SEO — Moving from Yoast to SEOPress

As mentioned in our October newsletter, we are transitioning from the Yoast SEO tool to SEOPress for search optimization features. The SEOPress tool is better supported by UMS IT’s Web Technologies team, and will be in use for all university websites going forward. This change has been made to many sites already— if you see an SEO icon in your dashboard instead of the “Y” Yoast icon, your site has already been updated. Our SEO Workshop is a great way to learn more about SEO considerations for your website, and can be scheduled for one of our Friday consultation sessions.

Events Calendar — Updating event database format

Our event calendar software was updated in July, and with that update came a new database format for events. The Events Calendar system has an easy process to update this in the dashboard, but large calendars can take some time to update. As we have updated SEO on a website, we triggered this database update to ensure forward compatibility with future improvements.

Jetpack removed from websites

As of Jan. 24 we have removed Jetpack from all but four websites on , and will be reviewing Cooperative Extension websites next. Websites that have specific uses for Jetpack are being reviewed to identify new options for Jetpack features, and we will be in touch as we learn more.

The new method of listing events uses a text “shortcode” — instructions for the website you can add in the page editor that will trigger features in the published pages. We have used these shortcodes for features such as buttons, status bars and link lists, and existing shortcodes are documented in our user guide.

Because this new method of listing events relies on specific syntax, we are happy to help set up your event lists. If you are interested in learning how this feature works, read on.

UMS Post Picker

This feature is utilized to pull posts from one site and display them within another site using shortcodes, taxonomy criteria and other options. The feature was developed and is maintained by the UMS Web Development Team, and the specific templates created for displaying information are developed and maintained by the UMS Web Technologies Team. The main uses for this feature are to display news, events, and other types of content across our websites to avoid duplicating content, in much the same way as our article and event list content blocks.

A useful example: embed the Academic Calendar events

To illustrate this feature, here is the shortcode needed to display the next five upcoming events in the academic calendar:

[ums-post-picker site_id="15" post_type="tribe_events" taxonomy_terms="tribe_events_cat:academic-calendar" order_by="meta_value" meta_key="_EventEndDate" template="ums_event_summary_list" omit_past_posts=true order="ASC" limit="5" options="no_excerpt;showDate:1"]

The details are explained below:

site_id: The sub-site ID to pull content from. If omitted, the post picker will pull content from your site. The ID of calendar.umaine.edu (where the Academic Calendar events are published) is 15.

post_type: The type of WordPress post to search. The post type for events is tribe_events.

taxonomy_terms: A list of taxonomies and terms to match. The format is taxonomy_terms=”taxonomy_name:term_slug”. For event calendar categories the taxonomy name is tribe_events_cat, and the Academic Calendar category term slug is academic-calendar.

order_by: The post field to order posts by. While the default for this is the post publish date, event calendar items have a special “meta” value to identify when a future event begins. For this reason, the order_by value for event calendar items is meta_value.

meta_key: This attribute is used in conjunction with the above meta_value to set the order of posts when the default publish date isn’t helpful. For event calendar items, this meta_key is _EventEndDate. NOTE: because this sorts by the event’s end date, events that span multiple days may appear to be out-of-order in your event list (which lists the event’s start date). Our recommended best practice is to list multi-day events as sequential single-day events.

template: This sets the template to use for the content. Templates can be specific to custom post types such as events, or generic and applicable to all post types. For calendar listings, the template is ums_event_summary_list.

omit_past_posts: This is an on/off (true/false) setting that controls whether the list should exclude posts earlier than the current date. If left out, the list will include past posts, but for event calendar items this is set to true in order to only display events that are upcoming.

order: The sort order, which can be either ascending (ASC) or descending (DESC). For a list of upcoming events, this is set to ASC.

limit: Shows at most this many posts. If left out the default is 50 posts. For this Academic Calendar example, setting this to 5 will show the next five upcoming events.

options: This is used in conjunction with the earlier template attribute to include options that are not otherwise included in the shortcode parameters. In the case of the event summary list template, the option no_excerpt will exclude any excerpt text from the listings, and showDate:1 will display the date to the left in bold.

Here is what the above shortcode displays:

That was a lot to take in, is there more?

There are still more options that can be used for event listings that we will document in our user guide over time. Displaying event image thumbnails, displaying the events in a horizontal row, and combining multiple categories of events together are all possible. If you want to explore what is possible with listing events on your site, contact us at um.weboffice@maine.edu.

Accessibility and inclusion sessions at WPCampus 2023

. Note: while this conference is occurring in the central time zone, we have adjusted the date/times below for Eastern Daylight Time.

Thursday July 13

noon – 12:45 p.m.

2:30 – 3:15 p.m.

6:00 – 6:45 p.m.

Friday, July 14

11:00 – 111:45 a.m.

noon – 12:45 p.m.

.

You may also send a copy of your published event to the 91¸£Àû calendar for listing on . When viewing the event on your website, the “admin toolbar” that appears at the top of your pages will have a clickable link titled “Repost to 91¸£Àû Calendar.” Using this link will send a copy of the event to our calendar website, where staff in Marketing and Communications will categorize the event and publish it to the calendar website.

If you do not have a need to create an event for your own website, you can use the  form on the calendar website to alert us to the upcoming event.

Planning an event?

If you have not already scheduled your event, please use our Plan An Event website where you will find important information about planning campus events, alongside web forms to start that planning process with the campus.

Bug fixes

A longstanding bug in our event calendar was fixed recently— importing events from a Google calendar had stopped functioning in January due to changes in the underlying software of our website calendar. Over the last month an update was made which offers a fix to this problem. If you had utilized this feature in the past (event import from a Google calendar), please get in touch and we will apply the fix to your website.

Importing events into website calendar

We license a “content aggregator” feature for our events calendar software, which works to import events in a shared Google calendar as event web pages you may list in a umaine.edu calendar list content block. This feature stopped functioning for our websites in mid-January. Our team has been working with the software vendor to identify and resolve this problem, but as of this newsletter the issue is ongoing.
The workaround is to manually create events within the WordPress calendar feature.

“Repost to 91¸£Àû News” and “Repost to 91¸£Àû Calendar” feature

Our website has a content syndication feature for news and events— if you view a published news post or event detail page, the WordPress “admin toolbar” at the top of the page has a text link that states “Repost to 91¸£Àû News” or “Repost to 91¸£Àû Calendar.” This feature creates a copy of your post or event, and submits it to the appropriate website in an unapproved “incoming” state for Marketing & Communications staff to review and publish.

Recently this feature has incorrectly given an error when it is used: instead of stating “Reposted” the message is “Try again? Failed to repost to” for either 91¸£Àû News or Calendar. The content is still being copied over, but because of this error your own site will not indicate that this has been done.
The workaround is to not believe this particular error message when you see it. We hope to have this issue resolved soon.

The “List Type” options have been updated to allow for specifying categories of events on any calendar. Previously one could only select an event category from the campus-wide 91¸£Àû Calendar site.

Here is how the new choices are presented:

If “91¸£Àû Calendar” is selected, the drop-down list below includes categories for the 91¸£Àû Calendar (including an ‘all categories’ option for all events).

If you select “Select a site” as the option, a new drop-down list appears that you can use to scroll through the list of sites. Because our list of sites is very long (and getting longer), there is a new search feature within this box. Start typing in the box, and the choices will narrow down to those that fit the text you have typed. In this example, typing “college” narrows down to sites with “college” in the name:

Once a site is chosen, the category drop-down will refresh to show the categories of events for this site: