Fall 2025 Web Editors Newsletter: Profile editing automation, curriculum maps, orphan pages, events unpublishing & more

Sneak peek at visual Curriculum Maps

We've seen many of you creating sample paths to degree using spreadsheets, flowcharts and bulleted lists. While these work, they can be hard for students to find, difficult to keep updated, and often aren't accessibility compliant.

We are excited to announce that we will be releasing a new feature called “Curriculum Maps”. This new component will make it easy to build and display sample degree paths (also known as 4-year plans or sample program schedules) in a visually compelling, accessible format. Students will be able to visualize guidelines for what to focus on in any given year and quarter, helping them plan their academic schedules to fulfill degree requirements.

Key features:

  • Color-coded course tags – Define your own requirement types and assign colors to help visualize buckets of courses
  • Flexible formatting – Include or exclude a Summer quarter based on your needs
  • Versatile – Can work for standard degree paths, honors programs, capstone sequences, concentration planning, study abroad planning, and more

 

Automatically grant faculty and grad students the ability to edit their profiles

Good news: We can now automatically grant faculty and grad students permission to edit their own profiles—no more manual setup required.

Many site owners allow faculty, grad students, and others the ability to edit their own profile on the website by using the Author functionality. In the past, setting this up required multiple steps, which sometimes led to confusion. We have significantly simplified this process, whereby when someone logs into the website, they can be automatically granted the ability to edit the profile that matches their SUNet ID. If you’d like us to enable this on your site, please reach out via support.  

Learn more about automatically granting users the ability to edit their Profile. 

 

Automatically unpublish past events 

Events can now be set to automatically unpublish after the end date. This setting can be configured across all events on a site, or on individual events. 

This new feature can be helpful to keep a lower online profile, to trim an excessive number of past events, and to highlight key past events with less “clutter.” 

Learn how to automate the unpublishing of events after they’ve passed. 

 

Orphaned pages not in the menu: Time for a cleanup

Pages that are published but not linked in your menu structure tend to fall out of date because they're less visible to you as site owners. We call these "orphaned pages," and despite being hidden from your navigation, users can still find them through search engines—which means outdated information may be representing your program.

How to find and fix orphaned pages:

  1. Go to Manage Content and select the Orphaned Pages tab
  2. Review each page and decide:
    • Add to menu if the content should be easily found
    • Unpublish if the content is outdated or no longer relevant

We recommend checking for orphaned pages quarterly to keep your site current and reduce confusion for prospective and current students.

Learn more about orphaned pages, why they can be problematic, and how to resolve them.

 

UX: Spotlight enhancements, anchors and more

We’ve updated field names and help text within the Spotlight component. When creating or editing a spotlight, you’ll notice the fields have been reordered and updated to be more descriptive.

We’ve brought back a DIY anchor link/bookmark functionality, to provide the ability to create links to jump down to a specific section on the same page or a different page. Learn how to use anchor links/bookmarks.

Looking ahead: We are working on polishing spacing, line length, and image resolution on the spotlight, postcards, and collections components. We will also be updating caption/credit text rendering to improve readability at smaller screen sizes, as well as for long caption/credit text. 

 

Hiding email addresses and phone numbers

We've received requests from several units to hide email addresses and/or phone numbers on their sites to reduce unwanted contact.

What's already protected:

Email addresses entered in the email fields on profile pages and event pages are automatically obscured—they look normal to human visitors but are scrambled for spam bots and email scrapers.

What's not protected:

Email addresses in other locations aren't automatically obscured, including:

  • Body text and text blocks
  • Footer contact information
  • Individual academic program pages
  • Other custom content areas

Our recommendations:

  • Have us remove emails from people listing pages so addresses can't easily be grabbed in bulk
  • Determine where keeping emails on individual profile pages for legitimate contact makes sense
  • Review where else emails appear on your site—we're happy to run a scan and report back on all visible email addresses

Need help deciding what to hide? Reach out via support and we can brainstorm the right balance of visibility and protection for your unit's needs.

 

New tool for audio and video captioning

The Office of Digital Accessibility has added a new vendor for providing captions and audio descriptions, Echo Labs. It is an AI + human-powered media accessibility platform that can generate captions in 24 hours. The Echo Labs web dashboard provides integrations with YouTube and other video and learning management platforms, so that completed files are delivered automatically to those platforms. 

Costs:

  • Captioning costs $0.90 per media minute.
  • Audio descriptions + captions can be created for $6.00 per media minute.
  • There are no surcharges for low-quality audio or additional languages.

 

Office Hours in November and December

Our Office Hours occur on the last Friday of each month from 11am to 12 noon. However, due to the holidays, our Zoom office hours in November and December will be rescheduled as follows: 

  • November 21st 11am-12noon
  • December 12th 11am-12noon

You can

And if you have an urgent request, would like to request training, or provide feedback, contact support. 

 

Web Editor announcements are sent to the hswebeditors mailing list. Feel free to click this link to unsubscribe if you no longer edit an H&S website, or conversely, encourage a new web editor colleague to subscribe.