanen discusses the University of Jyväskylä's transition from Plone 4 to Plone 5 during a significant website renewal between 2016 and 2017, focusing on the challenges faced and lessons learned from the process. Key issues included organizational changes, editor training, and technical difficulties such as caching and performance problems. Ultimately, the migration aimed to future-proof the university's web presence while emphasizing effective communication and collaboration amid the complexities of the project.

1. BEYOND INFINITY WITH PLONE 5 -
ARE WE THERE YET?
RIKUPEKKA OKSANEN - PLONE CONFERENCE 2017

2. THIS TALK IS ABOUT WEBSITES
▸ In 2016 University of Jyväskylä started a massive website
renewal process - upgrading from Plone 4 to Plone 5,
designing a new brand and new theme and changing to a new
organizational structure.
▸ In my presentation last year I tried to anticipate the challenges
we would face and how Plone 5 could help us.
▸ Now it's time to look back (and forward) on how things went,
where we are and what we could learn from the experience.
▸ This is about Plone 5, theming, Mosaic, agile, and people.

3. PREVIOUSLY, IN PLONE CONFERENCE 2016
▸ https://2017.ploneconf.org/
Ploneconf2016/talks/to-infinity-and-
beyond-with-plone-5
▸ https://www.slideshare.net/rioksane/to-
infinity-and-beyond-with-plone-5
▸ https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=XmWbUFXaV3A

4. WHO, ME?
▸ Rikupekka Oksanen
rioksane@jyu.fi
▸ Twitter: @rikupekka
▸ Plone-user/site builder/support/trainer/
project manager since 2004

5. LET ME TELL YOU A STORY...
▸ Of hard-working heroes, occasional bureaucratic villains(?),
massive challenges, last-minute surprises, monster-sized
bugs and perseverance...
▸ ...and website content. Lots of it!

6. IN THE LAND OF FINLAND NEAR NORTH POLE...
▸ Year 2017, when it rained.
Jyväskylä

7. UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ
▸ A significant multi-discipline research university and an
expert in education
▸ https://www.jyu.fi/en/university
▸ 15 000 students, 2600 staff

8. PLONE AND UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ
▸ Using Plone since 2004
▸ 7 (now 6) faculties, several departmental sites, separate
institute sites
▸ Separate site for students and applicants
▸ About 90 Plone instances - of many are customised
applications (such as video portal, payment services, study
material portals etc.)

9. WWW.JYU.FI

10. STATS AT WWW.JYU.FI MAIN WEBSITE
▸ Pageviews 1 700 000/month
▸ Visitors 200 000/month
▸ Content: approx 100 000 pages, portals, forms.
▸ Another 100 000 of files and images.
▸ Hundreds of content editors all around the university

11. WEBSITE RENEWAL IN 2016-2017 - ASPECTS
▸New organisational structure 1.1.2017
▸New brand #JYUnity #JYUnique
▸New theme
▸New intranet (for staff)
▸New search engine
▸And Plone 5 everywhere

12. CHALLENGES AHEAD
▸ Content editors: new Plone version and theme, new org.
structure, actually have to delete something
▸ Project management and support: communication,
managing expectations, new guides, trainings
▸ Developers: Plone 5 or 5.1 beta,
migrations, new theme, better search,
smooth releases, tools for content
editors (new portals with Mosaic)

13. OUR HEROES

14. UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS UNIT
▸ Content managers; responsible for brand, intranet (and
the whole renewal)

15. CONTENT EDITORS
▸ All around faculties and departments, going through all
content and learning new structure and Plone 5 version

16. NPC: AD AGENCY
▸ Designing new brand and new theme

17. PLONE DEVELOPMENT TEAM
▸ Maintaining the old, while creating new: migrations,
theme, search, support and training

18. VILLAINS?
▸ "Change Approval Committee"?

19. CHALLENGE 1.
ORGANISATIONAL
CHANGE

20. NEW ORG STRUCTURE
▸ Combining faculties and departments
▸ Moving people from faculties under administration
(University Services -unit)
▸ New responsibilities, as website content editors were
given to new people

21. ONE (GOOD) THING WE DIDN'T ACCOUNT FOR
▸ Some faculties and departments actually wanted to "start
over" with content
▸ So it wasn't just content migration to the old stuff
▸ It slows down the process, but eventually will enhance
content quality
▸ Right now: lasta 4 faculties under construction in preview-
sites, with only partially migrated content

22. NEW PEOPLE DOING NEW STUFF
▸ Previously, the people responsible for updating Plone
content were stationed under departments (amanuensis,
secretaries, planning officers)
▸ In 2017

23. TO PLONE 5
▸ Website renewal could have been done on Plone 4
▸ But upgrading to Plone 5 seemed like future-proof option
▸ This decision was done by IT Services and Plone team - it
was a technical aspect no one questioned.

