Full Width Carousel Component

To avoid confusion, every unique link on a page must have unique link text. It is not hard to compose comprehensive text for manually coded links, but links that are generated automatically by lists and carousels must also be different, which takes more planning.

Also consider Call to Action, Button, and Tabs components, as well as the pagination and "see all" links in the Event and News List components which may have the same labels and appear more than once on a page. (Some of these have additional label settings that can help prevent this redundancy.)

Best practice: when creating shared content pages that will be used in lists, use distinct titles, or set the Navigation Title in the page Properties so none of your pages have the same title if they are displayed together. Also take advantage of additional label settings in other components when you will have several on a page.

Alternative text ('Alt text') is a best practice for all your UBCMS images and is often required for accessibility so screen readers can tell visually disabled users what they are not seeing.

Images displayed as teasers in lists require Alt text. Normally this is supplied in the original listed pages, often in shared content, and in some cases, in the metadata of the referenced images in Assets.  

Best practice, Alt text should be added whenever an image is uploaded into Assets.

Link text should describe where the link will take the user in a manner that is appropriate to the context on your page and also the target page. This is also true for images that act as links.

Best practice: Avoid meaningless standalone phrases like "click here", "see all" and "learn more".

Links in many components can be set to open in a new browser window (or tab). The user can thus explore the new page, while preserving the source page (and your website) in the original tab. However, this can be confusing if the user does not realize a new tab has opened. They may become lost, confused how they arrived on that new page and unable to return to your site.

Best practice: let the user control their experience and stay in the same tab, with two notable exceptions:

• Use the 'open in new window' setting if loading a new page in the current window would disrupt their current activity (e.g. moving them to a new page while they are in the middle of completing a form).
• Use the 'open in new window' setting if loading a new page in the current window will break them out of a secure environment.

The user should control carousels, slideshows and video, so they are not confused by unexpected behavior and to provide enough time for them to process each segment.

Best practice:

• Do not auto-start video.
  
• Do not automatically scroll a carousel or slideshow.
  
• Provide tools that allow users to start, stop and resume animations.
  

These recommendations are supported by default in UBCMS carousel, slideshow and video components. Please comply with this best practice if you embed external video or animations.

If you wish to deliver news stories and other mixed shared content content consistently and effectively through a home page slide deck, we recommend the following best practice steps.  

• Lists and carousels are designed to 'host' linked stories somewhere else in your site, such as a news page. But the default Host Page setting is blank, which means if you do not supply a preferred host page, it will try to host the linked content "on the same page as the component” (i.e. your home page), and the UBCMS will not allow you to host other content on a home page. (Home pages are critical. This prevents accidentally breaking them or confusing visitors by replacing the expected content. It also prevents third parties to 'overpower' your home page with their own content... all very undesirable.)  There is a solution.
  
  1. Choose a suitable page on your site to act as a host page, perhaps your news page (e.g. /content/www/your-site/news).
     
  2. Enter the path to this page in the Advanced settings for the slide deck.
     
  3. Once this is set, any headline clicked in the slide deck will then shunt people to that linked content, displayed on your specified host page.
     
• Many carousels (and slide decks) are meant to drive shared content created using the Highlight Template. This is the ideal way to achieve full and consistent functionality for all of the displayed content. This is easily attained for content that your own unit creates, but there are times when desired content has been built using other templates (e.g. News Article) or is not shared content. There is a solution.
  1. Build ‘teaser’ pages in your own site's shared content area (perhaps in a folder called “home page slide deck”).
  2. In that folder, create a shared content page using the Highlight Template for every item you wish to feature in your homepage slide deck. For each, You will need to add a picture, title, and some text, which you can repurpose from the story for consistency.
  3. If you create a call to action within the shared content page using the List Builder (e.g. "read more about Susan's story") and want that call to action link to go to the same place as the main headline, you MUST add the same host page path in the List Builder component as you are using on your home page's slide deck (e.g. /content/www/your-site/news). Otherwise your call to action will display the story in its natural location, while your headline will display it on your preferred host page.
     

These tips should apply to all UBCMS components that provide a 'build by search' option (e.g. List Builder, News List, Event List, Full Width Carousel and the Horizontal and Vertical Slide Decks).  

• Boolean AND - All words in the search query must be present. A space basically functions as an AND operator.
  e.g. international students, equals "international AND students" and will find pages with both those words present.
  
• Boolean OR - Any of the words separated by OR must be present.  Use OR  ("OR" must be capitalized).
  e.g. abc OR def will find pages with abc or with def, or with both words.
• Boolean NOT - Exclude a word from the search query by preceding it with a dash/minus.
  e.g. abc -def will find pages with abc but exclude those with def.
  For an OR search, be sure to exclude the term from all parts of the search equation.
  e.g. abc -def OR xyz -def will find pages with abc OR xyz but exclude those with def.
• GROUPING - Use parentheses ( ) to set precedence among your search operators - parenthetical actions occur first.
  e.g. (abc def) OR xyz will find pages with both abc AND def (as described in the AND section), as well as pages with xyz.
• PHRASE - Threat the words as one alphanumeric string by using double quotes " ".
  e.g. “abc def” xyz - will make abc def be in sequence, and xyz anywhere.
• DISTANCE - "abc def”^10 will find pages with abc within ten words of def.
• WILDCARD - Use ?  to match any one character. Use * to match any number of characters respectively. Do not use either wildcard at the beginning of a word.
  e.g. buil? would find pages with build or built but exclude pages with buildings
  e.g. buil* would find pages with build or built or buildings

Please note, special characters (e.g. "&", "|", "-") are not permitted in a search query and are automatically removed.

You can also use the search option to list tagged pages. And the above logical operators allow fairly advanced logic for tagged pages that is not possible using other tools.

• Each tag has an ID that looks like this: sandbox:admin-services/policy/admin
  • Authors can see it in Page Properties, in the Tags option, by hovering over the tag.
  • Tag Admins can view the ID in the “TagID” column in the Tag Admin interface.
  • This ID is also visible in the page's source (e.g. Right-click + View Page Source).
• Use the complete ID in your search in quotes and with the logic operators described above.
  
  • e.g. "content-type:policy" -"sandbox:admin-services/policy/admin" would find pages with the policy tag but exclude those with the admin-services/policy/admin tag.
• You must fill in the Start in path for this to work. Unless you have something more specific in mind, use “/content”.
• Search returns will include child tags of the searched tags; e.g. "sandbox:admin-services/policy” also matches the tag sandbox:admin-services/policy/admin. 
• If the actual text like "content-type:policy” is on a page, that page will be found, too. Since most punctuation and capitalization are ignored, this could also appear in prose as something like “… the correct content type. Policy says you should …”
• The search will also find its itself (the search page), since the query is stored in the page. You can prevent this by adjusting the Start in path to exclude the current page (such as searching for shared content only), or by using the Exclude current page checkbox under Advanced options.