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Design/UX #22053

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CUNY Academic Commons News Site Redesign

Added by Sara Cannon about 2 months ago. Updated about 1 month ago.

Status:
New
Priority name:
Normal
Assignee:
-
Category name:
-
Target version:
-
Start date:
2025-02-11
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Deployment actions:

Description

With the Commons news being so prominent on the home page, I think it makes sense to update the look and feel of the CUNY Academic Commons News site to more align with the design of the commons. We could go about this by

  1. Identify whats currently working and not working with the current theme
  2. Choose a new theme that aligns with our goals
  3. Customize the theme's typography and branding to align with CUNY Academic Commons
Actions #1

Updated by Colin McDonald about 1 month ago

As discussed on the dev call yesterday, I just spent some time seeing what might be adaptable from the help site's new custom theme to this work on the news site design.

I had trouble cloning the entire large help site, but I set up a posts archive page in the background that I think aligns pretty well with what the theme would show by default right now on a "blog" home page, which is basically all that we would need for the news site homepage:

https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/posts-archive/

I changed out the header image to a Commons art image, but it doesn't cover the header area very well by default. I stopped there, because I wasn't sure how easy it would be to do further customization. Ray, do you think we could use this as the basis of a new design, the way blocks etc. work on the page? Or would it be better to start more from scratch?

Sara, maybe without doing a full mockup just yet, it might be good to know what you envision for the new design and if the simplicity of this basic homepage gets close in any way. I do like that it gets rid of the sidebar, both on the home and individual post pages. Perhaps the homepage would be good to make more visual, with featured images and a some sort of layout that isn't just linear reverse-chronological post excerpts.

Actions #2

Updated by scott voth about 1 month ago

Hi Colin - Just a FYI. When I created the new Help site, I made big changes to the FSE theme's templates.

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