As many of you may have heard we have had a change in staff within the Web Communications Team. I have been offered the position of Director of AgriLife Information Technology and as of July 1st have been operating in that capacity.

Tom Lyster, Sr. Web Applications Engineer, has also moved into AgriLife IT and will continue on as the CMS Operations Manager for AgriLife. Loretta Cortez remains in the Web Communications group and will maintain current web operations and provide assistance for items that the Web Communications team supported.

I will continue to support existing web communications initiatives until the Web Communications Manager position has been refilled and as time permits.

This change is expected not to create any alteration in the timeline for bringing the CMS online.

I’m pleased to announce the availability of the Agriculture and Life Sciences departmental web template.

Following are links to the Implementation and Style Guide as well as the template distribution.

Implementation and Style Guide
Please review prior to using templates.

One of our high priority areas for the CMS has been the development of suite of navigation tools. The goal of each tool is to automatically build portions of the navigation for a site based simply on the directories and content added. When used in tandem the tools provide complete, automated navigation capability for a site. Additionally we wanted the tools to be non-invasive i.e. not require special coding or tags to invoke.

To that end we have completed three nav tools. The first nav tool automatically constructs a standard breadcrumb path. The tool probes the structure of the web site and adds the necessary code during deployment of the site. The current configuration allows for an unlimited directory depth.