24. OUR PLAN A YEAR AGO...

25. OUR PLAN A YEAR AGO...

26. LAUGHING

27. WINTER 2017
▸ First new faculty site https://www.jyu.fi/hytk was released in 3rd
January 2017, as planned with migrated content and new theme
▸ Problems:
▸ Caching - changes didn't update immediately
▸ Performance - slow
▸ Old site still visible - broken links, wrong content, search
problems
▸ Shock about the new theme

29. WINTER 2017
▸ Solutions:
▸ Tweaking theme
▸ Fixing issues (cache, performance)
▸ Training, Plone 5 guides
▸ Lots of communication
▸ Forming www-editor -groups for new faculties

30. SPRING 2017
▸ In March 2017 another faculty https://www.jyu.fi/edupsy
was released
▸ Release was much smoother than the previous one
▸ In April a new intranet site was partially released - the
"helpcenter" for staff: https://uno.jyu.fi/helpcenter
▸ Other new Plone 5 sites also released
▸ Problems: old faculty sites were still visible in searches

31. SUMMER 2017
▸ Releasing more smaller Plone sites, creating preview-sites
for another faculties and departments
▸ Plone Midsummersprint in July 2017
▸ https://www.coactivate.org/projects/midsummer-
sprint-2017
▸ Other Plone development and releases
▸ In August: prioritisation for autumn: main website released
next (before intranet, other, faculties etc.)

32. SEPTEMBER 2017
▸ In August: preparing to release www.jyu.fi main pages
come new semester (four main portals)
▸ Last minute changes to theme, but also approval from new
rector
▸ Theme was ready, cotent almost
▸ September 7th 2017: Release of www.jyu.fi main website

33. Huge visual
navigation, no
navigation bar,
video embed

34. Campus news and events, statement of the schools philosophy

35. More news,
alumni in
the news

36. Huge social media integration tile
Footer with links

37. AND
▸ We start to get feedback...

38. ▸ HELL BREAKS LOOSE!

39. ▸ HELL BREAKS LOOSE!

41. EXAMPLE FEEDBACK 1
▸ "Email does not work!"
▸ "Too modern"
▸ "Too big images"
▸ "Just PR material and empty slogans"
▸ "Cannot find anything"
▸ "€%&*###&%!!"

42. EXAMPLE FEEDBACK 2
▸ "Men are researchers, studying, or leaders, women are just
a**es"
▸ Do not underestimate the power of visual message of
huge images...
▸ Slow, huge images

43. GATHERING FEEDBACK
▸ We have Plone forms (fi/en) for feedback
▸ First couple of days, about 50 messages
▸ In a month, 150 (in our case, quite a lot)
▸ Bad: 75%, OK: 15%, Good: 10%
▸ We added selection on role of the person giving
feedback, resulting:
▸ Staff: 75%, Student: 15%, External audience: 10%

44. CONTENT IS KING
▸ You remember this https://xkcd.com/773/ comic?

45. SOMEHOW THIS HAPPENED

46. Letter from
the president
Letter from
the president

47. Campus news and events, statement of the schools philosophy

48. More
news,
alumni
in the
news

49. Full name of
the school!
Campus map!

50. SERIOUSLY
▸ New main website is aimed first and foremost to external
audiences - that should have been better communicated to staff
members
▸ Theme is radically different to the old one. Too radically?
▸ Feedback on search results was really useful - deleted old
content, improved Google Search results.
▸ Generally, when you renew something, people start giving
feedback also on issues that were already there before the
renewal.

51. THEME AND THE
NEW BRAND

52. DESIGN HELL?
▸ Oatmeal comic:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
▸ Be warned.

57. AND so on...

58. DESIGN WELL
▸ Note: not sayin' this happened at our university, just sayin'
▸ The theme was approved in 2016 by high level people, but
after actually releasing the first faculty site, some backlash
appeared.
▸ After that, many changes this way and that - a challenge to devs
▸ Next time: better documentation on what was decided
▸ However, overall the finished website looks very similar to the
theme ad agency originally designed

59. WEBDESIGN AND LOREM IPSUM
▸ Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
▸ Beautiful!

60. LOREM IPSUM SUCKS (IN FINLAND AT LEAST)
▸ https://www.jyu.fi

61. OLD FRONTPAGE

62. §

63. ADAPTING THE NEW THEME TO PLONE 5
▸ We got a new whole theme bundle (html, css, javascript) from the ad agency. The idea
was that we could use it as it is.
▸ The new theme was run through university administration and it was accepted
▸ The first version of Plone adapted theme used the theme bundle as it was, with only
small tweaks.
▸ But as it quite often happens, when you actually release something, changes started
coming.
▸ We ended up to doing all the templates again for ourselves -> there was a big amount
of work
▸ But - this way all the elements were created to be renewable especially mosaic theme
fragments (carousels, news items tiles, feed carousels, social media embed tiles etc.)

