Site Building

Development Cycle 2023

The SiteFarm team has been hard at work the past few months researching, planning, and developing to create new features, improvements to existing offerings, and fixes for troublesome bottlenecks. Our work will be released over three phases with Phase 1 dropping April 22, 2023 with forecasted release dates for the remaining phases. Keep reading to see what's changing!

Many Happy Returns

Is your webform a little on the long side? Did you already know this and tried breaking it up into sections using the wizard page tool? Do people pack a lunch and block off time on their Outlook calendar when they know they have to submit something on your site? Yeah—maybe give these folks a way to save their spot and come back to it when they have time to finish your form, and let us give you a helping hand to add this feature to your form if it needs it.

Google Analytics 4 has arrived

The long awaited GA4 service has been added to the SiteFarm platform, but what does this mean for your existing Universal Analytics ID and how will you implement the new addition?

Masquerade your way to better testing

As a Site Manager and Builder, you may find yourself being able to see too much. It's not true to what your users will see and you're not sure how the changes you're making will affect users with a restricted view based on their roles and permissions. For security reasons the Masquerade module has been restricted to the SiteFarm team, but we still have a method for you to feel confident the site configurations you make are the right ones for the roles involved.

Create a clickable taxonomy-based icon grid

We've had a few enterprising users ask how the Horticulture site put together their Block Chain icon grid presented on their site's homepage. Take ten minutes to watch Carson Black, senior developer, give a video overview of how this was created for the department by the Web Development team.

Add a full pager navigation to your 404 page list

For site owners concerned with managing 404 - page not found issues and broken links, the 404 list available in your site is invaluable. The default configuration is less than optimal however as the pager navigation gives you almost no idea how many pages of 404 issues you have and only a limited method of navigating through the list. If you're a Site Builder, let's look at a fix.

Add a branding color to your custom category filter

It may have occurred to you that it would be nice to display a colorful, custom category filter that links to information pages, but on creating it you no doubt discovered that custom vocabularies don't offer anywhere to set a branding color like the Article or Event Category lists do. This write-up will show you how to incorporate it into your own custom taxonomies to get that same effect and presentation.

Intranet: Register non-UC Davis users with moderated approval

We had a recent request asking how a SiteFarm client could set up their site for visitors outside UC Davis, but restrict their access pending a Site Manager's ability to approve the account. It posed an interesting use case and touches on similar requests we've received in the past. Here's a formal breakdown of the steps we took to create a self-registering intranet with manager approval.

Take in the View: Exclude the page you're on from a related content list

OSTraining has put together a great use case showing how to use a View's contextual filters to ensure that the page you're on is not included in an attached block displaying related content. The article takes you step-by-step through the process and includes instructive screenshots to help keep you oriented through the process. If you're interested in building Views for your site, click through and take a look.