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Migrating liverpool.gov.uk to Umbraco
- 4. Done
- 5. What this session is not about... 1. Not about Top Tasks evidence based approach 2. Not about Centralised Content Management 3. Not about how to choose a cms 4. Not about Tridion vs Umbraco 5. Not about HTML 5 for designers...
- 6. Huge amount of work has been done in the past by the team... Kevin Jump – Chief Digital Overlord @kevinjump Conor Moody - Content Strategy @conormoody ...this is just a migration
- 7. Over 4000 pages on the site % went to just 200 of them of traffic
- 8. “no one” reads the news • Less than 2% of site traffic • 10 news items took 64% of news traffic • The 10 weren’t really ‘news’
- 9. none formed part of a top 20 user tasks strategies, policies and plans
- 10. Our cms usage • 260 trained • 20 performed 70% of all activity • 160 did something • Activity not related to Top Tasks Customers want:
- 11. Organisation v customer Brand Do-it online Popular Links Images Contact Benefits My Neighbourhood News Promo Site Elements (Navigation, Whitespace, etc) Jobs Leisure Libraries Rubbish Contact New s BusinessTransport Search Bene fits Planning Education The Council The Rest Homepage space allocation (%) If pure demand was followed (%)
- 13. So what is this talk about ? • A lazy overview of the migration • A bit about the site • Insert some jeopardy to help give the talk some narrative • Biggest Challenges • Specific Technical Challenges • Content Team adapting to Umbraco • Run a bit out of steam • Reveal that everything turns out ok with the jeopardy thing • Conclude you can build a large public sector website in Umbraco, it was all fine. • Try to remember not to just read the slides out
- 14. Why Migrate ? • Tridion is complicated for editors • Tridion is complicated for developers • Licencing costs Cost of Migration = 1yr of Licencing cost
- 15. About the project • Agile with Trello boards • 13 weekly sprints • Core team of 4-5 peaking at 12 • 800 pages of content • 15,000 visits a day / 4 million a year • 2 x Windows 2008 servers
- 16. Trello board
- 17. Umbraco-ness • Umbraco 6.01 to 4.11.4 and then 4.11.8 • Webforms & Dynamic Node Razor • Umbraco UI • Packages – Config Tree – uComponents – tswe.log4umbraco – CMS Import – Robots.txt – FamFamFam Icons – Google Maps for Umbraco – Eksponent CropUp – uCssClassNameDropdown – uSync
- 22. Show me the Doc Types...
- 31. Eksponent Crop Up • Allows content people to influence image crop but with the parameters set by designers
- 32. Multinode Tree Picker for Image Gallery
- 35. Masterpages
- 36. Insert Jeopardy Here • August Tridion Licence Renewal • Liverpool’s Central Library reopening on 17th May • Office move 8 weeks in • Live servers • Kevin handed his notice in
- 37. Biggest Challenges • Migrating the content • Evolving the site Agile-y • Hey it’s ‘just a migration’
- 38. How we reigned ourselves in • Trello boards – rough and long grass • Content – Review tick box • ‘Migrate for now’ • If the site were broken, what would be the first thing you’d need to get working and then the next thing, then the next after that.
- 39. Long and Rough Grass
- 42. What we changed anyway • Navigation • Font size • Twitter Bootstrap • Icons from a font (modified font-awesome) • All User Controls rewritten in dynamic node razor • New Libraries and Archives section
- 43. I See Umbraco logos... everywhere
- 44. Specific Technical Challenge 1 – Picking the Icon Editor requires new Icon Designer draws icon, Updates icon resource, Updates Stylesheet, Updates Icon lookup page CMS developer adds to dropdown Editor selects new icon
- 47. Basic dropdown of regex matches
- 48. Now with icons
- 49. Specific Technical Challenge 2 – Content in multiple locations
- 52. Analogue Trello
- 53. Content Team and Umbraco • Developers got training • Developers got non scary .net environment to work in • CMS Team got training • CMS Team got a sane product to work with • Designers got training • Designers got access to templates and razor • Content Team got on with it
- 54. Nobody asks the content people but they use the product everyday • We assumed they would immediately love Umbraco • You have to jump through hoops to do anything in Tridion but... • … look at his face, if you get good at jumping through hoops it’s really good fun. In Umbraco there are no hoops…
- 55. Stockholm Syndrome • Document Library Folder Picker
- 56. The edge case
- 57. The solution and not everyone understands irony The Arbitrary Related File Group Picker
- 58. What the content team got in the end • uEditThis
- 59. What the content team got in the end • Edit This • Simplicity • Less and better named page templates • Bulk media uploader (& macro picker thing) • Better image control • Ease of ordering of content • Speed of publishing
- 60. What did the content team think? “I think the key to getting the best from a CMS is the implementation and as ever you have implemented this site in a very logical and clean fashion and responded to the needs of the content managers making our lives easier whenever you could which is greatly appreciated. In that sense I neither hate Umbraco or Tridion…just poor historical implementations (not yours) that did not meet our needs.”
