New Widgets!

On the Mosaic Web platform everyone benefits from new features introduced by major projects.

Last September, the new Ashmolean Museum website was rebuilt on Mosaic using a suite of new widgets to produce highly engaging page designs - which went down a storm with site visitors! The new widgets, built by the Mosaic development team, introduce a range of new designs for laying out grids and listings and the items within them. All new sites provisioned since 1 October 2017 have already been using the new widgets, and they can also be viewed in action on the updated Mosaic Demo website.

The new widgets will eventually replace several of the existing widgets, but don’t worry: this change is being phased in over the rest of this academic year.

List of new and deprecated widgets

Widget Status Replaced by Help for moving from old to new widgets/styles
Authoring      
WYSIWYG content area Current + New 'Read More' button -  
Accordion content Current -  
Tabbed content Current -  
Advanced Authoring      
Advanced accordion Current -  
Advanced tabbed Current -  
Banner New -  
Listings      
Article listing Deprecated Grid, List
Event listing Deprecated Grid, List
Grid New -  
List New -  
Page listing Deprecated Grid, List
Person listing Deprecated Grid, List
Related content Deprecated Grid, List
Publications listing Current -  
Galleries      
Carousel New -  
Image gallery Current -  
Image gallery advanced New -  
Slideshow Deprecated Slideshow advanced, Carousel
Slideshow advanced New -  
Forms      
Form Current -  
Simple feedback form Current -  
Other      
Metadata display Current -  
Social media links Current -  
Taxonomy terms display Current -  
Vacancy listing New -  

 

What's changed?

  • The design of the grid and listing widgets have had a complete makeover, with new elements like call-to-action buttons, configuration options and lots of colour options in the Site Theme settings
  • Instead of having separate listing widgets for each of the various content-types, which were inconsistent in the design and content selection options available, we have rebuilt them based on their layout style - how the set of content items they include are to be displayed – i.e. as a List, Grid, Banner, Slideshow, or Carousel
  • Each widget supports a common set of content selection options:
    • Filtered: automatically generate a list or grid based on content-type, sub-type and/or taxonomy term
    • Selected: manually select content to add (as per the Related Content widget)
    • Static: add the content directly into the list, to tailor the presentation of entries for a specific list/grid or to add references to content held on external websites 
  • A set of shared item styles provides a number of options for the design of the individual items within a widget’s layout: Landscape, Breaker, Image Text, Row, Tile. The item styles available in each widget depend on what is appropriate for that kind of layout: the listing widget guide diagram illustrates the options.
  • The new Image Gallery Advanced widget provides an alternative way to display image galleries

Release of new widgets and removal of deprecated widgets

To improve the quality of websites and simplify support, we will eventually be removing the deprecated widgets along with any content built with them. Content in old widgets needs to be manually moved across into the new widgets. To give content editors time to become familiar with the new widgets and update their content, this change is being phased over the remainder of this academic year:
  • Stage 0: 1 October (MT17, wk 0). New sites provisioned with new widgets only
  • Stage 1: 22 January (HT18, wk 4). New widgets made available to all sites, alongside existing ones - both can be used. During this stage we will also:
    • add a ‘deprecated’ label to the listings of widgets within Mosaic, so it can be seen at a glance which these are when editors are selecting widgets to use
    • produce a report of the usage of deprecated widgets by site, so that Site Owners can see how many are used on their site - we will update this monthly
    • add an additional 'Landscape Tile' option to be used on Grids, to provide a better match for some current usage of the deprecated widgets​
  • Stage 2: 15 April (TT18, wk 0). Ability to create new content items with deprecated widgets turned-off - you will still be able to edit existing ones (nb. if you remove an existing one you will not be able to re-add it)
  • Stage 3: 1 October (MT18, wk 0). Deprecated widgets removed along with all remaining content built with them
If you have any questions or concerns about this process, please contact the Mosaic Support team