MWF Conference Review

From the notebook of Jeffrey Rosczyk

Overview

  • MWF as a Hosted Service
  • MWF 1.x RIP
  • WebBlocks
  • Opensourcing UC
  • In a Nutshell

MWF as a Hosted Service

UCLA becomes a vendor on CENIC

General Details

  • This is currently a pilot program
  • The intention is to cater to smaller Universities, community colleges, K-12
  • UCLA mobile team would be the vendor

What is the service?

  • Hosting
  • Setup Integration
  • Software Updates

What does this mean for UCSC?

While this may be great for small departments that have to budget their own websites... I don't see how this would work for a larger university with a centralized IT.

Want more info?

They are hosting a webinar, sign-up @

http://www.doodle.com/c3r9wsafuzp58p3u

MWF 1.x RIP

The UCLA Mobile Web Framework is no longer being developed.

Why?

  • MWF template only works with one page size while the mobile screen sizes are changing daily
  • So... they are encouraging folks to move forward with Responsive CSS

Is this the end of UCLA mobile solutions?

Nope

The MWF group is currently developing a new "framework" to contain open-source responsive CSS frameworks.

It is called WebBlocks.

WebBlocks

What is it?

WebBlocks is a tool to build responsive CSS out of open-source CSS responsive frameworks.

Here's the explaination:

There are dozens of great open-source CSS responsive frameworks.

What UCLA is doing is wrapping these frameworks inside of another CSS framework, so that they can change the CSS naming scheme.

Then offering a tool to compress the CSS and JS so that it can be dropped into a website/app.

Why?

So that whenever the newest CSS responsive framework comes out... they only need to change CSS files instead of going into every individual HTML page and changing the CSS tags and HTML div structure.

What else is inside of WebBlocks?

  • Object-oriented CSS, using SASS (Ruby language)
  • Minifier for CSS and JS

How does this work?

  • Fork it from Github
  • Clone it to local computer
  • Add CSS files, and make changes with SASS
  • Compile it with a Ruby script
  • Add the minified CSS and JS files to your project's website

Is WebBlocks going to be part of the SaaS MWF-CENIC?

Eventually, I was told. WebBlocks currently needs to be managed by a developer, where as MWF (at default settings) is plug and play.

What does this mean for UCSC?

Actually, responsive CSS has been a part of UCSC's mobile project proposal plan all along.

Since WebBlocks isn't a web framework, but rather a CSS compiler... this is something UCSC could use during the proposed phase 1 plan.

(Phase 1 includes changing all WCMS CSS into responsive CSS.)

Opensourcing UC

UCLA attorney presented the do's and dont's of opensourcing code

Is it possible to opensource The Regents of UC code?

Yes

Do's

Use the BSD opensource license.

Don'ts

Do not use GPL licenses.

Want more info?

http://ucla.github.com/mwf-conference/attendee-slides/contributing-to-open-source-from-higher-ed.pdf

Conference in a nutshell...

It was interesting to hear and see how other UC's are addressing mobile development.

Observations

There was little talk about mobile app development.

Most UC's are treating mobile as an extra format to model their site designs to.

The WebBlocks demo was interesting. It's really taking advantage of the Github social coding trend. This is the current future. If that makes sense :)

Questions?