64. ON EDITING MAIN WEBSITE
▸ Mosaic makes it easy, yet powerful
▸ Customised tiles

65. FALLBACK DIRECTOR AND VARNISH
▸ Using a tool called Fallback Director with Varnish we still
can have content under same domain coming from old or
new Plone site, example:
▸ https://www.jyu.fi/erillis - old site
▸ https://www.jyu.fi/fi/palvelut - new site
▸ Even logging in works well
▸ This allows us to release content in smaller pieces - that's
agile!

66. INTRANET
▸ One portal for all staff in Plone
▸ Departmental intranets in Plone here and there
...or no departmental intranets or anything
▸ IP-restriction for viewing (not a very good idea)
▸ Plone Ldap problem

67. OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2017
▸ Release of Intranet main portal in week 43 (waiting for
administration approval) -> NEW priorities -> Intranet
portal will be released AFTER all faculty sites
▸ Moving from Google Search Appliance to Solr
▸ Helping faculties to publish their sites
▸ Creating new dexterity type and mosaic layout for project
pages

68. NEXT: SEARCH ENGINGE
▸ From Google Search Appliance to Solr

69. VERSION BETA?
▸ Plone 5 has been robust
▸ In our main website we have been running:

70. LESSONS
LEARNED(?)

71. LESSONS LEARNED - PEOPLE
▸ Website renewals should be appropriately resourced -
this time there was no actual project in place either in
university communications or IT services or in departments
▸ More people on board would have been nice
▸ There was a project for brand renewal and theme
design, though
▸ However, while change is hard, it also in some level
energised people - different day, different stuff :)

72. LESSONS LEARNED - COMMUNICATION
▸ We did have:
▸ Internally public preview-sites throughout the year
▸ We did seminars for content editors
▸ Public pages for describing how the renewal goes
▸ Trainings for staff
▸ Some email info
▸ But it is not enough - only after you release something the truth comes out. So
more information the better!
▸ Using Flowdock chat system to actively communicate between IT and
communications unit and Ad agency

73. LESSONS LEARNED - PRIORITIES
▸ Other projects or development needs in parallel
▸ Prioritising stuff makes it easier to pull through
▸ We had a "website renewal steering group" which had
(almost) enough authority to put things in order
▸ Important to show information on what is decided about
the priorities

74. LESSONS LEARNED - N'SYNC
▸ To release a departmental site we need synchronised
action from each three: the content editors, university
communications and development team
▸ Often we push some preview-site further by doing more
migrations, installing add-ons, customising theme
▸ Parallel action is needed, but maybe not the most efficient
way
▸ Some push from the administration would be good?

75. LESSONS LEARNED - PLONE 5
▸ Editing: usually well received by content editors
▸ Toolbar is nice, UI is pretty and clean
▸ Mosaic features
▸ Missing features from Plone 4? Nope. Undo maybe.
▸ Basic trainings are easy: Simple editing can be teached in 15
minutes, managing content in 2 hours
▸ Overall Plone 5 has been a good thing in the renewal process

76. LESSONS LEARNED - MOSAIC
▸ Truly a powerful tool - drag'n drop is a blast
▸ Customised "theme fragments", e.g. RSS-feed carousel,
hero image carousel, social media integration - much used
▸ Different pre-defined layouts available: department page,
faculty page, document page
▸ People are adopting Mosaic view quite fast
▸ Mosaic pages are now actively updated, compared to Plone
4.3 with Portal View add on

77. LESSONS LEARNED - OTHER NOTES
▸ New sites are technically fast, but portals and frontpages
are very visual and content heavy - designed that way
▸ Caching problems - faster content or actual content?
▸ Internet Explorer still sucks :(

78. BONUS: MOSAIC
DEMO

80. DEMO
▸ Seeing is believing
▸ Mosaic everywhere
▸ University main page Mosaic
▸ Department main page Mosaic
▸ Help Center Mosaic

81. EDITING A MOSAIC FRONTPAGE
▸ https://sneak2.preview.jyu.fi/fi/etusivu

82. FACULTY PAGE - EDITING AN ACCORDION

83. THEME FRAGMENT - NEWS PICK

84. THEME FRAGMENT - FOCUS POINT

85. DEPARTMENT LAYOUT - HERO CAROUSEL

86. HERO CAROUSEL - SELECTING ITEMS

87. HERO CAROUSEL - SETTINGS

88. NEXT - THE ROAD GOES EVER ON...

89. QUESTIONS?
▸ Rikupekka Oksanen
rioksane@jyu.fi
▸ Twitter: @rikupekka
▸ https://www.jyu.fi

90. THANK YOU!
▸ PS. Remember to check my other presentation tomorrow :)
https://2017.ploneconf.org/talks/organizing-a-plone-
sprint-lessons-learned-case-midsummersprint-2017