News

2026

Self-Help Improvements

We've added a page outlining best practice for 'Writing for the Web'.  Additional self-help videos are being worked on.  These are not part of the basic training course -  they will provide extra information.

2025

T4 Upgrade to v8.4.2 (December)

T4 was successfully upgraded to version 8.4.2 on December the 1st. There is little change for the users but some subtle changes on visuals as per below:

Status shows when editing Content types:

The Sections Statuses now show the relevant status in text and with a small indicative icon: 

The Tool Tips on Content Types are now showing as text and you don't need to hover over the item to see the information:

Reordering Menus:

The Child section option in v8 appeared on a dropdown menu under the More tab. In the recent upgrade to T4 v8.4.2 the Child section option is now an additional tab which is visible on the 'Content in this section' view.

T4 v8 - Child sections was available from the More tab:

T4 v8.4.2 - Child sections is a new tab on the 'content in this section' view:

Advanced users only - A new option 'Accessibility Report' is visible from the Actions button. This tool's recommendations are usually outside the range of capabilities for standard website editors but they can be useful to CMS administrators with responsibility for the University's overall web presence.

T4 On-Demand Course

The eagerly-awaited on-demand training course for T4 v8 launched on the 29th of October.

This on-demand training is now mandatory and we recommend you take this training as soon as possible. The course must be completed on the one device using the one browser to ensure you receive your Digital Badge on completion. Ensure you follow all the Course Instructions on the Course webpage before you begin the course. 

Content Types

The last quarter of the year saw some improvements to our content types:

In early October, a new Table of Contents (ToC) content type was introduced, which allows you to easily added page-level navigation to individual webpages.  Great for longer articles, it is automatically built from the headings in the page, and serves 2 functions: (1) Allow ingthe visitor to quickly jump to various parts of the webpage, and (2) displaying the visitor's location as they scroll through the content.  More information on the ToC content type

In November, improvements were made to some existing content types:

Sidebar content boxes were given 5 more colour options: Black, aqua-marine, purple, dark maroon, and lime.

Content boxes' width can be set to auto, to take up all available space.  They also have a new option to have a block background colour for the full box - not just the title.

Countdown underwent accessibility improvements and now also has multiple colour options.

Website Gap Analysis Project

A web gap analysis project has begun and will run over the next 4-6 months. It aims to fully understand our University's web-related goals, identify anywhere our website / CMS configuration can be improved, and develop a roadmap to address any identified shortcomings. 
[Sep 1]

Search

Issue resolved

The website search had stopped working in the Irish site (ong.ie) - it's unknown when it broke for Irish pages but it was detected by ISS and immediately resolved in May.

New search solution Required

Microsoft notified us  in May that they will discontinue Bing custom search on Aug 11, 2025.  We have used this to power our website searches for the past 8 years.  Before that, we used google search appliances that were hosted on-campus (until our site outgrew them).
The Web Governance Group is looking into possible replacement search services.

Given the very tight deadline, it is fully expected that the Bing will be turned off, by Microsoft, before we can procure, configure, test, and roll-out an enterprise search solution, which is why the following mitigation efforts are planned:

1. The introduction of a Course Search feature to the Main course page.
   This was built by the ISS Web Team, by extending the existing behaviour of our various course pages. Instead of creating a search solution with a single results page, each of the course pages can behave like a results page and the search panel knows which of these to point the user to.
   (Implemented: June 19)
   
   
2. (Possibly) Place the same Course Search on the University Home Page
3. (Ideally) A similar ability to search for courses via the Mega Menu, on each page of the website.
   
   
4. Modify the existing site search results page to redirect site visitors to an external search engine (e.g. Google.ie).  Even though this is undesirable (because competitors' paid ads may appear above our own search results), it is preferable to having no site search feature available - and the difficulties this would cause for site visitors.

Course Pages

An inter-disciplinary project group, involving personnel from ISS (Web team), Student Recruitment, Global Galway, Fees, Marketing & Communications, and a team from global digital transformation experts 'Granite', undertook a project to transform and improve our University course web pages.  The project aimed to make all University course pages more mobile-friendly, intuitive, useful, informative, and easier to manage (particularly for recurring annual updates, such as: fees, CAO points, and start dates).  This project was prompted by the introduction of new standards for QQI compliance - an important target for attracting international students.

The Design phase lasted between February and April, and rollout, by a dedicated team from Student Recruitment is ongoing.  Most undergraduate courses and roughly 33% of our postgraduate courses were converted to the new format by September.  Knock-on effects, from this work, affecting other aspects of the University website (such as the wider courses area and college/school/discipline sites) were addressed by the ISS web team.

