Not to be confused with the great state of Iowa, the IA edition refers to Information Architecture
Conductor’s Fickle Mood of Late
For the past few days, Conductor has been experiencing a dramatic and marked slowdown. It has been particularly vexing, as no changes to the system had recently been made. With some sleuthing, we found that one of the Admin pages was causing the problem. As we saw it, there were two problems:
- Improper Information Architecture
- Slow Queries
Improper Information Architecture
The goal of Conductor is to enable our partners to administer their own content. However, with great content comes great responsibility…on our part. In our detective work, we discovered that a large number of sub-pages were being appended to a given page; which in turn resulted in slow query. In addition to the slow query, the resulting information architecture was becoming unwieldy for our partner’s audience (not our partner but the audience our partner is trying to reach and serve). So we rounded up the wagons, and spoke with our partner, seeking to guide them to a better audience experience.
Slow Queries
The defect of the slow query was only discovered as a result of the improper information architecture. Once found, the fix was relatively easy to create, test, and verify. As a result, everyone will now benefit from the elimination of the slow query, not just those that have lots of sub-pages.
Other Changes
- Fixed IE8 scrolling issue while editing pages
- Begin caching news items
- Site creation automation – when a site is created, users and roles can be immediately assigned.
- Added ability of site administrators to manually clear the cache of news, pages, and events