WHAT'S NEW

New Publishing Validation

We introduced some new validation to the publishing workflow.

The new validation rules have been implemented in Sitecore by means of mandatory fields, which will prevent you publishing if you do not populate them.

1. Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords in the SEO section

This ensures your pages are returned higher up the search listings in Google.

2. Search Keywords field

This ensures your pages are returned higher up the search listings when searching the corporate website.

3.  All Open Graph fields

This is the content that shows when you share a page on social media.  i.e. Facebook.

4. The main Content field

This is to ensure all pages have some body text on the page.

Please note – if you do currently have a live page without any body content, you will need to add some before you can publish the page again.

An example of this would be a page containing only rows of pods.   In this case, intro text would need to be added.

If you have any further questions or would like advice on populating the fields mentioned, you can contact the Digital Team at bc.digital.marketing@northumbria.ac.uk.

Success!

We have now successfully upgraded to Sitecore 10, and you may notice a few changes to Sitecore.

These changes include:

• A newly designed dashboard. This is just cosmetic.

• The Submit to Publish and My Items buttons now sit within the Review tab.

• The Media Library content tree now opens directly to the main folders. You do not have to click Corporate Website then New Sitecore Gallery.

• When making a change to your page in Sitecore, once you click Submit for Publish you will be prompted to leave a comment. If you could please leave a short comment saying what changes you are publishing.

We are always working to improve Sitecore user experience. If you have any recommendations on how we can improve training opportunities for the platform, you can contact the Digital Team at bc.digital.marketing@northumbria.ac.uk.

Sitecore 10 Upgrade

We are currently working with IT on the upgrade from Sitecore 9 to Sitecore 10 and are in the process of carrying out tests to ensure all goes smoothly.

In readiness of the upgrade, users were asked to review and test their webpages to ensure that they look and function as they as they do currently in Sitecore 9.

If testing is successful, the Corporate Website will provisionally upgrade to Sitecore 10 on Friday 18th of March until Tuesday 22nd of March. We are hoping to provide all Sitecore users with the new Sitecore link on Wednesday 23rd of March.

We will keep all Sitecore users informed on the upgrade as we progress.

Sitecore Fundamentals Training Course

Sitecore training has previously been delivered by the Digital Team in Marketing.  Pre-Covid this was done face to face in a classroom environment, and during Covid it has been delivered through Microsoft Teams.

We are pleased to announce that Sitecore Training will now be delivered online via the Sitecore Fundamentals Training course. This uses the same software as the university mandatory staff training courses, such as Fire Safety and Equality & Diversity training courses.

New Sitecore users will be required to successfully complete this course, after which they will then request their Sitecore Login Details and relevant permissions for the area of the site they will be maintaining.

For current Sitecore users, please feel free to complete this course as many times as you want, in way of a refresher.

As well as the online training, we would still advise teams to carry on adopting the ‘train the trainer’ approach in which they train any new users in their own team on how to maintain pages within their own section of the website. This will add more context than the online training provides.  

The Sitecore Support Hub will be updated to include a new ‘Advanced’ section, which will show users how to complete some of the more complex tasks that are not covered in the training course. For example – adding Mixed Pods and Accordions.