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Stanford Sites User Guide

Policy Content Type

Coming soon! A guide to using Stanford Sites Policy content type.

The Policy Content Type is a highly structured content type for listing policies on your site. You can see this in action on Stanford's Administrative Guide.

Use cases

The policy content type is most useful if you have a number of policies that could benefit from this highly structured content type. If your requirements include any of the following, we would suggest that the Policy content type is a good fit:

  • You have a number of policies that fit into different categories
  • You have policies that are related or dependent on each other
  • You want to display when policies were established and/or last updated
  • You want to indicate who establishes the policy
  • You'd like a public record of the changes to your policies
  • You would benefit from being able to refer to policies by number

The policy content type is most useful when putting together a suite of policies. If you only have 1-3 policies, we recommend a Basic Page, rather than this content type.

Fields

Here is a description of the fields on the Policy content type with information on how they are intended to be used. All fields are optional except the title.

Policy Title. The title of the policy or policy guide.

Summary. A short summary of the policy. This displays on higher level pages to provide a "teaser" for the policy.

Body. The text of the policy.

External Source. If this policy is maintained on another site, you should send the user out to the "source of truth." You should only use this field for policies that are at the bottom of your hierarchy, since using this field will send users out to that external source.

Effective Date. The date the policy took effect.

Last Updated. The date the policy was last updated.

Authority. This is the organization that establishes the policy (University Human Resources, University Communications, etc.)

Related Policies. If there are related policies that site visitors should be aware of, you may select them for display here.

Changelog. If you want to share the rationale for an update to a policy, you can add that detail here. This can help show the ongoing history of the policy.

Create a policy guide

Policies are placed in a policy guide via a hierarchical structure that determines the numbering for each policy. The number is created automatically based on the position of the policy in the hierarchy Imagine a structure like this:

  • Policy Guide Homepage
    • Policy section 1
      • Policy sub-section 1.1
      • Policy sub-section 1.2
    • Policy section 2
      • Policy section 2.1
    • etc.

All parts of this structure are created using the Policy content type.

First create the top level of your guide

  1. Create a new policy by going to All Content>Add Content>Policy
  2. Fill in the name of your guide in the Policy Title field
  3. Add a summary in the Summary or Body field.
  4. In the sidebar, locate the settings called Book.
  5. Select the option to Create a new book.

Then, create policies nested below that

For subsequent policies, select your new Book as the parent. 

  • Policy sections can be nested under your top-level parent.
  • Policy sub-sections can be nested under your Policy sections.
  • You can nest levels below that, too.

Multiple policy guides

You may have multiple policy guides on a single site by selecting the option to Create a new book.

Troubleshooting

  Do page sections with the same name serve the same purpose?

The Policy Content Type comes with two sets of "Previous" and "Next" navigation buttons. There's one set at the top of the page and another at the bottom. They both serve the same purpose, to make it easy to go to the next and previous pages. However, Siteimprove flags the second set of buttons with the following issue:

Siteimprove: Do page sections with the same name serve the same purpose?

Because each set of buttons does, indeed serve the same purpose, this is not an error. You can safely use Siteimprove's review process to dismiss this issue.

To dismiss this potential issue for other policy pages on your site, for the CSS Selector for review use:

.book-forward-back nav