Launching UNLedu 4.1, Codename: "Rust Never Sleeps"

After months of careful consideration, planning, designing, and coding, IIM has released the next iteration of the UNLedu Framework. The new design has many new features that lets users focus on their content while still strongly identifying as UNL entities.

Excerpt from WDN.UNL.EDU

It's tempting to invoke the concept of "dog years" in explaining why it is that we keep changing the code and design that supports the UNLedu website. But not all people, alas, are dog people. We have it on good authority, however, that pretty much all people are Neil Young people. So we're calling this one, UNLedu 4.1, "Rust Never Sleeps." 35 years ago, on the release of that groundbreaking album, Young declared his commitment to continued reinvention and his intolerance of complacency.

The web is like that, too. The technologies that underlie it have been completely reinvented and rearchitected in the 20 years of its existence. And that quiet revolution continues. It's filled out the 'stack' of open technologies like HTML5 and eliminated dependencies on proprietary browser plug-ins (some of which actually were so power-inefficient that killing them off has had a meaningful impact on environmental sustainability). It's opened new possibilities like responsive web design, which UNL has fully embraced. UNL's site is to our knowledge more broadly mobile-compatible than the website of any other large university. That's part of the reason eduStyle judged UNL 2014's "Best Overall Website" in higher education. But that's history. It's time to move forward.

UNLedu 4.1 "Rust Never Sleeps" quietly aligns with continuing refinements in University branding. It refines and increases discoverability of some of our unique user interface solutions as a "mega-site." By explicitly dropping support for several old browsers (don't worry, they're hardly ever used anymore and it's easy and free to upgrade), it opens 'green fields' for university developers to embrace new technologies like Flexbox and WebSockets. Some of the most important changes you'll see this fall in testing and 'live' for Spring 2016 are described below.

For more detailed information and background on 4.1 implementation visit the WDN blog post "Rust Never Sleeps."

4.1 UNLedu Framework Update

Screenshot of the UNL megamenu

See related work: Web/Interactive