Cookie Banner modifications

By law, the cookie banner must pop up on any webpage if you have not visited the site before, or if it has been 6 months since you last selected your cookie preferences.

To facilitate efforts to gain a more complete understanding of user behaviour on our website, 3 changes have been made to the cookie banner's behaviour, maximising its efficacy.  It now:

1. Appears immediately (if it needs to be shown)
2. Pushes the site content down, when it appears, to make room for the banner
3. Stays on the screen, overlaying the rest of the site content, if you scroll through the page.

The reasoning behind these 3 changes are fully explained below:

1. As a part of efforts to maximise our understanding of visitor behaviour (to gauge the effectiveness of our website and any marketing campaigns), the cookie banner has been configured to appear immediately when the page loads.  Previously, it waited 15 seconds, before appearing, but this delay could conceivably allow visitors to navigate away from a page before their page visit was logged, thereby giving the University an inaccurate picture of the paths that some people take through our website.

2. The cookie banner previously overlaid the site content until you made your cookie consent choice.  This was to ensure it was visible on the screen, regardless of how far down you had scrolled, in the 15 seconds since the page had loaded.  However, temporarily covering existing page content made some accessibility scanners (which regularly monitor us for compliance with our legal accessibility obligations) wrongly think that there were accessibility issues on every scanned page.  To combat this, the cookie banner now pushes the site content down, when it loads, ensuring the banner has nothing behind it.

3. It was possible for mobile users to scroll past the cookie banner, enabling some people to avoid making a choice altogether.  The University can understand how people use its website (in a general sense) if they consent to cookies - and it's also possible to understand user behaviour (to a lesser extent) if they reject cookies - but you must know whether the site visitor accepts or rejects cookies before you can employ the correct method.  So, the cookie banner now stays on the screen, no matter how much you scroll (even on mobile devices), making it far less likely to be ignored by any site visitors.

Affiliate Site Colour-Scheme Issues (Remediation Work in Progress)

Affiliate websites are those that are hosted by this University but not wholly run by the university - typically,  multi-institutional research groups would fall into this category.  These websites are allowed to use their own colour scheme and publish their own logo, alongside the University's one - while at the same time, taking advantage of the University CMS, and all its content types, for quick and easy website development.

We noticed, very early in the year, that a delayed reaction had begun affecting affiliate websites, where the University brand colours were now overriding certain aspects of their colour schemes, and hiding their logo.  The colour changes were introducing accessibility issues, in some cases, where the the correct text colour was now appearing on an incorrect background colour.  The resulting inadequate contrast adversely affected the legibility of the website text.

The mechanism that powers affiliate sites was upgraded to counteract the problems caused by the way the University's designers chose to apply our brand colours; however, a website conversion process is necessary to apply this change.  This has been automated inasmuch as possible.  We are now working our way through each affiliate site, converting them to the latest affiliate template, to restore their correct look and feel.

To date, the issue has been resolved for the Abbey Theatre Minute Books, BioInnovate, Blood Cancers, CEGS, and Shannon College affiliate websites. 

The following websites have yet to be reviewed to see whether remediation is necessary: Acadamh, CDLP, CFRC, CHARMS, ILAS, Stem Cells, International Summer School, Moore Istitute (Draft), Leabharlann, ROCSAFE, Corrib Core Lab, Open Repositories, and Tomas O'Maille. 

This work is progressing as quickly as practicable but is being slowed by many other demands on the ISS web team.  Please bear with us as we make our way through this large task.

Twitter Icon

The Twitter icon, that appears in the footer of most websites, has been replaced with an X icon to reflect the renaming of that social media platform.
[Feb 16]

Course Module Information Glitches 

In January, course modules were affected by 2 distinct issues.

First, Google Analytics (GA), required by M&C, suddenly began breaking the module information pages for some users - and this only happened to those users who had given it permission to work without needing to modify the website content.  We were unable to discover who was responsible for this obvious mis-configuration of the analytics tool, which is not managed or supported by ISS, so we took the only remaining option available to us - we modified our module viewer to make it GA-proof. 
[This issue was resolved by Jan 14]

Second, courses with subjects defined (e.g. Arts) had become very difficult to understand for web visitors because the auto-inserted headlines, outlining the subject name and prerequisites for that subject had stopped displaying.  This meant that a confusing list of optional and required modules (which added up to far more than 60 credits) was displayed for each year.

This issue greatly reduced the usefulness of the course module lists for some of our most popular courses - a feature that is very useful to prospective and current students, alike (See an example - this list appears in the 'BA Arts' course page).  Unfortunately, this usability issue had begun happening at least a year before it was reported but it was only brought to our attention in the first week of February. 
[The issue was resolved fully by February 14]