- 61. And really valid point… “As with any project, whether it is new or a migration, I think it’s extremely important that content requirements are given priority as this will determine how your developers/designers will tailor page types in the CMS to make sure they work in the way that you need them to. If you are rolling the system out, it needs to be easy to use so I would advise content managers to get stuck in to the process a.s.a.p and not just leave it to technical staff to do their thing”
- 62. Resolving the Jeopardy I created earlier • The migration from Tridion is ongoing, it should be ok for August • The site went live 16th May in time for the Central Library with a homepage takeover • We have internet again in the office • Servers were ready on the 15th, Kev wrote uSync disk edition overnight to do the file replication • Kevin is still leaving
- 63. Homepage takeover for central library opening
- 64. Done Conclusion: It turns out you can create a large public sector website in Umbraco, it was fine. Blogs: http://delta.ldlwebservices.co.uk/ http://tridionumbracomigrationtrilogy.monosnow.co.uk Twitter: @marcemarc
Editor's Notes
- Liverpool /ˈlɪvərpuːl/ is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, United Kingdom along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It is the eighth most populous British city, and sixth most populous in England.[citation needed] In, 2011 the population was 466,400[3] and Liverpool at the centre of a wider urban area, the Liverpool City Region, which has a population of around 2 million people.[4]
- I aim to whittle you down
- What I’m aluding to is a lot of work has been done to make liverpool.gov to be a really good public sector council website and this isn’t down to just the choice of cms, and you don’t need to wear glasses and have a stupid start to work for them but it helps…
- Snow, school closures, strike, times of fireworks
- Tridion is complicated for editors, to create a page, you have to first create a component based on a schema, then the component can be dropped onto a page with a component templates, so the editor has a choice of component templates to render the content in a differnet way, then the page, the page can have different page templates, that render the list of component templates in differnent waysDevelopers would always to be heard, yes I’ve finished the usercontrol, but it’s not in Tridion, it works ok, but not in Tridion, can someone in the cms team help me get it into Tridion ? – Tridion was becoming a barrier to us getting things done.Licencing costs, we’ve done the maths and migrating all the existing tridion sites to Umbraco would be roughlty equal to one years liencing and running costs for Tridion, this time next year we’ll be in profit for not using Tridion
- Landing page, very effective navigationally, major reason why we’ve been able to get rid of mega menu and left hand navigation, good on touch devices.
- Standard page, no left hand navigation any more, related pages, manually curated, so they are definitely related pages, rather than just in the same folder
- Contact us page – This is important, measuring contact is how we can gather evidence to benchmark the worth of the website, if someone contacts us online, or even better finds the information online, we save the council money, because contacting via telephone is really expensive, and we point that out.
- Functional page, Bulky Bob, is the service that picks up your old furniture, fridges etc – user control
- Venue homepage, we have venues, that the public visit and this is where we’ve used the google mapdatatype, to record the venues location, and that allows us to plot all the venues of a certain type on a google map
- And this is a typical venue page, this is a pretty venue page, and features an image gallery, and here is where we’ve used the CropUp package, which is excellent, it gives the perfect balance for an editor, imho, the editor can manually override the autocrop, so heads aren’t cut off, but also there not losing hours of time messing around in photoshop, even though they might secretly want to; so content has influence over the image but within the contstraints of the design. A Multinode Picker determines the images and their order in the carousel
- Lifestyles, I’ll show you the masterpages structure in a moment, but certain areas of the site for example our Lifestyles Fitness Centre pages, have a very different look and feel, one of the reasons we went with Twitter bootstrap was to enable us to have these different brands displayed within the council branding, and also for skinning third party applications, that we make look like they are part of our site
- The new libraries section
- Bootstrap Master, has your default Twitter boostrap styles and javascript, then the Site design ‘overrides’ these default and adds the design of the site, then a general layout level of templates, you can see libraries and lifestyles pages, get their different look here, and then underneath a layout level, you get specific pages
- We agreed a year to move Umbraco to Tridion, but then someone pointed out the licence gets renewed in August, so a year, became six months: jeopardy. Liverpool’s central library was due to reopen on 17th May, if we didn’t have the site live by then with the new Libraries section, we would have to do some last minute work in Tridion – SHUDDER. An office move was due to take place 8 weeks into the project, Jeopardy, Live servers we’ve had for six months, but can’t see the outside world or the database servers, jeopardy. Then in the middle of the project, kevin handed his notice in… It may come clear at this point that is is a good twelve years since I’ve used Powerpoint.
