cuTheme – Fall 2022 Update

We wanted to give you an update on cuTheme, the new web template that Web Service has been working on. It has been a journey filled with excitement, anticipation, some bumps and redos, and much learning.

Overview

• Our initial pilot of cuTheme has concluded, and so we are pausing the installation of new cuTheme sites until the Summer term of 2023
• The pause will allow us to use the coming months to review client feedback and our own learnings, and explore advances in the WordPress environment
• Next steps: apply lessons-learned and new tech to improve and further develop cuTheme, the hosting environment, and the migration and training plans
• We anticipate we will gradually initiate the rollout of the new and improved version of cuTheme, and resume installation of cuTheme sites for those who are are interested, by the Summer term of 2023

Pilot Project is Closed

Our initial pilot project saw over a dozen sites installed in cuTheme. As with any pilot, the intention was to put our product to the test before rolling it out on a large scale to the entire Carleton campus.

Currently, there are 7 sites live in cuTheme and several in our staging (offline) environment. Live sites include:

• Sprott
• FASS
• Neuroscience
• Future Edge
• Hub for Good
• Sociology and Anthropology
• Office of the Provost and Vice-President
• Charity Insights Canada Project
• Ericsson Carleton Partnership

A big thank you to everyone who participated in the pilot, migrating content, testing out the theme and editing experience, and sharing their feedback.

We have started a large-scale review looking at the current setup (blocks, features, functionality), and what has changed with WordPress since we started development. We will consolidate our findings and feedback from the pilot to make changes and improvements.

As such, the pilot project has concluded and we will not be doing any further cuTheme installs at this time.

Findings and Lessons Learned

One of the main goals of our pilot was to learn about usability for our clients. How was the transition to the new theme? The editing experience? What worked (or didn’t)? And what could be improved or added in? Additionally, we wanted to test the technology, including the software (responsiveness, bugs, etc.) and platform that cuTheme runs on.

Learning Experience and Transition to a New Editing Environment

We were happy to see that, despite a significant change to the editing experience, cuTheme is fairly intuitive.

We used feedback and questions to tweak our documentation and online training. When the pandemic hit, we put a lot of thought into how to deliver training in a virtual environment. Our training is self-guided and can be followed step-by-step but is also designed so you can easily find specific information.

The pilot showed us that people wanted somewhere to experiment and try things out. So we created the cuTheme Playground. Any of our clients can use this site to get a feel for the new theme and practice what they learn in the training.

We’ve also learned that we need to be more clear on some aspects of the user interface, how they work, and how things differ form our other themes.

Blocks and Features

Much has changed with WordPress since we started this journey a couple of years ago. Gutenberg (the new WordPress editor) was in its infancy. It is much more refined now and there are many new and interesting features that we plan to investigate for use in cuTheme.

We plan to amalgamate or modify some existing blocks. The pilot has shown us that we need to be crystal clear on the purpose of each block and how it works. Some of the blocks are overly complicated and will need to be reimagined.

Our goal is to simplify while providing users with options and flexibility.

The Technology

The pilot has highlighted the need to make cuTheme faster and address caching issues. Because of the way the theme loads, sites can feel slower than what we are used to with our other themes. We will address this through headless design (where the back end and front end are separate). As well, we are working with the awesome Unix team at Carleton to create a compatible and more modern server environment to host these sites.

With over 650 sites, our system also needs to be scalable. While sites in the pilot are currently single-site installs, we are in the process of moving to WordPress multisite. This will allow us to create and manage our entire network of Carleton sites from a single dashboard. It will make it soooo much easier to make changes and keep everything up to date from one place. (This makes our developers very happy!)

Next Steps

Over the next several months, we will:

• Continue to support and learn from our pilot participants (thank you for helping us test!)
• Consolidate and review client feedback and requests we have received thus far
• Conduct a thorough review of cuTheme, all the blocks, and the user interface
• Investigate new features available through WordPress and Gutenberg
• Finalize a modern server environment to host our sites
• Continue to learn about web accessibility and apply learnings to the theme and our accessibility training
• Review and update our cuTheme documentation and online training

Our goal is to take the findings from the pilot, our review, and technical learnings, plus all of your feedback and ideas, and build it into the next version of cuTheme. We aim to gradually initiate the rollout by the Summer term of 2023.

Thank you for your patience, enthusiasm, and all of your input. We look forward to this next phase of development!