Public Affairs, supported by IT, launched their new Home Suite (www, today at berkeley lab, newscenter) over the weekend. A few notable technical features include:
- Responsive Design: The site dynamically adjusts to the size of your screen, reconfiguring itself for readability and usability from smartphone to widescreen monitor. To see how it responds, just drag the right edge of your browser to make it more narrow and watch the menus collapse and reconfigure themselves to the width of the screen. Some adjustments can only be viewed on mobile devices. For example, on a mobile device you'll see the addition of a top menu item called "Directions to Lab" which provides easy access to maps and directions when you're on the go.
- Content Management System: We're a high tech, early adopter sort of place at LBL but sometimes we stick with what works for awhile. While the lab has probably had instances of virtually every big open source content management system over the past decade, we've never used a CMS on our main www.lbl.gov site. In fact, much of the directory hierarchy of our main site had remained unchanged since it was stood up as one of the first 250 sites on the nascent world wide web (we think we were actually in the first 100, but the exact numbers are lost in the mists of internet history). Among the things in our now preserved but unshared /web/ directory was a list of "the other sites on the www"! We chose Wordpress for our CMS and there are a number of reasons we're excited about it as a platform going forward. See more about this below.
- IPv6: Our new www.lbl.gov supports ipv6, an important step as the world transitions to the new standard to accommodate future internet growth.
So what does this mean for you? Well, in addition to having a cleaner homepage to look at (we hope you feel this way), we're excited to begin offering Wordpress hosting, templates, and support to the broader laboratory community. Procurement.lbl.gov is already making use of early release templates and JGI and PBD are making use of our hosting services. Check back soon for more info on how Wordpress fits in to our content and collaboration offerings and how to engage the set of services that will be offered by IT and CSO.