- Migrating the content, we always knew was going to be the biggest challenge, it is the thing most people ask about; we could have used Tridion Content Porter to export content into csv and the excellent CMS import package to bring it in; but Tridion uses this Component Linking thing to manage links between components, and so even if the export – import thing had worked first time, someone would have had to remake all the links, and check the content had moved correctly, and there was some stuff we wanted to change, so we very quickly decided we would just cut and paste the html. The whole team was going to help with this in the first two weeks, we wanted the content in, to help with the design and development but in the end the content managers of two, insisted on doing it all themselves, and I can understand where they were coming from, they were responsible for the content and they’d know it was right if they did it themselves, rather than check someone elses ctrl c ctrl v handiwork and this was a bit of a worry, but they managed 800 pages in four weeks. People found it very difficult to work agile-y if they were asked to work on something in a sprint, they wanted to completely finish and polish it, before showing it to anyone else, and it surprised people when we said that’s fine stop, it is enough, we will revisit it later, when you finish and polish something, you don’t revisit and improve, and you get upset if things have to change, it was hard for people to get their heads around and slowed things down. It’s just a migration, this was the biggest threat to the project timescales: wouldn’t this be a great time to change x ? No it wouldn’t everyone was really full of ideas and everyone wanted to improve everything which is brilliant but this is just a migration, so don’t, how did we reign ourselves in ?
- Trello boards – rough and long grass, if someone came up with an idea instead of debating and arguing over whether we should do it or whether we had time to do it, which in itself would take time and upset people, we acknowedged the idea, and if it was good and sounded feasible we’d put it on the rough grass board, and if there was time we would do it, this enabled everyone to move on with the migration work, and be happy we might do that cool idea thing, and if it seemed like it was the sort of thing that needed much discussion, then it was moved to long grass.It seemed like the content team wanted to change every word, as they began their cut and paste marathon, the wording had been like that for two and a half years, so why change it now ? – it’s difficult to get wording right, and this was slowing things down, and this is a cool thing, we added a ‘this content needs review’ tick box, and as the content team went through the site, if the content wasn’t quite right, and they couldn’t immediately fix it, they’d tick the box, and add notes, and this enabled them to move onto the next page, and speeded up things considerably. Part of the perverse part of my nature though it would be funny to not ever produce a report based on this information,but in the end I relented, and this was quite useful for the content team during the rest of the project.
- Navigation, we ditched left hand nav, and megamenus, traditional desktop computers are in a rapidly shrinking demographic of visitors to the LCC website (when placed up against mobile devices, tablets and touch-enabled devices) and this enabled us to increase font-size, our target audiences eyesight is beginning to go. Twitter bootstrap helped us with third party integration, but also gave developers and designers a common language. Icons became a font.. And all User controls rewritten in dynamic node razor (umm even though we said they didn’t need to be) and the New libraries and archives section
- So I was getting really into Umbraco half way through the project, and started seeing Umbraco logos everywhere, I have literally hundreds of these, even Ikea do a flat pack version of the logo, that you have to put together yourself
- Icon, you may have noticed the icons on the landing pages, these are from our modified font-awesome font; each page needs to be able to choose one of the icons, and this is the specific challenge,
- In tridion we had a lookup page and the editor had to remember the class name , now we could manually create a dropdown list of css styles, but everytime a new one was created, this list would have to be updated manually we ran into problems on a previous project with prevalues, synchronising them via packages, moving an updated list of icon prevalues via a package, does not sync the prevalues. So I got to thinking and I realised, where is the souce, well the designer has to update the stylesheet, and theres a pattern to the css for the icon selectors, and if you had a regex… and I was desperate to do a package and so uCssClassNameDropdown was born
- Stylesheet, regex and exclude some extra matches, if you are not great at writing regexes like me, this will produce a dropdown, still not great, and this is why it’s good to use an opensourcecms that you can extend, because well we know the classnames so why not add the icons to the selector…
- Service alerts, are alerts about services, you don’t want to hide them away in News, like we used to do, they must break the design of the page, and appear on the pages that has the information they override; but don’t overuse them or users will learn to ignore them
- Shared components section, borrowing from tridion once again, theres the alert, it has title, content and an alert type
- And a picker picks the service alert component from the page, and then we use the relations api to record that the alert has been picked on a page, and this allows us to use the ucomponents relations link datatype, to create a ‘where used’ property on the service alert, so the content team can see where an alert has been placed, and these alerts can be scheduled to publish or unpublish.
