Making major changes to websites
Making major changes to websites
Occasionally, not only individual content needs to be updated, but more extensive changes need to be made to websites - up to and including a complete redesign of an organisation's site structure. There are a few things to bear in mind and certain mistakes to avoid.
Video of the training course on making major changes
An online training course on"Making major changes" showed how to proceed if more extensive changes are to be made to the content or navigation structure of an organisation. The creation of new content as well as saving and finally replacing existing content was explained and demonstrated step by step. You can watch the video here.
Note: The video is only available to members of the university.
Initial situation: There are already public pages
While it is comparatively easy to create new websites in the "quiet room" and make them public after completion, additional questions arise when revising existing sites:
- Is the world now watching the revision? Or to put it another way: How can you edit your pages so that they don't look like a building site during the process?
- How are the existing pages linked within the overall structure of the university website, and what happens to them when changes are made to the pages?
- How does Google & Co. deal with changes to pages?
These questions have different relevance depending on the type and extent of the planned changes.
Need for clarification: How complex are the planned changes really?
The revision of websites should not be confused with the new edition of a book, where you first finalise all the changes before republishing the entire work.
Websites are allowed to "live" and be in a continuous improvement process. Many changes to websites can be made step by step ; you don't always need the "big bang". This reduces the complexity of the project:
Several small changes are often easier to implement than one big change!
→ Think about how you can divide the overall project into smaller change steps that can be implemented one after the other.
→ If, for example, individual content needs to be moved to a different location, this can be done quickly by cutting and pasting. A page does not have to be completely rebuilt for this.
Basic rule: Do not replace existing pages with new ones!
This rule is particularly important, as ignoring it can easily cause serious problems:
- Internal link errors: Websites have a unique ID (=identification number) internally. When pages are linked to each other within TYPO3, this unique number is used. If the target page is deleted and replaced by another one, the new page also receives a new ID, which is why the existing links then point to "nothing" and consequently lead to an error.
- External link errors - incl. Google & Co.: New pages are automatically given their own http address, as there can be no two http addresses in TYPO3. By default, the address of the new page differs from the old one. Several steps are required to ensure that a new page can be called up under the same http address as the previous page. If this goes wrong, external links to the page, browser bookmarks and Google & Co. hits will no longer work.
- Access rights error: In our TYPO3 CMS, certain editing rights are often linked to individual web pages (this applies in particular to the home pages of institutions, departments or projects). If the website in question is deleted, the access rights no longer work. This causes unnecessary trouble for both the TYPO3 editors concerned and the TYPO3 administrators.
... but replace the contents of the existing page!
If a particular website is to be updated, the content of the page can be replaced as required. There are different methods for this:
- Firstly, create new content elements in a non-public test page:
To do this, create a non-public page at any point and add new content elements to it. During development, this page can easily be viewed in the preview. After completion, the content elements can then be moved to the real page.
Instructions: Moving content elements - Create new content elements hidden in the public page:
A special TYPO3 trick is used here, where a preview of the new elements is possible even though they are still hidden! This means that one or more elements can be added to the page.
Instructions: Preview hidden elements - Obtaining the entire page content from another page:
Under certain circumstances, it can be useful to replace the content of a page with another one "at the push of a button". For this purpose, TYPO3 offers the option of simply retrieving the content from another page instead of your own content and overwriting it, so to speak: In the page properties, the source page whose content is to be taken over can be selected in the [Behaviour] tab.
This method should be used with caution, as it can contain stumbling blocks. If inherited contact data is used in the page column, it may be mixed with the content of the other page in an undesirable way.
If you want even more: Create a new page structure
If several new pages are to be added and/or there are to be major changes to the navigation structure, you may want to simulate this structure first and get a preview before it is published.
How can this be reconciled with the basic rule that pages should not be replaced?
Can a new structure also be simulated using existing pages?
- Create a non-public test page as a simulation for the future start page.
- Use it to create the desired subpages that are to appear in the menu on the start page in future.
- The desired content can now be inserted as normal on subpages that did not previously exist with this topic. These subpages will later be moved to the public version of the pages.
- For subpages that already existed, it depends:
- If the content is only to be supplemented or slightly modified, simply integrate its content into the test subpage [Instructions]
- If the content is to be completely rebuilt, do this here in the test subpage. Later, this content can then be moved to the public page.