New campus branding and other functionality are coming Saturday (July 10) to the 700-plus campus websites that run on SiteFarm, the UC Davis-created web content management system.

The rollout that is happening in just one weekend, the developers say, would previously have taken years to accomplish.

Information and Educational Technology worked in close collaboration with Strategic Communications and SiteFarm users to prepare for the update. Site owners had the opportunity to see what the update would look like on their dev sites, and provide feedback via a survey.

“Users have been active partners in the process and we’ve received a lot of valuable feedback from them that we’ve used to make adjustments and prepare for the update,” said Shawn DeArmond, SiteFarm web architect.

In addition to the new branding design elements and color scheme, the update will include:

• New fields for article content type for an enhanced journalistic presentation
• New fields for person content types, including personal pronouns and a unit field for including one person in multiple groups
• Column layout widget tool for improved in-page content arrangement
• New configuration options for hero banners and feature boxes
• Improvements to media handling

SiteFarm was developed by IET’s web dev team using Drupal, an open-source web development platform. It has since become widely used across the University of California. In fact, the idea for SiteFarm began in May 2015 at a Drupal conference where web developers from UC Davis, UCSF and UCLA met to discuss how they could establish a UC Drupal collaboration group.

Learn more about SiteFarm and the July 10 update.

More from IET’s TechNews

• Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DCMA — UC Davis’ DMCA compliance program moved July 1 to the university’s  Information Security Office, and Jackson Muhirwe, deputy chief information security officer, became the designated agent, succeeding Jan Carmikle, who retired at the end of June. The 1998 federal act is designed to protect internet service providers from copyright infringements by their network users. The DMCA covers music, movies, software, textbooks — anything that is protected by copyright. This law applies to everyone using the UC Davis network. More information about the DMCA is available on IET’s security webpages.
• Microsoft Teams — UC Davis transitioned to Teams Only mode for all Skype for Business Online users on June 30, one month before Microsoft retires Skype for Business. Microsoft hosted trainings for Microsoft Teams for all interested UC Davis employees in March, and recordings of those meetings are available here. More information about Microsoft Teams is available in the UC Davis Knowledge Base.