- During the office move, we lost internet for a bit, and projector and meeting room, the Trello board went Analogue for the last few weeks…
- The content team don’t care about the financial savings, it’s just words in a system, they didn’t have opportunity to influence which cms was picked; if you’re quite good at jumping through hoops it is probably quite good fun, and someone is changing you working day, it must feel a bit weird, I called this…
- Presumably you are aware that is the sympathy of the hostages towards their kidnappers. For example, if you have a list of 10-12 documents on a page in Tridion you have to pick them manually, we created a macro so if you picked a folder from the media library it would write out links to all the documents in that folder, much quicker, they liked that, maybe this Umbraco was ok… but…
- some files in the planning section of the site apply to both business and resident sections, in the document library these files have all been placed in the same folder, but the resident section also has some extra non-business related documents, also placed in this folder.So if you use the macro and pick that folder on business, you get the extra resident docs,if you take the resident docs out of the folder, use the macro to pick the folder then they are missing on the resident page.Now you might jump to the conclusion that it’s ok: the document library folders aren’t set up right, we’ll just have a folder for ‘common planning documents’ and another one for the ‘residents additional planning docs’ and use two macros on the residents page to bring in both lists;but no, this won’t do, this will create two lists and won’t be one list in alphabetical order.Maybe if the simple technical solution isn’t working, then maybe what you are trying to do is too complicated ?The names need to be in alphabetical order, right ? because it’s a long list, and people need to find things. but the names of the files haven’t been optimised for alphabetical order !! - some are listed under T for The… or Neighbour Notification under C…Also from a readability content perspective should we be putting a single long list of documents together like this ?, if they could be clearly grouped under sub headings, ie ‘Section 106’, ‘Household’ ‘Business’ etc, you know to help people browse them and find the document they need for their circumstances. (Although I’m sure a householder might want to find out about asbestos removal for the new pavement café they are planning.)But ignoring this, we have to be able to list a lot of files in alphabetical order, from the same folder location, but in some instances showing some files from that folder and some instances not.Now Tridion would allow you to pick the files one by one on the page in the rich text editor, and curate a custom list of files to display wherever you want to use them, no problem! none of this macro nonsense - but in that Umbracogrrrrr,yes well you can of course just do the exact same thing; ie you just create a link to the file in the media folder, in the rich text editor.So what genuinely is the problem here ?And why was the thing we created them that was good, was now bad and not worth using on the site because of this one edge case ?I’m not a psychologist.If we hadn’t built the thing that makes it easier to drop multiple files from a folder on the page this problem wouldn’t have occurred, but because we have said, look this macro thing is good, it will save you time, it’s almost with glee that there is a single situation where it doesn’t quite work.I don’t think this is a failing of Umbraco, or even the media folder picking macro which surprisingly wasn’t built with solving this problem in mind and I don’t suspect the files one folder two locations different sets of files magically merged and displayed thing is the real problem. There probably isn’t really a problem, just the ebb and flow of the office, but as a developer you should never have the arrogance to tell someone, something is better, even in jest, wait and appreciate the opinion of the person who has to use it, otherwise your arrogance prejudices their judgement, or it might just not be quite as good as you think :-)
- The arbitrarily related file group picker, you pick any documents from the media folder and order them, then the folder picking macro is extended to also pick arbitrarily related files components, so the fact we could create something to get round the problem, sort of made them happy, and sort of reassured them that we would be able to provide solutions for edge cases, and we cared, even though we were obviously taking the piss…
- So it’s not a case of being Umbraco Man and thinking of the content person at every stage of the process, and handing something over at the end for them to enter the content into, what worked well on this project, was the doc types were still wet as the content went in, the design was done within the cms, and development tied the bits together, you could be editing the content of the page, refresh it and it would change completely, so for a project of this size do not work in isolation!