June Newsletter
date: 21/12/2017
In this issue we highlight changes to the European Commission's privacy policy and legal disclaimer, changes to the consultation pages, how to fix the URL of a file, how to link to EUR-Lex, linking to Rapid press releases, page content type usability improvements and our style tip of the month.
Changes to the privacy policy and legal disclaimer
Changes have been made to how we present information about the European Commission's privacy policy and legal disclaimer on the website.
Previously, the information relating to both subjects was contained on a single page. Now, the information has been split into 2 pages, called Privacy policy and Legal notice. The pages are located in the footer on the info and political sites.
The Privacy policy page has been updated to include information relating to general data protection regulation (GDPR) rules. It includes information on data protection and the Commission's e-services. The Legal notice page contains the Commission's legal disclaimer and copyright notice.
The Commission's Cookies policy page is also being updated.
Changes to Consultation pages
There are 3 changes related to how the Consultation pages are created
- Content for public consultations will soon need to be entered via Decide instead of the Drupal template for consultations. This switch is expected to happen over the summer.
The Secretariat-General's stakeholder consultation unit will be circulating more information about this change soon, which we will circulate via this newsletter. - In the meantime, if you still need to make a consultation page using the Drupal template, note that the 'policy areas' field has now become 'topics'. You can choose a topic from the existing topics list.
-
Remember that you need to adapt the URL to your EU Survey questionnaire on each language version of your consultation page (so that for example, your French consultation page links to the French version of the survey, and so on).
You need to manually update the link by changing the URL suffix to the survey each time. The suffix is, for example: ?surveylanguage=FR or ?surveylanguage=DE, etc.
How to change an incorrect file URL
Files that are regularly updated, such as organisation charts, should always be replaced in the CMS and not uploaded again, because that changes the URL. Drupal adds a _0, _1, etc. to the file URL each time a file with the same name is uploaded. That means a user who bookmarked the previous file URL will be pointed to an outdated version of the file and will be unaware that a more recent version exists.
If you accidentally uploaded a file more than once, you will have to fix the URL.
Step by step guidance on fixing the URL of a file
How the info site CMS manages files
Linking to EUR-Lex
For all documents that are hosted on EUR-Lex, please do not just link to EUR-Lex, but use the file content type.
Linking to Rapid press releases
For all press releases, please do not just link to the Rapid press release database.
Rapid press releases are automatically pulled into the CMS. They are all tagged with specific departments and appear on the respective department page if the news block is enabled. If you want a press release to appear on other pages, you would need to search for it in the CMS and manually tag it.
How to add a press release to your page
Page content type usability improvements
The page content type is undergoing usability improvements such as removing outdated fields, reducing tabs and regrouping some fields. More changes are currently being implemented and will be announced in the next newsletter.
Style tip of the month
Avoid 'Member States' except in a legal context. Instead, write:• EU countries
• EU members
• EU member countries
• national governments, national authorities (particularly when talking about something they must do, such as transpose a directive).
You can see on Google Trends a graph highlighting interest over time for the past 12 months;
EU countries versus EU Member States.
Upcoming training sessions
General training, Drupal CMS updates, and Events training can be organised if there is sufficient interest.